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 Seventies, initially largely Chinese language, constructed our personal ethnic economic 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) youngsters. 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 vegetation to gradual cook dinner medicinal stews that might restore my yin and “undo the results 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 faculty and weekly Bible research in English, Mandarin and Cantonese across the nook. 99 Ranch, Shortly and King Hua for one of the best 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 seemingly a love language of immigrant dads).
Every part we would have liked 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 instructed a narrative of resistance and rebirth, for Southern California and my household.
From the start of World Conflict II till the Nineteen Sixties, Monterey Park, the origin of the San Gabriel Valley as an ethnoburb, prospered as one of the vital reasonably priced white suburban communities. The wartime economic system introduced transplants from throughout the nation to Southern California, and Monterey Park turned an rising website of comfy single-family houses and manicured inexperienced lawns. Postwar Monterey Park remained predominantly white however started to attract upwardly cell Mexican, Japanese and Chinese language Individuals from totally different ethnic enclaves round Los Angeles, together with East Los Angeles, the Westside and Chinatown.
In a time of charged debate and political battle 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 lots 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 present white political, institutional and cultural dominance in Monterey Park.
Nevertheless, lots 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 ebook “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 shifting 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 diverse middle-class suburb within the nation, with white folks 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 an alternative determined to start out 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 residence the place she had raised three youngsters 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 converse the language, didn’t have friends and couldn’t get round. She was remoted and heartbroken.
With barely a kindergarten training, her life ambition had been to turn into a spouse and a mom. In true Cantonese matriarch vogue, she bragged incessantly to her social circles about her husband’s and youngsters’s accomplishments. Now, with three grownup youngsters with households of their very own, she was not wanted as a mom, now not a spouse and shamed by her neighborhood. After I was a baby, she would insist, “Your popo has turn into a ineffective nothing.”
It perplexed me as a result of I by no means noticed her that manner. Getting left by her husband didn’t change into the tip of her story.
With the security internet of the ethnoburb, my popo rebuilt. After dwelling with us for just a few years, she moved into her personal one-bedroom residence on Principal Avenue in neighboring Alhambra. She walked to 85 Levels on a regular basis, the place they rang a cowbell each time recent baos got here out of the oven. She made buddies with Cantonese neighbors in her constructing, they usually began their very own mah-jongg group at which they might debrief the newest episode of whichever Cantonese drama had aired on TVB the earlier night time. She discovered a Cantonese church and received baptized. She by no means realized English. She drove recklessly within the 99 Ranch car parking zone and didn’t care. She might have confirmed just a few stereotypes, however the ethnoburb saved her. She stayed unapologetically herself via the upheavals of divorce and displacement. Within the security internet of SGV, she received 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 baby, 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 once we have been the one Asians round. You don’t converse Cantonese? Too dangerous and sit tight: 626 or 90210, my popo didn’t code swap.
I, alternatively, began my PhD in code switching after I was 9, after transferring to an uppity, predominantly white non-public faculty. 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 lease to stay someplace stylish is overrated and unsustainable. I would like Asian strip malls, I would like Hong Kong cafes and I would like my baby to develop up listening to Cantonese repeatedly 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, prospects and unassimilability.
Bianca Mabute-Louie is a sociologist and the creator of the forthcoming ebook “Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century,” from which this piece is tailored, copyright 2025 by Bianca Mabute-Louie. To be revealed by Harper, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
