TALES OF THE CITY A Suburban Chinatown

The Chinese built dynasties in Asia, railroads in America, tourist meccas in San Francisco and New York, the capital of capitalism in Hong Kong, and restaurants all over the world. But it wasn’t until they arrived in Richardson, Texas, that they discovered their true calling-the strip shopping center. Richardson, the stereotypical Southwestern middle-class suburb, is now home to the newest and most unorthodox Chinatown in America. It is also one of the most prosperous. Of the estimated 45,000 Chinese-speaking people living in the Dallas area, it is the wealthy white-collar professionals and merchants who have flocked to Richardson, buying up virtually all of old downtown Richardson between North Central Expressway and Greenville Avenue.

Why? I wondered.

“It wasn’t, hard to figure out,” said Lily Joe, a stylish, articulate Cantonese woman who had careers as a pharmacist and restaurant manager before discovering real estate development. “We were planning to build a new restaurant in Addison, but before we could start construction, we were offered four times what we paid for it. The amount would have represented ten years’ profit on the restaurant. We would have had to sell millions of egg rolls to make that kind of money. So it didn’t take long to figure out we wanted to be in the real estate business.”

Lily Joe and her architect husband, Johnnie Joe, have taken over and restored the elegant old Richardson Daily News Building on Main Street (better known to most recent immigrants as Belt Line Road) and, in an odd cultural irony, become the principal proponents of saving the historic buildings of the area. But if old downtown Richardson can be saved-and it looks as if the Joes are the family to do it-then it will resemble nothing ever seen in Texas before.



WALK A FEW hundred feet from the offices of Joe & Associates, cast a glance across Main, and there, rising like an apparition out of The Good Earth, is a strip shopping center, beautifully landscaped, disguised as a Chinese temple. The tile is imported from Japan, the ceramic awnings from Taiwan, and the wishing well on a little hill. . .well, that was Lily’s idea. “For tourists. 1 thought it would be fun for tourists to have a little wishing well.”

Tourists? In Richardson?

“The profit may not be as high on this shopping center as on the ones we have in Mesquite, Arlington, and Allen ” she explained patiently. “That’s because we put our heart into this. We paid for the expensive decor, the imported materials, to try to create some cultural spirit here. There’s no place like this in Dallas for tourists to go. Many people think a Chinatown won’t even work here, and that’s why we’re starting on a small scale.”

Hedging their bets, the Joes have oriented Asia Square, the first one-block-square all-Chinese shopping mall, toward the current needs of the Chinese and Vietnamese communities. The lower level consists of an Asian grocery store (a spacious jungle of imported specialties, from preserved duck eggs to Thai rice in twenty-five-pound bags to a carbonated drink called Ginseng Up), a Chinese video store, a Chinese bookstore, a Chinese “rock-landscaping” firm, beauty salon, travel agent, gift shop, and bakery. On the upper level craftsmen have been laboring to complete the Hong Kong Royale, a Cantonese restaurant that Lily Joe promises will be one of only two “authentic” Chinese restaurants in Dallas. It is owned by three Hong Kong jewelers who also operate the celebrated “Peacock” restaurants in the Philippines.



Asia Square is but the most dramatic development in a migration of Chinese to Richardson that began around 1980 and grew to a virtual flood in 1983. Besides the Joes, who own several buildings along Greenville Avenue near Belt Line, the city filled up with prosperous merchants and professionals trying to escape the rising crime rate of the Fitzhugh-Ross area of East Dallas. Long the “first stop” for Chinese immigrating to Dallas, the Fitzhugh-Ross neighborhood has been virtually abandoned by families with the money to get out and is now a largely Vietnamese and Cambodian ghetto. Many other Chinese came to Richardson as engineers and scientists, employed by either Texas Instruments or Rockwell International. (TI alone employs 500 Chinese.) And many simply drifted into the Dallas job market after attending North Texas State, long one of the most popular American universities for Taiwanese and Hong Kong students. (No longer, though. Governor Mark White’s dramatic tuition increase for foreign students has decimated Chinese en-rollment, meaning that the “Denton pipeline” has dried up and most Chinese now go to the east or west coasts.)

The result: one of the strangest Chinatowns in the country. Geographically, it’s not very well defined. The Asian-language Victory Theater, where I saw a delightful Hong Kong comedy called Security Unlimited and an ultra-violent Taiwanese police drama called Long Arm of the Law on the same day I met the Joes, is in northern Richardson. The Chinese Community Center, where Chinese opera aficionados gather once a week for rehearsal, and where six-year-olds born in this country are sent to learn their Chinese lettering, is in north Garland. And the Chinese residents are scattered throughout Richardson and North Dallas, where they have chosen homes chiefly because they’re located within the Richardson Independent School District.



THE STORY OF the Joes, though not typical of most Dallas Chinese, illustrates how completely some Asians of the area have become perfect little middle-class burghers. Johnnie Joe’s great-grandfather was one of the coolies who built the Texas & Pacific Railroad, then settled in Dallas and opened one of the city’s first Chinese restaurants {the Shanghai Cafe on Main, which survived until the Fifties). Gradually, Joe’s relatives filtered across the ocean to join him, but for the first two generations, into the Sixties, they all returned to China to die. Johnnie Joe fled the post-World War II Communists to Hong Kong, then emigrated; he enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin at the age of eighteen to pursue a degree in architecture. He went on to UT-Arlington for his master’s, where he met his future wife, a pre-med student from the same Chinese province, and soon they had set up a restaurant business in Dallas (the China Inn on Northwest Highway, later sold).

Sometimes Johnnie’s old-Texas ultra-con-servalive family clashed with Lily’s new-China feminist attitudes, with the result that she gave up her career in medicine (Joe’s family considered a female doctor scandalous) and compromised on pharmacy. But the China Inn became such a success (this was before the Szechwan craze, when Cantonese food was the most popular in town) that pretty soon she was working full time helping to expand the restaurant, and later build a second one near Six Flags Over Texas. But by the time they began work on their third location, in Addison, they discovered the marvelous world of Dallas real estate-and decided to become shopping-center builders and operators.

Still, Asia Square is their most speculative project to date.

“Nothing about this location is ’right’ for an American-style shopping center,” she said. “If we were building this in Mesquite or Arlington, we would say it is too isolated, too far off the traffic patterns. It’s a place you will have to find. We will probably have special events there-like a Chinese cooking school, to show you what you can do with some of the exotic foods, to show you how we can cook healthfully, without mono-sodium glutamate. But it will depend on about 40 percent of the customers being tourists-Americans who don’t normally buy these products.”

It won’t be the only Chinese shopping area in Richardson. Already thriving, just three blocks away, is China Plaza, featuring the bustling Din Hao Market, the Garden Bakery (French-Chinese), Hao Hao Video Rental, and First Chinese B-B-Q Cafe. Just across the street is a local hangout called the Topaz House, featuring a “Hot Pot Buffet” and a bulletin board full of Chinese used-car ads. At the more orderly Texas Oriental Emporium, two blocks north on Greenville Avenue, you can take your pick of Har Har Hot Pickled Vegetables by the jar. Grass Jelly in cans, or Vietnamese Hot Chili Garlic Sauce by the quart container. Step inside the spotless, antiseptic Yung Kang Trading Company, a Vietnamese pharmacy, and a very polite woman will show you exotic herb remedies for whatever ails you, as well as Cinnabar sedatives, Antiphlogistic Tablets, and Bruise Plasters.



BUT PERHAPS the most obvious example of Chinese hegemony in Richardson is the virtual takeover of the city’s Protestant churches. At least nine church buildings have “gone Asian” and been leased or sold to congregations that conduct their services in Oriental languages. Most of the Chinese in the city are immigrants from Taiwan, where Baptist missionaries have been very busy ever since they were booted off the mainland in the Forties. The huge First Chinese Baptist Church at Belt Line and Waterview is the spiritual flagship for the immigrants, but there are four other Chinese Baptist churches, as well as two Korean churches, one “Formosan Christian” church, and some smaller congregations down in the old East Dallas neighborhood. (There are 10,000 Koreans in Richardson- about half the total in the Dallas area-but they are less conspicuous than the Chinese because they tend to shop at Chinese and American stores.)

“I have no idea why the Chinese first came to Richardson,” said Ful Chu Li, the Dallas bureau chief for the Chinese-language International Daily News, one of five Chinese papers distributed in the city. “But I can assure you that most of us like it here. We miss things, of course. We have to import a lot of our food, and it’s more expensive. We don’t see the first-run movies. There is no Chinese nightclub life of the type that can be had in New York or San Francisco. I personally miss the Chinese traditional opera very much; the professional troupes only travel to the east or west coasts. But I can guarantee you that for most of us, there’s no place we’d rather be. Maybe it’s because it looks kind of like China around here. Maybe it’s the weather that’s the same. But the ones who didn’t like it have already gotten on the plane and gone home. We’re here to stay.”