Revitalizing Chinatown Into a Heterotopia A Geosemiotic ...

1 Revitalizing Chinatown into aHeterotopiaA Geosemiotic Analysis of Shop Signs inWashington, s ChinatownJia Lou1 Georgetown UniversityWith the changing immigrant population and rising real-estate prices in downtown Washington, , the number of Chinese residents and businesses in its Chinatown has declined in recent , non-Chinese stores and restaurants have marched into this thriving the threat of Chinatown s disappearance from the urban landscape, leaders of the localChinese community have devised and administered a mandate for all businesses, Chinese and non-Chinese, in the area to carry Chinese shop signs.

2 To understand how this mandate has reconstructedChinatown s semiotic landscape, this article employs the theoretical framework of geosemiotics andthe (post-)structuralist conception of the sign. Through an analysis of shop signs in their materialcontexts, it is argued that the local community s preservation effort has inadvertently renderedChinatown into a Heterotopia , where heterogeneous spaces are juxtaposed into one : Chinatown , shop signs, geosemiotics, Heterotopia , urban revitalizationWe are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, theepoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.

3 Michel Foucault (1967)At the intersection of Seventh and H Streets in northwest Washington, , standsthe largest single-span Chinese archway in the world. This brightly colored four-storyarchitecture (as shown in Figure 1) is decorated by 270 ceramic dragons in gold coat-ing, and its peaked roof is covered by 7,000 glazed gold tiles. Alfred Liu, the architect1space and culture vol. X no. X, month 200X XXX-XXXDOI: Sage Publications2space and culture/month 200 Xwho designed the arch, said the arch was representative of the architectural style of theMing and Qing dynasties and pointed out that gold used to be the privilege of theemperor (Wheeler, 1986).

4 This $1 million project involving 16 artists from China wascompleted in 1986. The cost was copaid by the district government and the People sRepublic of China. The arch was hailed by Marion Barry, mayor at the time of theconstruction, as a visual symbol of the cultural and economic exchanges which will bepart of our sister-city (Beijing and Washington, ) agreement (quoted in Wheeler,1986, p. J01) and a symbol of a living downtown (quoted in Sherwood, 1986, p. C01).Ironically, in the shadow of this grand archway, s Chinatown is tiny comparedwith those in other North American cities such as Boston, New York, San Francisco,and Vancouver.

5 Although it is impossible for any passer-by to miss the arch, they mightneglect the actual existence of the miniature Chinatown . Reportedly an eight-blockethnic neighborhood in 1986 (Wheeler, 1986), s Chinatown nowadays is virtuallyreduced to two blocks, with the crossroad of Seventh and H Streets as its center and G,I, 8th, and 6thStreets as its boundaries (Figure 2). Fewer than 500 Chinese people actu-ally reside in downtown s Chinatown , most of who live in Wah Luck House, a low-income housing project built in 1982 (Wah Luck House, 2005). Many of theWashington metropolitan area s Chinese now live in the nearby suburbs in Virginia orMaryland (Knipp, 2005; Nicholls, 2003).

6 At the same time that an increasing numberof Chinese businesses closed down because of high real estate prices, a variety ofAmerican retail chains, such as Starbucks and Washington Sports Club, have movedinto this booming downtown area with ample business opportunities (Moore, 2005;Sheridan, 2002).Anticipating the threat of urban development on Chinatown s survival, theChinatown Steering Committee, comprising community and business leaders, deviseda plan to preserve the neighborhood s tradition and character by insisting thatnew businesses use Chinese characters and decoration (Pyatt, 1999).

7 This mandateFigure 1: Friendship Archway, Chinatown , Washington, a unique semiotic landscape (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) that is notobserved in Chinatowns elsewhere, that is, the spread of Chinese signage to non-Chinese businesses. These new shop signs have to some extent contributed to thebooming appearance of the area, but some observers have also questioned whether thisinitial success is leading to the actual revitalization of Chinatown (Knipp, 2005; Moore,2005). In this article, I address this problem by analyzing and comparing the shop signsof the Chinese and non-Chinese ChinatownThe definition ofChinatown is not an easy task.

8 It is usually perceived as a Chinesequarter of any city outside China, a self-contained urban enclave where nearly allChinese people, their businesses, and their social institutions were confined (Lai,1988, p. xv). This common perception is poetically narrated in Chinatown , an illus-trated book for children: Chinatown . City within a city. Home to street cobblers andherbalists, tai chi masters and kung fu students, outdoor fish markets and lots and lotsof restaurants (Low, 1997, front flap). Indeed, the contemporary Chinatown in NorthAmerica is not only characterized by the ethnicity of its residents but also the sheerabundance of restaurants and stores.

9 Shop signs, therefore, are a conspicuous part ofChinatown s streets of Chinatowns have fascinated outside observers (reviewed in Lee,2001). For example, Arnold Genthe photographed San Francisco s old Chinatown inthe early 20th century (collected in Genthe & Tchen, 1984). Genthe s photos providecontemporary researchers of Chinatown with invaluable historic records of oldChinatown and also with materials for critical examination. Lee (2001), for instance, Revitalizing Chinatown into a Heterotopia3 Figure 2: Map of Chinatown , Washington, that most of those pictures in historical records are not representations butimaginations of Chinatowns in Western eyes (p.)

10 8). He raised the question What is theplace of Chinatown ? beyond geographical boundary marking (p. 9).In many North American cities, Chinatowns have not remained a confined urbanenclave. In the past two decades, scholars have studied the changes that have happened inChinatowns from socioeconomic, historical, and anthropological perspectives (Chen,1992; Lai, 1988; Wong, 1982). Chen (1992), for instance, has noticed the emerging het-erogeneous community structure of the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, New to the present discussion, Lai (1988), in a history of Chinatowns in Canada,presented a stage-development model that summarizes the historical development ofCanadian Chinatowns into the four stages of budding, booming, withering, and this timeline of development, Washington, s Chinatown nowadays couldstand on the three stages of withering, booming, and reviving simultaneously.