Book on Migration Recounts ‘Remaking of Monterey Park’

Growing up in the Bay Area, the only Monterey that Tim Fong knew was the city in which John Steinbeck’s novel “Cannery Row” was set.

Then, in 1986, he read an article about how massive Chinese migration was transforming a suburban city in Los Angeles County and stirring tensions among the longtime white and Latino residents.

That’s when Fong, a scholar and journalist, decided to turn his documentary eye to Monterey Park.

Eight years later, the result is a new book called “The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park.”

Published this year by Temple University Press, Fong’s book traces the founding and history of Monterey Park, focusing on how the Chinese affected local politics, urban planning, Chamber of Commerce meetings, real estate prices and cultural values, splitting the formerly close-knit community into factions sparring over the speed and density of desired development.

Already, Fong’s book has drawn praise.

“It’s a meticulously researched piece of work that does a good job of providing very rich detail of the city,” said Leland T. Saito, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego.

Saito, who plans to use the book as a reference in his classes, possibly assigning his students to read selected chapters, also calls the book a window to the future.

“The future of other places is already the reality in Monterey Park, and it helps us understand the new sorts of suburban communities that are becoming more common in the U.S.,” Saito said.

Fong’s interest in Monterey Park began after he read the 1986 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. When he was asked to produce five half-hour radio documentaries about changing demographics in California, Fong chose Monterey Park for his first show.

In the course of that research, Fong realized he had enough material for a book. He says most of the existing literature on Chinatowns in America focused either on densely packed urban enclaves such as those found in San Francisco and New York or on agricultural settlements such as in the San Joaquin Valley.

Monterey Park was neither.

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“Most people have an image of Chinatown as being a poor, touristy, ghetto kind of place, and Monterey Park is a thriving middle-class suburban community, and that’s unique in and of itself,” Fong said.

Having grown up in ethnically diverse East Oakland in an assimilated Chinese American family, Fong found Monterey Park a cultural eye-opener. Until then, the closest he had come to traditional Chinese society was weekly visits to San Francisco’s Chinatown to visit his grandmother.

But the 36-year-old scholar decided he had to move to Monterey Park and submerge himself in its rhythms to understand the forces reshaping the city. In 1990, he and his wife rented an apartment and Fong took a volunteer job doing oral histories for the Monterey Park Historical Society.

Fong said he was overwhelmed by the city of 60,000--which at the time of the 1990 U.S. Census had become 56% Asian--the first city in the continental United States to have a majority Asian population.

The experience gave him a glimmer of what many longtime white and Latino residents must have experienced.

“I was inundated with so many Chinese-language signs, businesses,” recalled Fong, who speaks some Cantonese but conducted all his research in English. “At the stores, everyone would start talking to me in Chinese. I can empathize with how the non-Asians for many reasons felt out of place because I wasn’t totally a part of it either; so in that sense it gave me a very good perspective of both sides.”

Fong spent one year reporting the book and another writing it. He lived 18 months in the nation’s first suburban Chinatown. Eventually, the book became his doctoral dissertation in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley.

Fong found that Monterey Park, which had large numbers of Jews and Latinos, was historically considered a fairly liberal city and touted itself as a cultural melting pot. After World War II, many families of Mexican and Japanese heritage moved in. When the Chinese began arriving in the late 1960s and 1970s, Monterey Park initially welcomed them too.

In the book, Fong quotes a 1977 column written by Eli Isenberg in the Monterey Park Progress: “The city should . . . call on all organizations . . . to play their part in offering a hand of friendship to our new neighbors. . . . They should be invited to join service clubs, serve on advisory boards, become involved in little theater and PTA.”

“A lot of them thought the newcomers would assimilate and become good neighbors just like the Japanese, but that didn’t work out,” Fong points out.

Instead, the Chinese formed their own Chamber of Commerce. They bought and tore down many single-family homes, replacing them with large apartment buildings, which were quickly rented by newly arriving Chinese. A worldwide boom in real estate was heightened by land speculation, which drove up the price of land in Monterey Park and forced many old-time businesses to close, unable to meet rising rents. In their place rose businesses catering to Chinese.

Fong found that the Chinese actually revived the local economy in Monterey Park at a time when it was moribund. But he also writes sympathetically about longtime white residents who sold out to Chinese buyers rather than watch their community change.

In his research, Fong pored over national publications as well as local newspapers for demographic data, photos and accounts of stormy council meetings and tempestuous city elections. He also recorded more than 40 interviews with white Protestant settlers, third-generation Mexican Americans, Jewish residents, Nisei families and Hong Kong developers.

Louise Davis, president of the city’s historical society, admits she was skeptical when Fong first proposed his project. Davis said she thought the city had already received enough scrutiny from researchers who had inspected aspects of city life like a strange new bug under a microscope.

But Fong’s hard work and objective attitude won her over.

“Some of the people who are writing about this city are coming at it from a specific point of view and zero in on specific areas, but I thought Tim gave equal time to various perspectives; it was an honest evaluation,” Davis said.

Additionally, Fong’s interviews helped preserve the city’s controversial recent history for posterity. “Sometimes we live through these things and they aren’t documented, but in the days ahead we’ll look back on this as being very informative as well as historic.”

Temple University Press, known for its scholarly publications on African American studies and urban studies, published Fong’s book as part of its Asian American History and Culture series and has just released the book in paperback. The hardcover edition of 1,000 copies is sold out.

“The phenomenon of Asian immigration and how it affects West Coast cities is an instructive story, and Tim did a very good job telling it in an interesting way and getting different points of view,” said Janet Francendese, executive editor of Temple University Press.

Fong is moving to Southern California this fall to become an assistant professor of Asian American studies at Cal State Northridge. Asked whether he planned to relocate in his old San Gabriel Valley haunt, Fong admitted that he is seeing a place closer to his new school.

“But I want to keep involved with what’s happening,” he said.