Talk:Chinatowns in North America

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[edit] Big picture lost. Move big Chinatowns to top

This article is not very useful. I came looking for the big picture and found a mess of details. I would recommend, if any one is curious, putting all the major Chinatowns together at the top (no more than 10), and then putting regionally important Chinatowns below. I would not include very small, neighborhood Chinatowns in this article (those details belong in the article on each small city).

[edit] Re: Houston's Chinatown

The writer of the entry on Chinatown, Houston said that it has been an area of settlement for Chinese Mexicans. I assume this is a more recent population of Chinese Mexicans that has settled since the 1970's or so. Historically, Chinese Mexicans preferred El Paso and San Antonio.

I'd like to know where the writer got his/her info on the Chinese Mexicans settling in the Bellaire Chinatown area. I'd like to know how many Chinese Mexicans the writer believes live in the Bellaire Chinatown of Houston. And I'd like to know when they settled and what they do.

I am the editor of a Univ of Texas book on the history of Asian Americans in Texas, and I found your Wikipedia website very useful for this neighborhood-related information.

Thank you for helping me.

Oh, and I have not done any studies on the sizes of Chinatowns, but I do know that the Chinatown along Bellaire in Houston is humongous. It stretches from close to Highway 59 along Bellaire to getting close to Highway 6. And of course it is not limited to stores and homes on Bellaire itself. It is likely larger than both the NYC and SF Chinatowns in geographic size, combined. Also, nearby Fort Bend Coutny suburbs are also very Chinese (25% or so).

Irwin Tang

Don't depend on Wikipedia too much for information. It's best to use peer-reviewed journal articles. Everyone seems to have their idiosyncracies here.

[edit] Needs pictures

This site could use some illustrations and pictures of the suburban Chinatowns. If I were to be credited, I'd go out to some of new Chinatowns described and shoot some pictures but I'm not entirely altruistic due to this being a "copyleft" site and all.

[edit] This article is 92KB, and should be split

As this article is 92KB, quite considerably larger than the 32KB recommended, I suggest splitting off the specific surveys of 'Chinatowns in the United States' and 'Chinatowns in Canada' and concentrating the article as an analysis of patterns in North American Chinatowns.--Pharos 08:12, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • Alternatively, we could keep the US and Canada surveys on this page to be consistent with the other articles in the series, and move the other sections to Chinatown patterns in North America.--Pharos 10:00, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Go for it!

I've intentionally included several POVs, spelling and grammatical errors and also left information vague to see if this article (and the main Chinatown article) ever gets much attention beyond the delete-happy edits. Probably not. Yes, this article does need some splitting. But then, since it's not a high priority for me, I'll let someone else do it.

  • OK, the article has been split.--Pharos 10:26, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vancouver?

"Vancouver's Chinatown is the largest in British Columbia and the second largest in North America, after Toronto's"

Should this be "in Canada"? Kinst 02:37, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe Vancouver's C/town is 2nd largest (in N/Am), after S/Fran. (?) Hu Gadarn 04:46, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Toronto always thinks it's bigger and better than nearly anywhere on a lot of counts; but Vancouver's Chinatown/Chinese subculture is larger, and always has been; Toronto's old Chinatown was fairly small, but even with the five new ones it's still nowhere near as complex a Chinese cultural/commercial colony as is Greater Vancouver.Skookum1 06:59, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This was taken out by someone, but...

There have been redevelopment proposals to turn Portland's Chinatown into an exotic ethnic playground for non-Chinese revelers, which will possibly further dilute the Chinese character of neighborhood.

That comment, and others like it on the Chinatown patterns page, and the main Chinatown page and on Talk:Chinese Canadian, expressing discontent with somewhere being "no longer exclusively Chinese" or "not Chinese enough" strike me as incredibly biased and a sign of the very prejudices others have been so busy denouncing me as a racist for pointing it. But consider this paraphrase:

There have been redevelopment proposals to turn "Neighbourhood x" into an exotic ethnic playground for non-white revelers, which will possibly further dilute the white character of the neighbourhood.

I suggest a lot of people posting to this page undertake what the Maoists so cleverly called "self-examination" and "self-criticism" concerning their biases and prejudices towards non-Chinese, and the idea that building and expanding Chinatowns is something worth "embracing"; the creation of racially-based communities and commercial enclaves may be appealing in your culture; in ours, it is anathema; especially if "we" were to try and do it for our own particular ex-imperialist/ex-colonialist bloodlines/culture. A neighbourhood and commercial district that sought to be "more white" and which resents "dilution" by non-whites....well, we know what the self-righteous would say about that, don't we?Skookum1 00:49, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge proposal

I started the discussion on Talk:Chinatown patterns in North America. See also Talk:List of Canadian cities with large Chinese populations for other comments.Skookum1 08:58, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree. This page is 81 kilobytes long, and articles are supposed to be 32, as here:

"Overview

In the past, because of some now rarely used browsers, technical considerations prompted a strong recommendation that articles be limited to a maximum of precisely 32 KB in size, since editing any article longer than that would cause severe problems.[1] With the advent of the section editing feature and the availability of upgrades for the affected browsers, this once hard and fast rule has been softened and many articles exist which are over 32 KB of total text.

Though article size is no longer a binding rule, there remain stylistic reasons why the main body of an article should not be unreasonably long, including readability issues. It is instead treated as a guideline, and considered case by case depending on the nature of the article itself.

For stylistic purposes, only the main body prose [2] (excluding links, see also, reference and footnote sections, and lists/tables) should be counted toward an article's total size, since the point is to limit the size of the main body of prose.

Even so, an edit warning is displayed when a page exceeds 32 KB of text in total, to act as a reminder that the page may be starting to get too long (see MediaWiki:Longpagewarning)."

The page should be merged as it is too long.PЄ|>ρ3® 19:09, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Um, pages that are too long are supposed to be split, not merged. This article has already been split once; it might well deserve to be split again, but I'm not sure. Anyway, let's keep the discussion in one palace, at Talk:Chinatown patterns in North America. Thanks.--Pharos 03:51, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What about Annadale?

If you do rightly mention Rockville as one of the suburban Chinatowns 20 miles out of DC, we should mention Annadale which is located within the beltway. This would be a major convenience for tourists in DC that want a 'real' Chinatown. It is located West of Exit 3 on I-395. You can do some research on it.65.206.122.30 13:07, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No stereotypes, please!

i noticed the article failed to mention how residents in suburban Chinatowns live like normal Americans in large suburban houses. What typically defines the Chinese community who live in a concentration is a supermarket, a few stores, and a cultural center.65.206.122.30 13:10, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Victoria

"Its greatest size and population would be the size of most of the current Downtown Victoria waterfront area, the heart of the modern Victoria business district."

This statement is very awkward and also incorrect. For one thing, downtown Victoria's waterfront area is not the heart of the city's modern business district. Douglas Street is the heart of the modern Victoria business district, and Douglas Street is 3 blocks (4 blocks in some places) from the waterfront.

I think the writer probably meant to say that "...at its peak, Victoria's Chinatown covered an area north of Pandora Avenue that was roughly the same size as the city's present, historic "Old Town" (which covers the area west of Douglas Street/south of Pandora Avenue/north of Humboldt Street), or about one-third of the area occupied by modern downtown Victoria (CBD/Old Town/Chinatown)." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.103.145.162 (talk) 00:40, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sunset Park (Brooklyn, NY) Chinatown "New"?

The page states that the Sunset Park Chinatown is perhaps only 15 years old. I lived in Sunset Park in my youth, and the area cited (along 8th avenue) has been very much self-described and apparent as "chinatown" back to at least 1980, perhaps longer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.228.93.202 (talk) 05:13, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Attention all editors

Please note that the Hoa people are NOT considered ethnic Chinese by immigrants from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan; the 'Hoa' are considered 'Vietnamese'. In light of this, I urge all editors to check that this and all related articles reflect this.

I have already made some amendments to this article to address this issue. 122.105.147.208 (talk) 12:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Too bad for you, I just reversed them, as they should have been discussed here first. And it cdoesn't matter what people call them in Chinese, it's what they're most widely known as. The Vietnames don't consider them Vietnamese, which is why they left; in English we doo call them "Vietnamese Chinsee" or "ethnic Chinese from Vietnam". "They're not Chinese enough" is hidden in the subtext of your attitude, i.e. according to Chiense-culture prejudicdes they're not Chinese. Well, THAT is POV.Skookum1 (talk) 13:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
And guess what? The Cantonese, Hokkien and Taiwanese peoples are really independent ethnic groups that have been severely marginalised to this day so calling them 'Chinese' is actually an insult. As for the Hoa people, few culturally minded people would dare call them 'Chinese' simply because the Vietnamese peoples are virtually genetically identical to the Cantonese peoples. Of course there are many Vietnamese people who try to make outrageous suggestions that the Hoa people are 'alien' based on distorted notions of ethnicity. And yes, much of 'Vietnamese histroy' is not to be trusted, simply because they are little more than myths.

So what is the point of all this: we should simply refrain from calling the people in question 'Chinese' if we can. Furthermore, some of the previous editor's claims like 'most widely known as' have nothing to do with the populace; they only hold (arguably) among business people for obvious reasons. 122.109.121.182 (talk) 11:32, 28 May 2008 (UTC)