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I’m from there

Chow-fun Heaven

Jan Stürmann

Oakland Chinatown’s the Real Deal

    About 10 years ago, an Asian supermarket called 99 Ranch Market opened near the El Cerrito-Richmond border, a relatively easy 10- to 15-minute drive from Oakland if the Eastshore freeway isn’t badly clogged, as it often is.
    I had heard of 99 Ranch Market from my sisters in Silicon Valley, where several had popped up. I had read about 99 Ranch Market in Southern California, where the retail chain started.
    I was intrigued, so I schlepped on out there to see what the buzz in the local Asian American communities was all about.
    99 Ranch Market was, well, like an Asian-themed Safeway. While Safeway and other American supermarkets had teeny Asian-food offerings (mostly soy and other bottled sauces), 99 Ranch Market had rows and rows of Asian foodstuff—from China and other parts of Asia, and also from American producers of Asian food products. And there was a big fresh-fish section and a deli counter featuring specials of rice or noodles with two items for something like $2.50 or $3 (remember, this was 10 years ago).
    For a Chinese-American like me, weaned on Oakland’s Chinatown, how could I not think I had just died and gone to chow-fun heaven? And there was plenty of free parking!
    Oakland Chinatown’s business leaders were worried about 99 Ranch Market, which anchors an Asian strip mall. Chinatown had some stores with a similar variety of goods, but not of the size and modernity of 99 Ranch Market. And Chinatown always seems to have a parking problem, to say nothing of being adjacent to a downtown that has seen better days.
    My flirtation with 99 Ranch Market lasted, oh, several months. I’d drive out there and revel in the inexpensive plate specials, fresh produce and fresh fish. This obviously meant I went to Chinatown less often, even though it was much closer.
    Not that my changed shopping habits alone were going to devastate Chinatown’s economy, but I could see why Chinatown’s business leaders were worried.
    They no longer have to worry about me.
    Since this early passionate affair with 99 Ranch Market, I haven’t been back since. I have mended my wayward ways. I am now faithful to Oakland’s Chinatown, where I was born and grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.
    In my youth, it was my world, and I felt safe and secure and even thought the world was Chinese. It was where I first heard and learned the Chinese village dialect of my parents, both of whom were illegal immigrants from China.
    My sisters and I were among many children who grew up on Chinatown’s streets and at Lincoln Square, next to Lincoln School, in the decades before and during World War II.
    Our parents ran the restaurants and grocery stores and barbershops and herb stores and laundries, and we kids worked there and went to Lincoln School, then Chinese school after that. Long days, hard work, sometimes fun, sometimes agony.
    That was the Chinatown of old, before the gradual integration of Oakland Chinese- Americans into mainstream American and Bay Area life, out into the once white-only neighborhoods and into once white-only workplaces.
    The Chinatown of my youth was busy and tight-knit with families whose roots were the Pearl River Delta villages in the greater Hong Kong area of China.
    The World War II years were actually good for Chinatown, since it was only about six blocks from the shipyards that hummed with activity during the war years.
    Shipyard workers found Chinatown to be a place for good, cheap eats—and maybe a little illegal gambling on the side (the Chinese lottery was a sometimes lucrative, sometimes survivalist business for a number of Chinatown families, including my own).
    Once the war ended, however, Chinatown—indeed, Oakland as a whole—began to wither away. It wasn’t until Congress liberalized the immigration laws in 1965 that Chinatown began to revive itself. The end of the Vietnam War a decade later brought more Chinese and other Asian newcomers to Oakland, and many chose Chinatown as a place to make over their lives.
    Today, Chinatown is one of Oakland’s liveliest neighborhoods. It doesn’t have
the chi-chi cachet of  Rockridge or Piedmont Avenue or Montclair, but its streets are alive during the day and weekends. While evenings tend to be much quieter, a handful of restaurants stay open till early morning hours.
    Oakland’s Chinatown maintains an authenticity that eludes at least Grant Avenue of the world-famous San Francisco Chinatown. Sure, Oakland Chinatown business leaders yearn for more tourism, but I like my Chinatown for its no-nonsense character. It’s a real community, and it’s deeper in variety as several different Chinese and Asian languages are heard, as opposed to just the Cantonese and Cantonese offshoots in the old days. Oh, English is spoken too.
    Chinatown isn’t immune to general economic conditions or to the vicissitudes of urban reality, such as crime and traffic, something that a 99 Ranch Market strip mall doesn’t have to worry about as much.
    Who knows what the future holds for Chinatown? Any significant changes in immigration policies could impact the lifeblood of Chinatown. So could the ongoing fortune or misfortune of Oakland as a whole.
    I don’t go to Chinatown as much as I used to, and sometimes I get the oddball feeling of being an outsider in a place where I was such an insider more than 50 years ago. Nonetheless, I feel some of the vibes of my childhood days whenever I shop for food, meet friends for lunch or attend a meeting or event. Despite changes in Chinatown and me, it still feels like home.