Oakland Chinatown faces a ‘dual pandemic’ of violence, COVID

Tony Fong never expected the pandemic to linger so long. When Fong closed his 7,000-square-foot Buffet Fortuna — an Oakland Chinatown staple for Chinese New Year celebrations, baby showers and birthday parties — in March 2020, he figured it might take a month or two to get back in business. He told workers not to go far, because “soon they will be back to work again.”

Today, the shuttered banquet hall is just one instance of what has happened in Oakland’s Chinatown during the pandemic. Ten percent of the neighborhood’s 300 businesses have closed since the lockdown began, according to the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, victims of a triple epidemic affecting Chinatowns from San Francisco to New York.

The pandemic has cut down tourist traffic and banquet bookings, once the lifeblood of restaurants like Buffet Fortuna and Oakland’s Peony Seafood, the last remaining traditional banquet hall in that neighborhood that still makes dim sum by hand. Hundreds of banquet bookings for Chinese New Year and family gatherings were canceled those first few months, says Peony’s general manager Ming Zhu.

Rampant hate crimes targeting Asian Americans are keeping fearful patrons at home and forcing restaurants and businesses to close early, so employees can get home safely. Anti-Asian hate crimes surged by nearly 150 percent in 2020, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino, and anti-Asian hate crime reports in San Francisco spiked 567 percent last year alone, city officials said.

And inflation just adds to the woes. Prices for ingredients and supplies have doubled, leaving restaurant owners no choice but to raise menu prices and risk pushing more customers away.

Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce president Carl Chan calls it “a dual pandemic.”

Grace Young – an award-winning cookbook author and documentarian whose fierce advocacy for the nation’s Chinatowns was recognized with a James Beard humanitarian of the year award in June – calls it an unraveling of the threads that bind these communities together.

Young spent much of her childhood strolling the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown with her father, a liquor salesman who met his clients there every day. It was an intimate community, where everybody knew each other. “As Chinatowns all across the U.S. lose the mom-and-pop restaurants, bakeries, stores and food markets,” she says, “this part of culture and heritage for the community could be lost forever.”

Many Oakland Chinatown eateries that survived the pandemic by offering take-out haven’t resumed dine-in service even today. And banquets, which are critical to both the culture and restaurants’ survival, are in trouble.

The profit margins have always been “razor thin” for Chinese restaurants, Young says. “They are not expecting to sell 10 bowls of wonton noodle soup. They have to sell 150 or 200 to make a significant amount of money. But the volume is just not there.”

The neighborhood’s grandmas and grandpas once filled the tables at Oakland’s tiny Big Dish restaurant, manager Queenie Guan says in Mandarin. They grabbed breakfast and chatted for hours over cups of tea. The return of that daily routine, she says, “feels far, far away with no end in sight. Ninety percent of our customers are neighbors. Now some stopped coming. Their kids buy stuff for them; they don’t come out themselves.”

There’s an element of fear in the sentiments expressed by Chinatown patrons and business owners. People no longer swing by Chinatown after work to get dim sum for dinner or pick up groceries in the once-bustling food markets. The streets empty when night falls.

“In the past, people were on the streets at night, playing basketball at Lincoln Square Park,” said middle schooler Ben Guan, who moved to Oakland in 2019. “Not anymore.”

The fear is not unfounded, says Chan, who was attacked on a sidewalk in broad daylight last year and believes the alarming hate crime statistics are severely underreported.

Part of Fong’s decision to close the Oakland Buffet Fortuna permanently — he still has a restaurant in San Leandro — was the realization that there was “no prospect” for the restaurant in the midst of Chinatown’s decaying public safety conditions.

“There’s a way to contain the virus itself with vaccines and such,” he says. “But if the public safety remains so bad, there’s no hope for Chinatown.”

Meanwhile, some community and business leaders have stepped up to try to make Oakland Chinatown feel safer. The Blue Angels Patrol, a volunteer group of residents, business owners and workers, patrol Chinatown streets to deter crimes and serve as a bridge between non-English-speaking residents and the police.

And community events, such as last Friday’s Town Nights in Lincoln Square Park, are on the rise. Dozens of seniors played bingo in the park, many for the first time ever. Teenagers occupied the basketball and badminton courts, while tots played in a bounce house and waited in line for shaved ice and cotton candy.

“There has been so much fear of the same thing happening over and over again,” says Heidi Wong, the Family Bridges program director who helped organize Town Nights. “We specifically want to do it during the time of gun violence. We want people to come out and play and just be together. It brings back the vibrancy of Chinatown.”

Young calls it a tipping point. “We don’t know what the next chapter is, but this chapter is very critical, that everyone shows up and not just once in a while but regularly to make sure that we spend money in these businesses,” she says. “Because without our support, they are not gonna make it.”