Lifestyle
L.A. Chinatown, a place for outlandish yearnings and improbable dreams
I am walking through Dynasty Center, warmed by the morning sun. The season’s rainstorm brought a sky as blue as a newborn’s eyes, but water vapor is still rising from the multicolored canopies. Stalls with vendors selling densely packed sun-faded souvenirs is the Chinatown setting I’ve been walking through for as long as I can remember, from New York up to San Francisco and back to L.A. Turtles the size of chicken nuggets paddling in their little plastic boxes, accompanied by the barks of little mechanical dogs that march stiffly in the same futile direction, beneath the phone chargers, the rows of luggage, and the bamboo clusters peeking over one another in ceramic pots. I am walking past walls of pajamas with Disney characters, then walls of backpacks with Marvel characters. Then there are characters I only vaguely recognize, some I feel real fondness toward but no present desire for, all those Labubus of yesteryear.
I had been driving west through downtown and stopped in Chinatown to wait out the morning congestion in a new café that used to be an old bistro. One thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough about L.A. is all the positive aspects of traffic. Sometimes sitting in the car makes you want to die, but other times the standstill on the freeway is a provocation. It forces you to get out of your car so you can really look at a place and forces you to reckon with all that it means.
Walking from my parking spot, I buy cilantro and two star fruits from a bundled-up grandmother eating from her own supply of sticky corn. I wonder if I could pick up a bamboo cluster for a friend, as a birthday present. Perhaps some paper manifestations just in time for the year of the Fire Horse.
But it is then that I realize that perhaps I am being looked at with curiosity. There aren’t many customers inside Dynasty to begin with, but I am the only one that the vendors seem to be watching. I stop and stare back.
“Ni Hao,” one of them finally says, spoken in a warped inquisitive tone, like a test. As if he is really trying to ask: Who are you? Where did you come from? Are you lost? What are you doing here?
These are valid questions. What am I doing here?
Every city I have ever found myself alone in, I have gone directly to its Chinatown. A 12-hour layover in Istanbul, a summer abroad in Paris, a weekend trip to Athens from London, a visit to a friend in Seoul. It’s an impulse I’ve always followed but haven’t questioned too closely. I tell myself I am seeking ease, advice from a familiar face, a cozy bowl of soup that tastes like home.
When my family immigrated from China to America, I was surprised that our first shared apartment was on a street with hardly a single English sign. Alhambra was another one of L.A.’s unofficial Chinatowns where everyone still spoke their native tongue. I grew to love places like that, places where I could get affirmation for just speaking Mandarin without an accent, where I was still allowed back simply because I didn’t draw attention to myself. Over the years, Chinatowns have offered me ephemeral homecomings in city after city without demanding that I make my home there.
One day, and I guess that day has finally come, this ruse stopped working. I no longer fit in the picture. I’m a person who creates characters, imbues them with problems and makes up situations for them to struggle through toward emotional epiphanies. The very real people who live in this part of the city have no use for someone like this. The grandmothers might still smile warmly at me, but they are no longer my grandmothers, and I am no longer a child, so why should they offer me refuge.
My mother was dubious when I told her I wanted to write about Chinatown. She said, “You know how older immigrants talk about Chinatown? Three words: dirty, chaotic, broken.”
Historian Norman M. Klein wrote about one of L.A. Chinatown’s most enduring legends: underneath is a hidden web of tunnels, where sinful, lurid acts were carried out and crimes were committed. For decades this myth was passed on as people were suspicious of what they couldn’t understand. After the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Chinatown’s Chinese residents were barred from testifying in court, excluding them from courtrooms that were investigating them, and vulnerable to police officers whose official records stated they couldn’t tell them apart.
That original Chinatown was eventually demolished to clear space for Union Station. The replacement was moved just north of Downtown Los Angeles and opened in 1938. It’s an eerily quiet part of city, especially during the day. Its only post office is in danger of closing due to lack of funding, and fliers are posted up on lamp posts asking for financial support from the community. The owner of the small antiques shop will talk to you for hours about every small business that has come and gone on his block. Fridays and Saturdays a group of young Thai chefs and artisans try to draw crowds to eat and shop at their night market on Mei Ling Way. During game nights, hundreds of Dodgers fans will stream in and park before games; perhaps they will eat a big meal together at Yang Chow but then the crowds depart, the rest of the streets stay quiet.
Perhaps it is the neighborhood’s enduring, somewhat mysterious opacity that appeals to a new generation of designers and artists. They’ve opened studios and galleries alongside the stationery store, coffee shops, tea cocktail lounges, fusion restaurants and destination bars that come fully to life only after dark.
A decades-long business owner on Chung King Road told me, “Every couple of years, a new group of people, recently graduated art students usually, come around, rent space and try to revitalize the streets.” In her shop she sells postcards of faraway places with captions like: A BEST SELLER MOVIE BY JACKIE CHAN RUSH HOUR WAS NOT SHOT HERE. There’s a resigned weariness in her voice when she says, “Then they realize we just don’t get the kind of foot traffic it takes to sustain those kinds of businesses, and it goes away.”
I get it. She’s been living in the community for decades and has seen tides of faces come and go. She sounds already disappointed on their behalf, tired of artists whose far-fetched plans never quite materialize.
There’s something about the architectural scale of Los Angeles Chinatown that has always struck me as somewhere between convincingly authentic and strangely artificial. Is the sky too close to the clay tile roofs? Is the sunset too orange? Did someone repaint the mechanical horses for children one too many times and now their eyes look crazed?
It’s hard to walk during the day between Hill and Broadway without feeling like you’re walking in the backdrop of a movie, like a camera from above is about to come in focus and people will appear out of nowhere and set the place into action. Signage for new and defunct art galleries appear with letters roasted dry by the relentless California sun until the edges of words peel away, looking like they were written in calligraphy.
When pitching a TV show around Hollywood a few years ago, I saw the ways media executives’ eyes perked up with approval when I mentioned Chinatown as a setting. Somehow, always a piece of the city, yet to be claimed. Since I’d been finding myself in various Chinatowns both as a liminal space and a state of mind, I told them I’d claim it, even though it was just as mysterious to me. I thought in trying to capture it, I could join the group of people somehow helping to protect it.
I love exploring Chinatown, peeking into the windows of jewelers boasting diamonds and gold and Rolexes, and discovering secret cinemas across the street from death doulas. But it’s also a place that takes care of its elderly inhabitants, whose presence is most urgently felt. Elders get their hearing checked and play mahjongg and practice calligraphy in the shade of empty plazas. Elders in wheelchairs sit in the sun beside decommissioned shopping malls, whose main purpose seems to be to hold adult daycare centers for senior citizens. There do not seem to be sharks circling.
For a long time I wanted to move to Chinatown myself, to live there even without knowing very much about it. I dreamed of my children learning Chinese in the dual language immersion program of the local elementary. Before moving back to L.A., I had lived in a tenement building in New York’s Chinatown. I miss having claim over a piece of that city that other people found indecipherable. I miss a place that did not make me feel ashamed about my most outlandish yearnings and dreams.
There are many places in this city that real estate developers have found more appetizing. Communities with futuristic dispensaries and start-up athleisure. Thriving shopping malls and long lines around the block for viral beverages. Not here in Chinatown, but perhaps this place is holding out for something better, something more real.
My friend Joseph Lee has his painting studio on the second floor of a strip mall plaza, his half-squeezed tubes of paint line the walls from end to end. On the surface, here is another Chinatown mall whose decommissioned retail and office spaces have stood empty for years. But in recent years, they’ve been turned into studios for architects and designers and other creatives whose floor-to-ceiling windows face one another under Chinatown’s bright sky.
Joe told me he followed his heroes to Chinatown. The first one being Bruce Lee, who once had a martial arts studio in an unmarked building (which Joe found using a now-defunct History Channel app). Then there’s one of his favorite living painters, Henry “Chinatown” Taylor himself, whose gallery and former home are still just around the corner.
At night, Mandarin Plaza buzzes with conversation from the tea shop in the center. On weekends, sometimes a jazz band performs behind the stairwell and revelers dance in the eaves. The sidewalk in front of Café Triste is often so crowded with impeccably dressed patrons, it’s difficult to hear your own thoughts while walking by. Its owner can’t keep the customers sitting down long enough to eat his creative menu, so he thinks he must start serving fries.
My mother brought me to this country as a child and toiled with a ferocious determination that afforded our family the means to move farther and farther from the place we started. Thinking back, it was precisely because she was too busy working to focus on me that I was given the freedom to pursue my own fantasies of becoming a writer.
Chinatown is a part of Los Angeles built by immigrants who were chased, moved aside, distrusted — a place with a violent history it has continuously tried to shake. And yet it remains in a state of reinvention, making it an ideal place for dreamers to impose their improbable dreams, to make bets on themselves as artists, as creatives, as immigrants. Even when those dreams don’t quite hold, it continues to allow people to harbor hope for the next evolution. In that sense, Chinatown carries its own poetic legacy, the myth that deserves to endure.
Xuan Juliana Wang is author of the short story collection “Home Remedies” and assistant professor of English at UCLA.
Who doesn’t love a seaside soundbath or a spa day? But wellness is expensive — and self-care shouldn’t break the bank. So we’ve curated a handful of free wellness activities for the month of May to keep you stretched, sane and grounded.
But first: One of these events is blending wellness, culture, community and healing in an interesting way.
For more than 38 years the World Stage Performance Gallery, in South Los Angeles’ Leimert Park, has presented live music, poetry, spoken word and other forms of cultural expression in its performance gallery. On May 23, it will stage its first annual Sacred Music and Healing Festival in Leimert Park.
It’s an ambitious undertaking, says Executive Director Dwight Trible. The idea behind the festival, he says, is that “music is medicine.”
“At a time when many are seeking restoration, grounding and connection,” he said, “we are creating a space where sound, rhythm and collective presence become tools for healing.”
We caught up with Trible to learn more about the free event in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been thinking about staging this festival for years. Why finally do so now?
The time is right to do this. Democracy is just barely visible and hanging on. I think we have a rogue administration and I do believe that they’re pushing swiftly towards a fascist regime. Most people that I encounter are very, very angry about [that]. And whenever there is some upheaval in the world, or in our community, Leimert Park has always been this galvanizing place where everybody comes together to learn what’s going on, to find out what the solutions are and what the marching orders are. Usually it’s about some kind of injustice that’s happening to the black and brown community. This time we just felt that the way of counteracting the upheaval and negativity that exists currently in our country was to look at it from a different perspective: with love, compassion, faith and education.
(Illustration by Robbin Burnham WACSO / For The Times)
How is the festival different than a traditional music festival?
It’s a wellness experience shaped through culture, where jazz, Indigenous traditions and healing arts come together in one shared space. We wanted to make it as diverse as possible. To not only have the African-oriented or African American music, but music from Mexico, Indigenous Native American music, Asian music, so people can be exposed to different forms of spiritual music. Most of the time in South Los Angeles we will go to the church and hear this sort of gospel Baptist music — and there will be some of that too — but there are all sorts of ways to express your spiritual views. So we wanted to have something that everybody can relate to.
How exactly is music healing, in your opinion?
We’ve all been to concerts — whether symphonic music or jazz or new age music — and we go in with one mindset and when we come out, we have a completely different disposition. I think music is one of the strongest ways of healing. Music is medicine. It’s sometimes better than taking pharmaceutical drugs. It changes your mind, your mental state, your spiritual state. When you surrender to the music it’s definitely something that’s going to transform. Music has a direct impact on the nervous system. Hopefully it will calm the body, shift emotional states and create a sense of connection. I hope that people from all over the city will come.
What other wellness offerings will be at the festival?
We have a main stage, which will have [musicians]. But there will be two other tents. In one, there will be people doing yoga, tai chi — the more physical things of peace and healing. Then we have another tent where there will be presentations on herbs and meditation and other ways of healing people’s bodies. There will be about 25 booths with other people [showcasing] healing remedies and some of the hospitals will be talking about mental health.
Who will be performing?
One of our founders of the World Stage, he’s a poet, Kamau Daáood. We’ll have Carlos Niño & Friends and I’m sure he’ll bring a special guest. The great pianist Eric Reed. Jimetta Rose Voices of Creation. I do progressive music and I’ll have a group playing there as well. We’ll also have people from our spoken word workshop who will be doing presentations throughout the day. There’s a store called Nappily Naturals & Apothecary in Leimert Park — they do healing remedies and meditation — and they will be curating the healing tent.
You’ve said the festival reflects “a deeper narrative emerging in Los Angeles.” What is that?
I think the narrative is: there has got to be another way to do things rather than to try and use force against force. We [can’t] bring peace by bringing war. I know that a lot of people are getting tired of what’s going on and thinking about how do we stop this? You have a person leading the country and they’re prepared to use guns and ammunition to be able to make sure they can keep doing whatever they’ve set out to do. You have to go at it another way. The power of love is stronger than the power of hate.
Sacred Music and Healing Festival, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, May 23; 4321 Degnan Blvd., Leimert Park.
Here’s what else is happening across the wellness landscape in May.
Mindfulness with Christiane Wolf at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City.
(Stella Kalinina / For The Times)
Midweek is “Wellness Wednesdays” at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City. The museum will host a free, hourlong, guided meditation — led by Christiane Wolf — in its Glorya Kaufman Community Center’s A-frame theater, a refurbished, century-old MGM prop house. Afterward, the Cantilever Collective will lead a free movement workshop in the sculpture garden, helping participants shake out any remaining remnants of stress. There will also be complimentary garden refreshments such as homemade soup and fresh bread from Clark Street Bakery. 9-11 a.m. every Wednesday in May; 10808 Culver Blvd., Culver City.
Similarly, the Hammer Museum hosts free, guided Mindful Awareness Meditations every Thursday in its Billy Wilder Theater, a collaboration with UCLA Mindful. Can’t get away midday to attend? The museum broadcasts the event live on its website. 12:30-1 p.m. every Thursday in May; 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.
Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation is hosting a week of free “golden hour” wellness experiences in dozens of L.A. County parks in a program it’s calling, not surprisingly, “Parks at Sunset.” Activities include yoga, guided meditation, painting and dance; they’re meant “to help attendees relax, recharge, and reconnect in the heart of L.A. County parks.” The best part? They’re all free “drop-in” happenings, with no registration required. 4:30-6:30 p.m. May 14-22; check the site for park addresses near you.
ace/121 Gallery, which is operated by the nonprofit Glendale Arts, will host a “Mindful Art for Wellness” workshop for participants over 16 years old. The instructor will start off by giving attendees a prompt to spark creativity along with stress-reducing breathing exercises. Then the art-making begins. No experience is necessary. Simply “slowing down is the point,” the organization says. 7-8:30 p.m. May 18; 121 N. Kenwood St., Glendale.
Clockshop is an arts and culture nonprofit that puts on free programming in public spaces with the goal of connecting Angelenos to the land they live on. Its annual kite festival is a much anticipated, colorful “gallery in the sky.” This year, the festival’s theme is: “Take a Breath.” That includes visitors’ own deep breaths to slow down and feel relaxed as well as “the wind that lifts our kites, the air that sustains us, and the open sky we’re committed to protecting,” Clockshop says. 2-6 p.m. May 9; Los Angeles State Historic Park, 1245 N. Spring St., downtown L.A.
Los Angeles State Historic Park will be busy in May! The National Alliance on Mental Illness — NAMI — has dubbed May 16, 2026, “the day of hope.” As part of that, the annual NAMIWalks Greater LA County Mental Health Festival will take place that day at Los Angeles State Historic Park. The donation-only event, with free wellness activities, includes NAMIWalks, a roughly 1.5-mile walk on a path around the perimeter of the park. The fair will include about 60 booths as well as a “mind and body area” with soundbaths, yoga and other wellness activities. 8 a.m.-1 p.m. May 16; Los Angeles State Historic Park, 1245 N. Spring St., downtown L.A.
Nearly 50 years ago the Venice Art Walk debuted as a one-day fundraiser. It’s since grown into a 10-day-long Art Exhibition + Auction benefiting the Venice Family Clinic. The VFC provides comprehensive healthcare services to more than 45,000 Angelenos. The free exhibition will showcase works by established, mid-career and emerging artists, with Alison Saar serving as the event’s signature artist. Auction bids will be accepted online. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. May 8-17; 910 Abbot Kinney in Venice.
A line in Mark Binelli’s fascinating piece in The New York Times Magazine about Michael Jackson’s estate-led rehabilitation campaign really jumped out at me. Referring to the early ’90s, the period in which the biopic “Michael” ends, Binelli writes, “It was also among the last moments that Jackson looked cool: the white V-neck and the unbuttoned white dress shirt, black pants, hair pulled back.”
What an astute observation. By this point in Jackson’s life, he had already given us his most iconic looks: the Sky Masterson-esque ivory pinstriped suit and cobalt blue socks in the “Smooth Criminal” video; the leather jacket from “Thriller,” as red as pulled taffy; and the black Florsheim loafers worn with sparkly socks, which he pulled out for his inaugural moonwalk in 1983.
In images of him from this time, he’s still just the musical magician who vanquished MTV. The allegations of child molestation that would dog him through his later life (and afterlife) haven’t yet appeared. It’s this period that fashion designers have long been selectively fixated on, with little room for his personal life.
In 2017, Supreme sold a series of hoodies and tees showing a bow-tied “Billie Jean”-era MJ. In January 2019, Louis Vuitton, then under the stewardship of Virgil Abloh, created an entire collection inspired by Jackson. Abloh, in an interview before the show, described Jackson as “the most important innovator in men’s wear history,” a plaudit that, even then, came off as too generous.
There were ensembles with characters from 1978’s “The Wiz” (including Jackson’s Scarecrow), a cherry zip jacket owing to “Thriller” and a T-shirt with an airbrushed rendition of some gleaming socks parked in black shoes.
Abloh’s timing was terrible. Eight days later, “Leaving Neverland,” about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, premiered at Sundance. With the public reminded of the child molesting allegations that trailed the singer’s latter years, his reputation was again upended. After the documentary premiered on HBO in March, Louis Vuitton halted production on items that directly referenced Jackson.
What I had forgotten about this backlash was that it didn’t take hold immediately. Two months after the show, in a March 2019 New Yorker profile of Abloh (who died in 2021), the designer is asked about “Leaving Neverland” and the allegations that Jackson had molested two boys. He said he hadn’t heard of the documentary but that he had been inspired by “the Michael that I thought was universally accepted, the good side, his humanitarian self.” It would take four more days for Vuitton to nix the Jackson goods.
Yet one can see why Abloh might have thought his explanation would fly. Fashion has, after all, always been capable of pushing past a controversy, if the person’s image is indelible enough.
The photo of Jackson in his black loafers, as I’ve seen on infinite mood boards over the years — that’s strong iconography. And now the box office might of “Michael” seems like proof that the singer’s defenders have won in the court of public opinion, even with a new lawsuit against his estate filed by four siblings who knew Jackson as children.
The invitation to the Jackson-inspired Louis Vuitton show was a single white glove coated in chandelier-sparkly rhinestones. I still have mine in storage. It felt important to keep as a token of a luxury house trading on the image of a contentious figure. Today it is really the only existing piece of that collection that is actually tied to the singer. You can buy one on eBay for as much as $3,000.
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Lifestyle
What to snag at the ‘And Just Like That…’ auction, from Carrie’s manuscript to Charlotte’s heels
If you’ve ever daydreamed about owning an item from Carrie Bradshaw’s closet or the writing desk where she penned her famous memoir, this L.A. event may be your golden ticket.
Julien’s is hosting an auction for “And Just Like That…,” the sequel to HBO Max Original’s groundbreaking series “Sex and the City” that took its final bow last year after three seasons. The auction features more than 500 lots of designer clothing, shoes, furnishings, kitschy keepsakes and props straight from the beloved show. Online bidding kicked off earlier this month and will conclude with a live, two-day event at the auction house’s Gardena location on Thursday and Friday. Participants can place bids both online and in person.
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Given the popularity of the show, particularly the fashion, style expert George Kotsiopoulos says being able to own an item that your favorite character wore or had in their home is a rare opportunity.
“Even if you love something design wise, there’s an extra layer of ‘Well, that came from “And Just Like That…”’ or ‘That’s Carrie’s’ or ‘That’s Charlotte’s’ or ‘That’s Miranda‘s,’” adds Kotsiopoulos, a former co-host of “Fashion Police” and a style expert working with Julien’s on this sale.
While you won’t be able to snag a pair of Manolo Blahniks worn by Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) — Carrie’s clothing is sadly not for sale at this auction — you can purchase other items from her closet, including the round, vintage suitcases that held her elaborate hats, custom wooden hangers inscribed with her initials or even empty designer shoe and jewelry boxes.
Many items from Carrie’s collection are from the luxurious apartment she shared with her husband, Mr. Big. There’s the front door intercom panel, a pair of embossed leather club chairs and, fatefully, Mr Big’s Peloton water bottle. The memoir “Loved & Lost” that Carrie wrote about Mr. Big’s sudden death is also for sale, as is the manuscript. A small but poignant item: the condolence card sent to Carrie by Samantha Jones, her estranged friend played by Kim Cattrall, who made a brief but impactful appearance in the reboot.
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1. Shoes from Lisa Todd Wexley’s collection. 2. Carrie Bradshaw’s globetrotter luggage set, a vintage stool and steel writing desk. 3. Midcentury modern chairs and an upholstered cat pillow from Carrie Bradshaw’s Gramercy townhouse.
Fashion lovers will likely find satisfaction raiding the closets of OG characters Charlotte York-Goldenblatt (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), along with newcomers Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker). Notable items from their collections include Charlotte’s Prada coat from the Spring 2023 Menswear collection and Miranda’s vintage Issey Miyake coat. There’s also an authentic woven Intrecciato Bottega Veneta clutch that Miranda wore, Seema’s silk Fendi dress, the showstopping Balmain cape Lisa wore while trekking through the snow in New York City and an array of glamorous heels.
Catherine Williamson, managing director of Hollywood memorabilia for Julien’s, says it was important for the company to price items conservatively so many people, particularly fans who may have never bid before, would have a chance to buy something.
As of late last week, several items had highest bids under $100. Meanwhile, bigger ticket items like Marantino’s Louis Vuitton bags were bidding for $4,000, and the engraved Rolex watch — it’s a prop not a genuine Rolex — that Bradshaw gifted Mr. Big for their anniversary was going for $5,000.
How to participate in the auction
The “And Just Like That…” auction will take place over two days on April 30 and May 1 at the Julien’s location in Gardena. Participants can place bids both online and in person.
Visit juliensauctions.com to register and bid online or be in the room and participate live. Email info@juliensauctions.com for the location and more details.
In honor of the late Willie Garson, who played Stanford Blatch on the series, Warner Bros. Discovery will make a one-time donation to You Gotta Believe, a New York City-based organization that specializes in finding permanent families for pre-teens and young adults in foster care. As a father of an adopted son, Garson, who died from pancreatic cancer in September 2021, was deeply connected to the organization.
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