In San Gabriel, a Redefined Chinatown Springs From Success

At the Go Go Cafe, upstairs from the Islamic Chinese restaurant, they serve a drink suggestively named for an amply endowed Hong Kong movie actress. Those with less racy palates can wash down their smoked salmon fried rice with iced Ovaltine. Jackie Chan croons on the overhead television screens, his Cantonese ballad drowned out by a half-dozen cellular phones ringing at once.

Were it not for the absence of cigarette smoke, this place, with its confused pollinations of pop culture, could easily pass for a flashy nightspot in an Asian capital.

One look out the cafe window, however, confirms that this is an only-in-America experience. You’re in a San Gabriel shopping mall, a sprawl of flamboyantly Chinese shops bigger than the Rose Bowl covered by Spanish-style tile roofs. Across the 1,000-car parking lot is a palatial seafood restaurant where Bill Clinton once came to lunch--and left with $250,000 in campaign loot.

Some call the 40-store complex “the Emerald City” for the way its neon colors the evening sky. Others call it “Chinese Disneyland.” The latter description may be especially apt, for like the Magic Kingdom, the mall is enchanting to many and appalling to some.

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The 12-acre San Gabriel Square is one of those

Southern California wonders born when money, imagination and demographics collide in a place where size matters.

The mall is in some ways a byproduct of immigration and Proposition 13, the initiative that squeezed property tax revenues and made cities hungrier for sales tax money.

Before it was built seven years ago on the site of a former drive-in theater, some San Gabriel residents had hoped the lot would be turned into a park. But city officials, faced with six-figure budget shortfalls, were looking for a different kind of green.

Meanwhile, immigrants to the San Gabriel Valley from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other prosperous parts of Asia had become a huge consumer force.

The result was a sort of instant Chinatown, unburdened by the legacy of older Chinatowns, which were often born out of involuntary segregation and evolved into tourist traps to survive.

The master-planned San Gabriel Square is more about consumerism than sustenance. There are no vegetables being sold from carts. Instead there is a supermarket stocked with Maine lobsters awaiting their doom in tanks of bubbling seawater.

There is a department store filled with Armani and Donna Karan collections. A Las Vegas casino has set up an office in the mall to peddle lodging and meal packages, and there are shops with as many types of Swiss watches and French handbags as Sears has socket wrenches. The busloads of tourists who stop by daily tend to be from Taipei, not Terre Haute.

In the late 1980s, some of San Gabriel’s slow-growth advocates, protesting plans to build the mall, were quoted in press reports as saying they weren’t opposed to development, they just wanted “classy” development.

To many Asian Americans, San Gabriel Square lays to rest the dark, dirty or secretive aspects of old Chinatowns--qualities that reflected the prejudices of the surrounding communities as much as anything. It has become a gleaming symbol of that group’s success, an affirmation that “classy” and “Chinese” aren’t contradictory terms.

That was one reason the mall was picked for an Asian American Clinton fund-raising luncheon in 1992. “We could have had it in a downtown hotel, but we wanted to show what Asian Americans have built,” recalled David Lang, a political consultant who attended the event.

Beyond the pricey boutiques and splashy events, however, there are still the kinds of services found in older Chinatowns, like medical offices and Chinese-language bookstores. And there are plenty of places to eat for about the cost of a burger and fries elsewhere.

It’s a place where a family can spend money all day. “We want people to perform multiple transactions,” said Simon Lee, the complex’s architect. “You can buy a book, go to the beauty shop, eat at a restaurant, and after lunch go to the market to buy milk,” Lee said.

That’s the idea behind any big mall, but at San Gabriel Square the book might be in Mandarin, the beauty shop might style your hair like a Canto-pop singer’s, the restaurant will certainly be Chinese and the milk could come from soybeans.

It’s a concept being copied in other states. Architect Lee has a commission for another Chinese mall--nearly three times the size of San Gabriel Square--in Houston, which will open starting next year.

Another is already off and running in one of the few places that makes L.A. look old-fashioned. Chinatown Plaza, another Lee-designed complex, opened two years ago in Las Vegas. That center features even bolder architecture than San Gabriel’s. It’s modeled after a Chinese palace, with an arched gateway, something Lee says he’d never have attempted here. Los Angeles tastes, he said, “are a bit more conservative.”

The busloads of tourists who stop by daily tend to be from Taipei, not Terre Haute.