In a single night, 20 Chinese American lives were brutally destroyed. “The worst elements of society...disgraced civilization by their acts [and]....exceeded the most barbarous races of men” (Dorland 1894). How can so terrible an event go nearly ignored in the telling of the history of LA? What other stories are waiting to be told beneath the façade?

 

The story of Chinatown lives on in its people. Theaters that now stand as shells, are still aglow with all-night kung fu marathons in the mind of Kelvin Harrison. Pío de Jesús Pico’s powdered racial identity surfaces afresh in Mike ‘El Tigre’s’ keen memory. And the multiplicity of identity–the varied origin stories across Chinatown–are threaded together for Eugene Wong of the Historical Society.

 

If place is the seat of identity, history is the narrative of people searching for lost identity. Maps are not snapshots in time, but an access point for untold stories. The trick is to ask the right questions.