With Efforts to Make Asiatown More Visible, What’s the Right Way Forward? And Whose Voice Will Come Through?

Gates leading into many American Chinatowns have an unmistakable immediacy to them.

In Chicago, the 48-year-old gate, adorned in red, white and green, welcomes passersby (with a slightly communistic greeting — “The world belongs to the commonwealth.”) In Philadelphia, dozens of glimmering tiles from Tianjin, China, compose the 40-foot Friendship Gate. And in San Francisco, a dragon-topped gift from Taiwan in the 1960s, which grew into a symbol of restored Chinese business after the Korean War.

“Within its quarter, Chinatown serves every need and desire of the human being, from stomach to soul, from birth to burial,” Charles Leong, a notable Chinese-American journalist for the Chinese Press, wrote in an essay in 1963 urging San Francisco’s Dragon Gate. “Like eternal Rome, Chinatown is the center of its world.”

In Cleveland, it's not Chinatown, but Asiatown, the 25 or so blocks tucked in between St. Clair and Perkins Avenues. And yet, despite the efforts of councilpersons, a slew of nonprofits, three mayoral administrations, a handful of culturally-attuned individuals, no similar gate or archway has ever been erected here.

That may change.

Following the stifling impact of the pandemic on Asiatown’s 60 or so businesses—many who talked to Scene said the stigma of Covid proved a lingering and harmful double whammy not faced by others on top of pandemic protocols—two projects promising new cultural markers in the neighborhood could gain traction: One, a traditional Chinese-style archway, an imitation of Chicago’s, that would be installed facing southward on East 21st and Rockwell. The other, a series of calligraphic aluminum columns designed by Cleveland Institute of Art architecture students, that double as “modern gates” and street lighting.

Both projects, still in their planning, design and funding stages, are both symbolic and practical fixes, their backers say, for Asiatown’s long deficiency as a unified, visually attractive enclave.

MidTown Cleveland, the CDC whose territory includes Asiatown, has been well aware of the issue over the years. Since 2019, when its own Asiatown initiative was created, there’s been a concerted effort to make those 25 blocks seem more visible to outside tourists, along with more of a livable place for its 3,000 residents.

But those two dozen or so blocks, with their 38 restaurants, five groceries, four hair salons, three gift shops, three herbal doctors, two massage parlors, Tai Chi studios, Aikido dojo, karaoke bar and Latin dance studio may need more than pretty artwork around them to prosper in new ways.
“Overall, my goal is, ‘How can people identify with the neighborhood? How can people understand the story of their neighborhood?'” Rhea Doria, marketing coordinator at MidTown Cleveland, told Scene, sitting in a meeting room in their offices at the Agora. “How can people understand the story of the individuals and the buildings and the history for people to not only just see the face value of it, but the actual deep meaning and the beauty behind it? That’s my message.”

Doria, a 24-year-old native of New Jersey, was hired by MidTown last August in a bid to freshen up Asiatown’s image on social media, while actualizing the goals outlined in 2021’s “Imagine Asiatown” study. The project was a culmination of three months of focus sessions, 200 survey respondents, in-person interviews with 38 residents and 10 businesses, and was, for Doria and team, a signifier on how to move forward.

The result was a slew of statements that could and should be true in the future: “Asiatown is a real community, not just a tourist destination.” “The road is level, the community is beautiful, the streets are well-lit.” “Green spaces have replaced concrete jungles.” “This is a vibrant neighborhood.” “People don’t have to buy or drive cars!”

Other than delving into public arts projects, like the CIA calligraphic one, Doria has spent the past year or so marketing Asiatown’s culture for the social media era. On their Instagram page, spotlights of Saturday square dancing sessions intermingle with restaurant adverts, Ward 7 flyers and various pop culture memes. (Cue Michael Scott’s “Everybody Dance Now," used to advertise May's Asian Festival.)

“I think we're talking about a younger generation,” Doria said. “They were born here, so America is their home, but they inherited both Asian and American culture. So it's a fusion.”

Naomi Jia, a business development manager who works on Doria’s team, is sort of the business liaison companion to Doria’s Instagram marketing. Jia spends her weeks putting the economic facet of the 2021 study into practice, helping dozens of local businesses apply for $1,000 micro grants, or helping them apply to the federal Storefront Renovation Program, which could bring a possible $50,000 boost for a stale facade. (“To make Asiatown a home,” Doria said.)

“Some of our Asian business is not visible,” Jia said. “Even walking past, you don't see it. And that's what Asiatown is, has been for so long. People driving past didn't pay attention. The public placement wasn't visible. But underneath, Asiatown has been ignored for so long. That's one way to really help is to tell people. 'Hey, here we are, here come to see it.’ And then you make your own judgment.”

Ray Hom, a retail tech executive who started the CIA project with public arts connoisseur Andrew Ratcliff in spring of 2022, thinks any streetscape art approved by the city should act as the visual locus for its residents.

Growing up the son and grandson of restaurant owners—the Chinese Peacock in Van Aken, the Hong Kong in Chagrin, the Golden Dragon in Lyndhurst—Hom grew fascinated with his mother’s neighborhood  in Asiatown after 16 years living in Singapore. In 2018, in order to live by her, Hom began staying part-time in Asiatown, flying in monthly from his home in Atlanta. “I had a new sense of pride,” Hom said. “I wanted to do something in Cleveland. I saw something that was missing.”

Last year, after meeting Ratcliff at a MidTown Cleveland event, Hom felt compelled to beautify the dull sidewalks and gray lots surrounding AsiaPlaza on Payne Ave. in a character reminiscent of bigger, denser Chinatowns. Attacks on Asian Americans —  both fueled by and separate from Covid stigma — propelled Hom's need to act. “We felt there was a need to bring more exposure. To combat that. To make the community feel proud.” He petitioned CIA a half year later. It was made into a semester-long project, with seven students crafting designs from Dragon Gate-inspired archways to shipping crate shopping centers.

“Philadelphia has some cool gates. Boston has cool gates, too. When I was in Seattle, I went to theirs all the time,” Hom said over a recent dinner of spring rolls at Siam Cafe off St. Clair. Hom, a fashionable man in his sixties with round glasses and silvering hair, pours tea, signaling to the CIA designs on his phone. He held it up for close examination.

“You come to our Chinatown, you go to come to Asiatown here. Now, what would your impression be now if you drove down Payne?” he said. Hom smiled. “Right?”

Shao-Jia Huang, better known to restaurant heads and CDC chiefs by his honorific, has access to probably the most culturally-important, private Asian museum in the entire city. But few are privy to this. Few have seen the museum, historically called the On Leong Temple, or its contents—its Qing Dynasty urns, Beijing-made incense burners, wartime letters of support from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But there, in an airy, third-story room above Mr. Huang’s Emperor’s Palace Chinese restaurant, there exists an archive of Asiatown's historical identity.

That is, because Asiatown’s roots are inevitably Chinese. Long before the neighborhood grew as an enclave for other East Asians at the turn of the century, Cantonese railroad workers, fleeing West Coast racism and political dissent, sought new lives in Cleveland in the 1860s and 1870s, centered in Cleveland's first Chinatown, on Ontario between Lakeside and St. Clair. As that neighborhood changed, Chinatown became centered on Rockwell between East 21st and East 24th. The On Leong Temple, both a symbol and meeting hall, acted as its epicenter. 

Today, it's essentially Mr. Huang's apartment. Like Hom and Ratcliff, Mr. Huang, a bald man in his sixties who sports open-buttoned Aeropostale polos, has a fixed idea of what a cultural homage should look like. As maybe he should. In 2006, the same year Mr. Huang relocated to Cleveland to apparently buy the Chinatown building on Rockwell Ave., he hired an architecture firm based in Guangzhou, China, to draft up a Chinese-style gateway in the spitting imitation of Chicago’s. One that, he said, would be erected on East 21st.

But, alas, 16 years later, the blueprints have resulted in absolutely nothing.

“He hasn’t shown it to me,” Joyce Pan Huang, Cleveland’s director of City Planning, and former director of MidTown Cleveland, said about the proposed gate on East 21st. “I am not familiar with it personally. But I also know that there's probably a lot more that needs to happen with fundraising before it even gets to that point.”

Councilmember Stephanie Howse, whose Ward 7 includes Asiatown, told Scene she's had preliminary discussions about the gate projects and is looking forward to those evolving.

"I'm really interested as far as community dialogue goes."

To erect the same green, red, white and gray gate, with pillars, characters and dragons, Joyce Pan Huang (no relation) told Scene that Mr. Huang would have to get approval from Cleveland's Division of Streets.

But, the question is, would a traditional Chinese gate, like Chicago’s, be fully appropriate? After all, the greater Asiatown sphere is not just Chinese, but Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc.

“I think I have personal feelings about what Chinatown gates represent,” Joyce Huang said. As for Mr. Huang’s design: “If [he’s] behind it, we would support it.”

The purpose of a gate—a beacon for curious visitors and a signifier of homecoming—brings up an interesting, and sometimes tense, debate amongst Asiatown’s caretakers and chief stakeholders. In interviews with a dozen residents and changemakers, the how of reshaping Asiatown’s visual identity ultimately concerned the who spearheading it. One seems just as paramount as the other.

It’s impossible to talk about such a debate without bringing up both the legacy of Night Market and the Asian Festival. In May of 2015, after being hired by St. Clair Superior Development, then the CDC whose territory included Asiatown, Brendan Trewella and Josh Maxwell, cofounders of a design firm called Small Organizing Solutions, created an evening-time showcase of the neighborhood’s oft-undiscovered culinary talent in the parking lots across from the Chinatown complex on Rockwell.

With Mr. Huang’s full backing, Trewella and Maxwell rallied together some 30 or so vendors selling everything from ceramics to mackerel off the grill, along with Chinese folk dancers.

They had anticipated 500 attendees. By their June event, nearly 8,500 showed. (Including, at one, Tom Hanks.)

“One of the most shocking things that we discovered was most people didn't know Asiatown existed,” Trewella said recently, dining on a bowl of tonkotsu at Alpha Ramen on Payne and East 38th. “If you go outside of this little pocket, even they know maybe we have one, but they certainly don't know that it’s dozens and dozens of restaurants and, like, whole blocks of our city.”
Although Covid-19 would effectively kill Night Market’s four-year stint come 2020, its legacy still leaves a slight sour taste on the tongues of those involved.

One of those is Johnny Wu, a local filmmaker who sat on the St. Clair Superior board in Night Market’s early days and yearly co-producer, with Lisa Wong, of the Asian Festival. In an interview, Wu, who lived near East 32nd and Superior Ave. in the 1980s, told Scene that Night Market, though a cultural moment in pre-pandemic Cleveland, was not as profitable for the neighborhood as its image suggests. And that its arrangement with St. Clair Superior was rocky.

“So, what happened was that Night Market was created by two white guys,” Wu said in a phone call. “They came to Asiatown. They wanted to make a living by doing an event in an Asian home.” He suggests that though Trewella and crew had good intentions, they fumbled Night Market’s coexistence with Asiatown’s more traditional culture showcase. “They completely disregarded what the Asian Festival had already done.”

At Alpha Ramen, Trewella owns up to some initial planning gaffes as he chopsticks noodles. “There’s tension,” he said, with the Asian Festival heads, Lisa Wong and Wu. “There’s probably at this point what I would describe as some unresolved components of it, because we've not ever really sat down and had the full out conversation where everything got back in alignment.”

But could Night Market happen again? Trewella is iffy in his response: Night Market could happen, of course. But whether, in his view, it’s needed—especially with MidTown’s steering—is up for debate.

“Night Market really was a tool for community development,” Trewella said. “It wasn't supposed to be just an event. It was supposed to do things. It was supposed to get businesses into Rockwell Avenue. It was supposed to get new businesses started in Asiatown.” Trewella paused. “And it did that.”

In the middle of June, after lunching on six plates of dim sum, including chicken feet and barbecue pork buns, Mr. Huang brought Scene up to his apartment, to see the private museum-temple few eyes have apparently seen. Mr. Huang, who spoke through his friend and restaurateurThomas Mei, swung in a pendulum between the joys of privatizing, and fears of publicizing, his gem of local history.

“He's low profile, very private,” Mei said about Mr. Huang, as the two sipped black tea. “He doesn't want to put himself out. He doesn't want people to know him.”

On the walk up to the temple, past all of the glittering, China-imported chandeliers and the servers pushing dim sum carts, Mr. Huang and Mei cut to the point of the East 21st gate: to keep an area’s history from moving—just as it did after the I-90 highway construction pushed it eastward. To say, This here is Chinatown. For good.

“It comes from my personality,” Mr. Huang said through Mei. “I just want one Chinatown. I don’t want to be like Midtown, Downtown or Asiatown. There's one name, so you don't want to break it up.”

In Mr. Huang’s museum, which contains hundreds of items originally collected by the On Leong, Mr. Huang and Mei walk around observing the dusty erhu and pipa musical instruments, the offering oranges in front of a golden Buddha, the magnificent seven-foot-tall thread works of the China countryside.

Mei walked to the enormous table in the center of the temple, and took out a thick binder. He licked his finger, and turned to the architectural drawing on everyone’s mind. There it is, just like Chicago’s, in red, white, green and gray. “And I have all the materials ready,” Mr. Huang said. “All from China.”

Mei’s attention turned to the whole museum. “Sooner or later, we're going to open to the public,” Mei said. “You have to push it out slowly. We will open for the public.” Mei turned to Mr. Huang to translate.

Mr. Huang nodded. “One day,” he said.

After frequenting Asiatown for nearly seven years under the hat of health inspector, Brian Ng figured it was time to finally open up his own restaurant.

But Ng’s concept was different than the restaurants he inspected. The third sibling in a Chinese-American family, Ng and his brother Andy had been growing a food stand business called Ice or Rice, along with a companion, instructional YouTube channel growing in popularity. (They have 45,200 subscribers today.) The premise was a sort of roundup of the Ngs’ cumulative food tours of East Asia: A food stand specializing in snack foods—onigiri (rice balls), bing su (green shaved ice), oko hot dogs topped with seaweed or dried fish flakes.

“In the case of Japanese food, you typically only find sushi restaurants around here,” Andy Ng says in a three-minute YouTube video entitled “Why We Do What We Do.” “And of course we know that Japanese food is more than just sushi.”

Such mentality stretches to brother Brian Ng, who, after a long pandemic-related delay, opened up the brick and mortar arm of Ice or Rice in March in an abandoned liquor store across from Payne Commons. Him and his wife, Rachel, a former sushi chef for Heinen’s, helped in structuring the menu now lathered with Japanese snack food — Thai-style chili hot dogs, Spam-stuffed musubi (rice cake), pickled plum onigiri (a triangular rice snack). 

“I think the closest place you could get this kind of food is in Chicago,” Brian told Scene, sitting at one of his tables in May. “There's so many sushi restaurants, so many hibachi restaurants. We wanted fun food, like more interesting food.”

The Ngs’ pursuit of uniqueness is sort of the culinary equivalent of MidTown’s attempt to prettify Asiatown’s overwhelming hardscape. Moreover, these new eateries symbolize a convergence of what might be dubbed Asiatown’s new era: a varied mix of contemporary, thoughtfully-designed spaces geared to bring in a younger, more globalized generation.

Ice or Rice’s line-out-the-door opening in March trails a series of likeminded eateries, those that take imported, modernized concepts past the immigrant mainstays of the 1980s and 1990s, those that have opened up in the past two, three years: Mango Mango, a hyper chic Asian dessert bar; LJ Shanghai, a no-frills restaurant selling cuisine from China's largest city; Ball Ball, a street food-style waffle café; Alpha Ramen, a fast-casual, bubble tea and ramen joint decorated like an white-and-black anime scene; Mei’s Pho Sunshine, his first restaurant in Asiatown.

The onus may be on MidTown, and the city, to see if they can keep up. So far, there’s the soon-to-break-ground Superior Avenue Midway, the two-way central bike lane that will cut through Asiatown’s north end, and a slew of tiny beautification projects in the works, including repainting stale crosswalks in Chinese colors; 12 murals, new blade signs, bike racks, streetlamps; assigning volunteers to color the Payne Ave. Bridge; hosting the Cleveland Public Library’s Artbox, a former shipping crate-turned-book nook situated in Asiatown’s pop-up park. (That is, a vacant parking lot made free after Dave’s Market fled the neighborhood in 2018.)
“Bringing color to a neighborhood really makes it so much more friendly and more approachable,” Chi-Irena Wong, the 25-year-old muralist who designed the Artbox, said sitting on the bench of a piano she painted for AsiaTown Center. “Versus a lot of the buildings we have here are, like, brick buildings or brown, or just really white, beige. It's very muted.”

While shown the series of designs from CIA students, Wong’s mind drifted to her childhood. She recalled moments as a kid, walking through her grandparents’ busy block in Manhattan’s Chinatown, an experience she’d draw on for the “compactness” of her own art.
“I can see there might be a bit of pushback,” Wong admitted, her finger stopped on the Chinese archway design. “Yeah, Asiatown is small, but it’s not just Chinese. There’s a whole ton of diversity.”

But can Asiatown, despite its wide streets and beige exterior, actually find and fund its hipness?

“We have to make do with what we have right now, presently. And not just for the way it looks,” Doria told Scene. “I know we have an intention to bring community, an intention to just do whatever's best for people. And that's the overall intention with Asiatown and our social media, whether it be for businesses, for residents, for visitors, and much, much more.”

She added, with emphasis: “We're just trying our best.”

On a recent visit to Asiatown, en route from Atlanta, Hom returned to the Siam Cafe, one of the several restaurants here he likes to frequent. As he sipped tea, Hom’s mind drifted to his 88-year-old mother, who was expected to call after her Mahjong date with friends had wrapped up at the nearby Evergreen senior facility. Thirty minutes had passed since her wrap-up time; Hom was noticeably anxious.

The conversation about the CIA designs veers into his mom’s well-being. How Asiatown, the neighborhood May Hom had returned to in 2007 to be closer to friends, has long been without sufficient senior care facilities, a green space to gossip in, or a hall to square dance in. “They actually go to Asia Plaza,” Hom lamented, “and dance in the middle of a mall.”

As for the promise of Asiatown seeing its first ever cultural marker at scale, Hom said his mom and her octogenarian friends are eager to see those plans actualized.

He laughed. “They’re skeptical about how we’re going to get the money."

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