Wall Street Journal

For Asians in U.S.,
Mini-Chinatowns
Sprout in Suburbia

Mr. Chen's Las Vegas Mall
Feeds a Growing Hunger;
Comfort Zones in Heartland

Ms. Wu Eyes the Pork Snouts

By BARRY NEWMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 28, 2004; Page A1

LAS VEGAS -- The inspiration for building his Chinatown on a vacant lot a mile from the Strip came to James Chih-Cheng Chen at the end of a weekend's gambling. He and a friend had driven in from Los Angeles with the friend's mother, who was visiting from Taiwan.

"She was a religious person," Mr. Chen says. "Buddhist. A vegetarian. She was quiet the whole trip -- just watching. As we were leaving, she finally said, 'I guess this is what heaven is like.' "

Except for one qualm: the nothing-she-could-eat casino buffet. If the roulette wheel was heaven, the turkey-roll was hell. Mr. Chen couldn't get his friend's mother an honest Chinese meal.

He knew how to satisfy a need for bok choy and bean sprouts in older American cities. "You get in a cab and say, 'Take me to Chinatown.' " But here, he says, "I asked people, looked at the map, checked the phone book. No Chinatown in Las Vegas."

That's why Mr. Chen had to invent one. Nine years ago, he built what he calls America's first "master-planned Chinatown" -- and, on the way, helped take immigrant enterprise into new territory. Mr. Chen and a few others, mostly East Asians with capital, have come up with an angle that lets middle-class immigrants move away from the coasts and into America's inland car culture without leaving their own cultures behind.

These investors have brought to life what might be called the ethnic commercial enclave, a cross between the regional mall and the corner store. Because their customers live scattered in unsegregated subdivisions, instant-Asia shopping centers can park anyplace where the rent is low and the drive-time reasonable. These commercial spaces are taking on all the intimate social functions of the old immigrant neighborhood. The neighborhood is the only thing missing.

Rice-loving shoppers from the suburbs are driving to about 70 stand-alone Asian shopping centers on the coasts -- not only in New York and Los Angeles, but Seattle, Baltimore and Miami -- and to about 50 in such mid-American cities as Denver, Minneapolis and Phoenix.

"When I lived in Baton Rouge, I drove five hours to the Chinese mall in Houston," says Min Zhao, a Chinese-born sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Now Baton Rouge people don't need to drive to Houston. They have Chinese malls in New Orleans."

One Chinatown Plaza knockoff is even going up as a downtown-revival project in New York's upstate capital of Albany.

"There's no Chinatown there," says Raymond Xu, president of a nonprofit group who put the deal together. "That's what we're creating."

Capital flowing in from East Asia, itself already full of giant malls, is the main force at work here, along with masses of well-paid immigrants. The U.S. now has 12 million Asians. Their buying power, pegged by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, is $344 billion. In 20 states, Asians make up between 2% and 6% of the population: too few to congregate, perhaps, but enough to ignite a demand for very fresh fish.

Mr. Chen learned that early on. His Las Vegas Chinatown Plaza opened for business in 1995. By 1998, it was complete: an imperial arch on Spring Mountain Road; a golden statue of Xuan Zang's "Journey to the West" in the parking lot; and a two-tiered shopping center under tiled roofs with dragons at every tip. By mall measures, the plaza is an 85,000-square-foot mini. But it has nine restaurants, shops with Asian goods from jade to ginseng, and an anchor supermarket where tree-ear fungus outsells Cheez Whiz. The place is usually jammed with Asians. In a desert city fixated on fantasy, Chinatown Plaza has matured into an oasis of authenticity.

At the University of Nevada here, Prof. Gary Palmer sends his students there on anthropology field trips. "The Asian people in the stores weren't just looking, but instead buying these products," one wrote in a term paper. "For the first time, I saw something in this town of billion-dollar mega-resorts that impressed me."

Like Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo, the casino that first lit up Las Vegas in 1946, Mr. Chen's Chinatown didn't come out of nowhere. Long before his brainstorm hit, he had been thinking about moving "inland."

"If you stay in Southern California, you're not mixing, you're isolated," he said during a spring-onion-pancake breakfast at the Emperor's Garden on the plaza's second floor. He is 56 years old, in a white shirt and a gold watch. In 1948, his father fled China for Taiwan; in 1971, Mr. Chen left for Los Angeles.

He studied finance and washed dishes. With Henry Hwang, a buddy back home, he exported medical equipment to Taiwan and imported mother-of-pearl carved birds for Native American necklaces. Then he bought 30 acres, hired 60 Mexicans and started a Chinese-vegetable farm. To sell the vegetables he opened a grocery, and in the grocery he opened an early video-rental service, with rights from 23 Hong Kong movie houses and three Taiwanese television stations.

"I like pioneer things," Mr. Chen says.

So he moved to Las Vegas. In 1990, Nevada's entire Chinese population was just 6,618. To test the market for his shopping center, he opened another Chinese-video service there. Customers supplied their zip codes, and that gave him a map of where Las Vegas Asians lived. Video rentals were understandably sluggish. "It was very risky," he says. "People warned us." But like all Chinatowns, he reckoned his would draw tourists -- especially in the shape of hungry Asian gamblers.

"Do you want population before you build, or do you build to attract population?" says Mr. Chen. "You don't want to be late. You want to be early. That's the game."

With Mr. Hwang (who immigrated on an investor's visa) and a second friend who owns a button factory in China, he acquired eight acres on Spring Mountain Road for a project that would cost $10 million. It was a rough district of wholesalers, small factories, topless bars and no Chinese people.

That's where Mr. Chen wanted to build. But first, he went after the one anchor tenant that he knew would make a desert Chinatown work: 99 Ranch -- America's biggest Asian supermarket chain with 26 west-coast stores and franchises in Phoenix and Atlanta. The number 99 is lucky to Chinese, and "ranch" sounded trendy to another Chen from Taiwan -- Roger Chen -- who founded the chain in 1984.

Since it opened in Las Vegas, and perfected an ability to truck swimming fish over long distances, the 99 Ranch here has turned into a gold mountain. "I thought the population growth would slow down," says Jason Chen, Roger's nephew and the Las Vegas franchisee. "It went the other way. It keeps going and going."

The nation's fastest-growing state, Nevada had two million people in 2000. Of them, 90,000 were Asian, a 250% increase in 10 years. Yet Las Vegas census maps show them lightly sprinkled. Fewer than 2,000 live in Chinatown Plaza's immediate surrounds.

In suburban Los Angeles or New Jersey, and the old urban enclaves of New York or San Francisco, Asian districts encircle Asian malls. In Las Vegas and young cities like it, the ghettos are gone. Hispanics, more numerous and less affluent, still cluster, but Asians often migrate from the coasts and integrate economically before they arrive. Along with the many others who move to Las Vegas each year, Asians are buying houses in the developments that are advancing into the desert like pink-stucco lava flows. Still, they're rarely more than 10 miles from Chinatown Plaza.

"We don't go to the neighborhood," says James Chen's son, Alan, who was born in Los Angeles. "The neighborhood comes to us."

Some of the neighbors were taking numbers at the fish tanks on a Saturday morning: Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese, pushing cart loads of sausages, taro root, bean curd. The Chinese who move here often work as blackjack dealers, but Wendy Wu came because her husband got an engineering job. She was at the cold-cut counter, eyeing the pork snouts and beef feet (hooves included).

"We didn't know that in Las Vegas there's a Chinatown," said Ms. Wu. She came to the U.S. from China in 2001, lived in Texas and Florida, and has only just arrived here. "We're going to look for a house," she said, tossing a shrink-wrapped package into her cart. "I never thought I would get pork snouts in Las Vegas."

Once James Chen corralled 99 Ranch, Sam Woo Barbeque signed on, as did a string of other California restaurants. Then came the hair salon, jeweler, florist and optometrist; the travel, real-estate and insurance agencies; the pharmacy, bakery and bookstore; the offices of the Las Vegas Chinese Daily News, and the art gallery that sells shimmering backlit pictures of waterfalls.

Chinatown Plaza feels snug and homey. In contrast to kitschy casino shows for Asian gamblers, it began a parking-lot Chinese New Year's festival. Politicians came. Signs went up on Interstate 15: "Chinatown Next Exit." Mr. Chen founded a Chinese-American Chamber of Commerce and printed up a directory. He puts on a Miss Chinatown beauty pageant, holds open-houses for school kids, arranges free flu shots for the elderly and offers help with their tax returns.

"My father can't stop," says Alan Chen, who is 25 and his father's property manager. "He can't sit still." Mr. Chen says: "People come here because they feel comfortable."

Comfort, as Prof. Zhao at UCLA sees it, is what Chinatown Plaza and places like it are about. She calls the Asian shopping center a new form of social organization for America's migrating immigrants. "When people have to drive for miles, they want to spend a day," she says. "Nobody lives in it, but it becomes the meeting place, the center of a community."

It didn't take long for other entrepreneurs to get the picture. Now Chinatown Plaza is expanding into a Chinatown strip. In 1999, the contractor who built it put up a satellite, Great China Plaza, right next door. Then Harsch Investment Properties, an Oregon developer, acquired an old shopping center one block east. It had a few Asian shops already and more wanting in.

"Asians were knocking on our doors," says Jordan Schnitzer, president of Harsch. Mr. Schnitzer isn't Chinese, but he has become one of the few non-Asians to see the possibilities. "So we said, let's do the whole thing Asian. Look, this is a themed town. Our other tenants wouldn't mind at all."

Mr. Schnitzer hired a feng shui master and spent $8 million dolling up the Center at Spring Mountain with red and gold Chinese roofs. The tenants include Chung Chou City Dry Seafood, the D Bar J Hat Company, Wing Chung CPA, and the Detox Massage Center.

Joy Yu and Sean Chung have also paid James Chen the compliment of cloning his concept. They will soon open Pacific Asian Plaza a mile up Spring Mountain Road. Both Taiwanese, Ms. Yu made her money developing software for Cisco, Mr. Chung as a Las Vegas contractor. They won't say how much it cost to build, but their plaza has indoor parking, floors of polished granite, and dark-blue roofs reminiscent of Japan.

Its supermarket is called Shun Fat. It will be double the size of 99 Ranch. The owner, a Chinese seafood wholesaler originally from Vietnam, decided to build big, Mr. Chung says, "after standing in the Chinatown Plaza parking lot for 45 minutes."

Hearing this, James Chen said, "That means we did good. Our vision was correct." The competition has gratified him. He stood on his second-floor walkway, another Las Vegas pioneer looking past a full parking lot to the desert's hills. "Chinese people go to the Strip, see the casinos," said Mr. Chen. "Then they come here. They can think, wow, American Chinese are pretty good, too. We also can make something from nothing."

Write to Barry Newman at barry.newman@wsj.com¹