How L.A.’s historic Chinatown shows a just future for Asian American communities

Laureen D. Hom, the author of the new book “The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles,” concedes that she had originally “dismissed Chinatown as too personal” and wanted to “move on,” like so many other Chinese Americans of her generation, when solidifying her dissertation plans as a PhD candidate in urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine. The deaths of both her grandmothers while she was in graduate school, however, forced Hom to reckon with what Chinatown meant for her family, now that these first-generation elders who’d lived there had passed on.

Hom took up Chinatown as an intellectual project, engaging in rigorous research and field work into the development history, political power and intimate human stories of the legacy neighborhood in Los Angeles. The result is a rich community history that illuminates the heterogeneity of Chinese (and more broadly, Asian) American racial politics in forging the evolving, continuously contested identity of an urban ethnic space — and a call to action for Asian Americans to imagine a just and equitable Chinatown for the next generation.

Hom’s research interests in gentrification and civic engagement in Asian American communities had led her in 2012 to Irvine, where Asian Americans had been settling in newer, often suburban areas rather than the historic urban ethnic spaces like San Francisco’s Chinatown, where Hom grew up.

That same year, however, Hom’s interest was piqued by the contentious development proposal for a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Residents, business owners and grassroots organizers all had starkly disparate ideas of whether a Walmart best served the…