I grew up within the San Gabriel Valley — additionally known as SGV or the 626 — an ethnoburb in Los Angeles County the place Asian immigrants go to by no means assimilate. Immigrants within the Nineteen Seventies, initially largely Chinese language, constructed our personal ethnic financial system and ecosystem in SGV, with Chinese language banks, grocery shops and hair salons, and Chinese language-language faculties on Saturday mornings for ABC (American-born Chinese language) kids. I grew up with two Wing Hop Fung retailers a 10-minute drive away from our one-story, three-bedroom house within the ethnoburb.
Wing Hop Fung was the place I fabricated tales in my head about my mother being a Chinese language herb witch as I watched her collect pungent, brightly coloured seeds and crops to sluggish prepare dinner medicinal stews that may restore my yin and “undo the consequences of all of the fried hen and pizza I ate at Jessica’s party final weekend.” Dr. Lee offered psychiatry companies in Mandarin, Cantonese and Toisan down the road. The Chinese language Baptist church held worship companies, Sunday college and weekly Bible examine in English, Mandarin and Cantonese across the nook. 99 Ranch, Shortly and King Hua for the most effective dim sum outdoors of Hong Kong have been all in our ZIP Code. Throughout the road from King Hua was Costco, which carried mooncakes, lap cheong and dehydrated sea cucumber in bulk (hoarding dehydrated sea cucumber is outwardly a love language of immigrant dads).
The whole lot we wanted was within the ethnoburb. Even so, after I was youthful, naive and presumptuous, I discovered it embarrassing, “too ethnic.” I didn’t see the way it advised a narrative of resistance and rebirth, for Southern California and my household.
From the start of World Battle II till the Nineteen Sixties, Monterey Park, the origin of the San Gabriel Valley as an ethnoburb, prospered as one of the crucial inexpensive white suburban communities. The wartime financial system introduced transplants from throughout the nation to Southern California, and Monterey Park turned an rising website of snug single-family houses and manicured inexperienced lawns. Postwar Monterey Park remained predominantly white however started to attract upwardly cellular Mexican, Japanese and Chinese language Individuals from completely different ethnic enclaves round Los Angeles, together with East Los Angeles, the Westside and Chinatown.
In a time of charged debate and political wrestle round race, segregation and housing rights in California and throughout the nation, Asian Individuals and Mexican Individuals approached house shopping for in Monterey Park cautiously by gathering intel from intra-ethnic networks and assessing the attitudes of native actual property brokers. It helped that a lot of these trying to purchase houses in Monterey Park have been second- or third-generation immigrants: educated, acculturated and pursuing the dream of suburban life. As a result of that they had social and monetary capital and have been few sufficient in numbers, they have been perceived as much less threatening to current white political, institutional and cultural dominance in Monterey Park.
Nonetheless, a lot of them nonetheless skilled racial discrimination on the time of their more and more built-in social worlds. And Black Individuals continued to face overt and violent resistance to house shopping for and integration. Geographer Wendy Cheng notes in her guide “The Changs Subsequent Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California” that anti-Black racism allowed Asian American and Mexican Individuals to buy houses and settle in Monterey Park, whereas Black Angelenos have been frequently hyper-segregated in South Central Los Angeles and precluded from shopping for within the suburbs.
White suburban residents went to nice lengths to exclude Black Individuals from transferring in, whereas slowly (begrudgingly) permitting Asian Individuals and Mexican Individuals to take up residence. In 1960, white residents made up 85.6% of Monterey Park, Latinos 11.6%, Asian Individuals 2.8% and Black Individuals 0.04%. By 1970, Monterey Park turned the primary ethnically various middle-class suburb within the nation, with white individuals holding a majority at 50.5%, Latinos at 34%, Asian Individuals at 15.3% and Black Individuals hovering at 0.2%.
Within the Nineties, my popo, who was in her 70s, relocated from Hong Kong to hitch us in San Gabriel. As she and her husband ready to retire and cool down in Hong Kong, he as a substitute determined to begin a brand new household with a lady a long time youthful with whom he’d had a secret affair for nearly 10 years. With out choices and overwhelmed by disgrace, my popo left her house, her house the place she had raised three kids along with her ex-husband, and her mah-jongg group in Hong Kong to stay with us. She began over in a international place the place she couldn’t communicate the language, didn’t have friends and couldn’t get round. She was remoted and heartbroken.
With barely a kindergarten schooling, her life ambition had been to change into a spouse and a mom. In true Cantonese matriarch style, she bragged incessantly to her social circles about her husband’s and youngsters’s accomplishments. Now, with three grownup kids with households of their very own, she was not wanted as a mom, not a spouse and shamed by her group. Once I was a toddler, she would insist, “Your popo has change into a ineffective nothing.”
It perplexed me as a result of I by no means noticed her that method. Getting left by her husband didn’t change into the top of her story.
With the protection web of the ethnoburb, my popo rebuilt. After residing with us for a number of years, she moved into her personal one-bedroom house on Foremost Avenue in neighboring Alhambra. She walked to 85 Levels on a regular basis, the place they rang a cowbell every time contemporary baos got here out of the oven. She made associates with Cantonese neighbors in her constructing, they usually began their very own mah-jongg group at which they’d debrief the most recent episode of whichever Cantonese drama had aired on TVB the earlier evening. She discovered a Cantonese church and acquired baptized. She by no means realized English. She drove recklessly within the 99 Ranch parking zone and didn’t care. She could have confirmed a number of stereotypes, however the ethnoburb saved her. She stayed unapologetically herself by the upheavals of divorce and displacement. Within the security web of SGV, she acquired her groove again.
Generally my mother would take my popo out to go window-shopping in Beverly Hills and they’d drag me alongside. For me as a toddler, Popo outdoors of the ethnoburb was a daunting, multisensory expertise. She at all times introduced her full self. She was giant and in cost. She tried to discount and make offers. In Cantonese. At Saks. Her voice and presence have been at all times loud, even and particularly after we have been the one Asians round. You don’t communicate Cantonese? Too dangerous and sit tight: 626 or 90210, my popo didn’t code change.
I, alternatively, began my PhD in code switching after I was 9, after transferring to an uppity, predominantly white personal college. I noticed Popo as an unassimilable twister that left me within the mud, embarrassed and flustered.
Now, having moved away from the San Gabriel Valley for over 10 years to self-actualize in additional “fascinating” areas, I discover myself longing to return. Paying exorbitant hire to stay someplace fashionable is overrated and unsustainable. I need Asian strip malls, I need Hong Kong cafes and I need my little one to develop up listening to Cantonese often and know that we’re not yelling; that’s simply our default quantity.
As my popo did, I embrace my ethnoburb — in all of its limitations, potentialities and unassimilability.
Bianca Mabute-Louie is a sociologist and the writer of the forthcoming guide “Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the twenty first Century,” from which this piece is customized, copyright 2025 by Bianca Mabute-Louie. To be revealed by Harper, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
