INTRODUCTION The letters that spell out "ICG. Louie Co." are veined with neon, and at night they illuminate the front of one of the remaining art and curio stores in the central plaza of Los Angeles' Chinatown. Inside, rows...
moreINTRODUCTION The letters that spell out "ICG. Louie Co." are veined with neon, and at night they illuminate the front of one of the remaining art and curio stores in the central plaza of Los Angeles' Chinatown. Inside, rows of tea sets, fans, chopsticks, and miniature lanterns clutter the long tables. On the upper shelves along the walls, webs of twine anchor together old vases and statuettes against the unpredictable jolts of earthquakes. Across the street in the plaza of Chinatown West, the proprietor of another store, Fong's Oriental Works of Art, has recently reduced his overhead by consolidating the contents of his two storerooms into one. An orange lantern with gold characters hangs from the corner of the exterior sign, which is painted in sloping Roman letters that mimic the calligraphic strokes of Chinese writing. Like a number of the other art and curio stores in the two plazas, K.G. Louie Co. and Fong's are run by the American-born children of the original Chinese business community. Stores such as these have operated in Los Angeles since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Responding to particular social and economic exigencies, the early storeowners catered to popular curiosities about "the Orient," refracting Western stereotypical representations of Chinese culture into commercial identities. In this article, I review the development of art and curio stores from the early 1900s and highlight their legacy in the contemporary practices of the two stores introduced above. I explore how the arrangement and display of objects in these stores constitute "symbolic ecologies," which mediate the social interactions of the proprietors. Just as subjective principles of inclusion and organization inform the presentation of culture in museums and ethnographies, so too have storeowners selectively curated a version of Chinese and Chinese American culture. I suggest that over time the central organizing principle of these stores has shifted. This shift roughly corresponds with the transition of proprietorship from immigrant parents to their American-born children, and it involves a refraining of the temporal and geographic referents of the material environments of the stores. DEVELOPMENT OF CHINATOWN The representation of Chinese culture in Los Angeles' early Chinatown grew out of a long history of the Orient as a subject of Western collecting fads and ethnographic attention. In the 1500s, European cabinets of curiosity, those precursors to natural history museums, often contained objects such as porcelain, wooden implements, and clothing from East Asia. In the 1600s and 1700s, upper class Europeans developed connoiseurship of domestically produced cabinets and porcelains suggestive of an exotic Orient. In the late 1800s, European and American art and design movements looked for inspiration from Asian decorative arts (e.g. Art Nouveau, the Aesthetic Movement; typeface designers), and new trade agreements between American, European and Asian countries gave rise to the popular collection of "Oriental" objects such as fans and cheap pottery. During this same period, the display of Chinese people in museums, circuses, and world's fairs established a framework within which the general public became familiar with viewing the Chinese; a framework that highlighted their exoticness or oddity. Thus, even before Los Angeles had developed a distinguishable area known as Chinatown, Chinese or "Oriental" culture had been domesticated for American consumption and wonderment into a repertoire of easily recognizable forms, objects, and styles. The Chinese first showed up in the Los Angeles census in 1850. By the 1870s, there was a recognizable area of Chinese residential concentration specifically identified as Chinatown. At the turn of the century, Americans tended to regard Chinatowns in general with both condemnation and curiosity. Chinatowns were maligned as dirty, crime-infested, corrupt, and sinister ghettos. …
