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With the heart of the Chinese community shifting to the San Gabriel Valley, a more diverse Chinatown is struggling to stay afloat. A new office tower, a light-rail station and possibly a new school district headquarters may be answers.
As Yiu Hai (Mama) Quon stares at her restaurant's empty dining room, she reminisces about times she spent hours pan-frying chow mein and egg foo young for crowds of hungry customers.
Quon, 93, still whips up tasty meals at the 46-year-old Grand Star restaurant in Chinatown, but now she spends most of her afternoons greeting the restaurant's scant number of customers from a worn vinyl booth near the main entrance.
Her son, Wally, is equally nostalgic. He likes to show off pictures of Charles Bronson, Tony Curtis and other movie stars who used to visit. And he still hands out copies of a 1969 newspaper review that raved about his mother's Peking duck and winter melon soup.
In many ways, Mama and Wally Quon symbolize the old Chinatown that has lived through its heyday and is now trying to carve a new role for itself.
Once a bustling tourist hub and an almost exclusively Cantonese enclave, Chinatown is now a multiethnic and multilingual community struggling to attract enough visitors to keep its shops afloat amid a shaky economy and a continuing shift of Chinese residents and businesses to the San Gabriel Valley.
"Chinatown is losing ground economically, and the businesses seem not to have done anything to recapture it," said Kenneth Yee, an assistant pastor at the First Chinese Baptist Church. "But I think Chinatown will continue to be the focus of educational, spiritual and social services for the Asian community."
Though Chinatown's destiny is far from clear, many hope increased development in the community and in the surrounding Downtown area will restore its faded glory.
Strolling past the mom-and-pop gift shops along North Broadway, Don Toy envisions a Chinatown with stylish condominiums and a variety of restaurants, theaters and stores that would draw young professionals and keep present residents.
"Chinatown has this reputation of being a place only for the immigrant population, but I think it can and will attract young people back," said Toy, director of the Chinatown Teen Post, a nonprofit social...