Part 2: Chinatown Becomes Home in D.C.

However, racial attitudes and discrimination were the worst they had ever been, due to the divisions and fear caused by the Great Depression. Chinese Americans were markedly ‘colored’, and subject to heavy racialization. 

Neighborhood programs and institutions also helped inspire the lives of young people in Chinatown. The Chinatown Creative Workshop served as a program for new immigrant children to become quickly integrated into their community by teaching dance, art, and cultural classes. The program was largely successful and hosted anywhere from 30-50 children each year, but ended in the 80s due to a lack of government funding. As more Chinese Americans tried to assimilate, confusion of mixed identity rose.

Because of the insularity and relative self-sufficiency of the community, the majority of the first generation immigrants would never learn English, while their children would have weak to no grasp of their parents’ mother tongue. The influx of new immigrants also marked the beginning of a dispersive effect, however, and Chinese shops and small communities began to form around the suburbs of D.C.

While this dispersion was underway, however, Chinatown would continue to serve as a community and cultural center for many Asian Americans in the DMV area, even as many moved to the suburbs of Maryland or Northern Virginia.  Chinese New Year festival celebrations became one such opportunity for these diasporic groups to gather, and served as a cultural touchstone by hosting activities such as traditional costume shows, acrobatics, martial arts, among many others.

In a 2003 interview for Small But Resilient: Washington’s Chinatown over the Years, childhood resident Wendy Feng noted “I think one of the reasons people initially sojourned or stayed in Chinatown was because they felt safe in Chinatown. And I think a part of it was the Anti-Immigration Act [of 1882]…that sort of gave people the excuse to really behave badly towards them. And so they felt that they have to sort of isolate themselves within Chinatowns.” 

Nevertheless, Chinatown had definitively established itself as a home and home base for both a new and old diasporic population. Businesses, community organizers, and schools shaped the space that provided for many.