Do We Still Need Chinatowns? That's the Wrong Question.
My bandmate Joe and I are writing a musical called At the Edge of Chinatown, and neither of us has any real experience in theater beyond sitting in the audience and writing and opera.
We're both former restaurant kids. We grew up in family businesses in and around Chinatowns, the kind of upbringing where the smell of garlic and ginger hitting hot oil is less a flavor memory than a location marker for an entire childhood. The show is set in the mid-2000s, scored with the emo and pop-punk of that era, and it has nothing to do with The Slants or my legal case. That's mostly the point: people will probably always associate me with the court case whether I want them to or not. This is something else — a love letter to the food, and to the community that makes it possible.
Underneath the music and the food, though, there's a question we keep circling.
Chinatowns were born out of exclusion. They weren't chosen so much as they were the only place available — the neighborhoods immigrants were allowed to settle when most of the city wasn't. They transformed over time partly by leaning into "Chinese-like" architecture to draw tourists, even though most Chinatowns don't actually resemble any city in China. The aesthetic was always more about atmosphere than authenticity. Over generations, they also became home to other parts of the Asian diaspora — communities that didn't always get along elsewhere finding a shared neighborhood here. And generation after generation, the parents who built those neighborhoods pushed their kids toward leaving them. Meanwhile, the real estate underneath became valuable enough that Chinatowns started disappearing from the inside: fewer family-run tea shops, more Papa John's and Starbucks.
COVID accelerated something already happening. The rise in anti-Asian violence exposed how unevenly protected different communities are, even within the same city. At the same time, Chinatowns became places cities quietly relied on: language access, mutual aid networks, trusted small businesses, informal safety structures that filled gaps in public systems. They weren't just symbolic neighborhoods. They functioned as civic infrastructure, even when public policy rarely treated them that way.
We've had two early showcases. The first was at the Rough Draft Festival in New York, where we stripped Act One down to acoustic versions and performed them ourselves — something we'd never intended to do, since neither Joe nor I are in the show. People from the theater community said they could hear the emo influences and could picture the story staged. For two people with zero formal theater background, that was the first real signal.
More recently, we brought an excerpt to the Portland Chinatown Museum, partnering with local restaurants, community organizations, and neighbors. The room was packed. People from inside and outside the community came together around the music and the food to start thinking through something real: what does it mean to rebuild a Chinatown that has experienced so much deterioration? That conversation is part of what the show is for.
We don't want Chinatown businesses to simply authenticate the experience. We want them to participate in its value. In every city the show plays, the goal is to partner directly with Chinatown restaurants and vendors so the audience doesn't just watch the story — they taste it, and the people who make that taste possible share in what the show generates.
The question we keep coming back to is whether we still need Chinatowns. But that might be the wrong question. A more accurate one: who has decision-making power over whether neighborhoods like Chinatown survive at all?
Chinatowns don't simply fade away. They're shaped by zoning boards, city councils, planning commissions, redevelopment authorities, and the financial incentives that flow through them. Many of the people making those decisions don't live in the neighborhoods they reshape. The residents, immigrant-owned businesses, and community organizations that do live there are frequently treated less like decision-makers and more like consultants to their own displacement.
Part of this work is grounded in the Jade District in Portland, where I lived and worked for over a decade — eventually as board chair of APANO, the district's managing organization. What I saw there was a different model: community input that was structural rather than symbolic. Local businesses and residents were part of the actual decision-making process, which led to things that rarely happen elsewhere, including multi-generational affordable housing designed specifically to allow the neighborhood to grow without pushing out the people who built it.
That's the model we're trying to build the show around. The question isn't whether Chinatowns are still culturally meaningful. It's whether the people who sustain them have real power over what happens next.
The smell of garlic and ginger hitting hot oil isn't nostalgia. It's evidence that someone made a life here. The question is whether the people who built those lives get to shape what comes next.
For updates on At the Edge of Chinatown, visit attheedgeofchinatown.com. I speak on how culture, identity, and policy intersect in public life — if these questions connect to work you're doing, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start.
