As you all know, my discussions of Chinese restaurant food is heavily infused with the history of Chinese Americans. The reason is that well before I began my Chinese restaurant quest, I had been deeply involved with the history of Chinese Americans. Among other endeavors I was a charter member of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, where I served on the Board of Directors, gave numerous speeches and presentations representing the Society, and even doing to legal work to get them started. However it had been decades since I had been involved with the Society and 10 years since I attended a Society event, so when their 50th Anniversary Celebration was announced, I had reservations about attending since I wouldn’t know most of the people in attendance. However, when I was assured that charter members would be acknowledged, I decided to definitely attend. In addition, the celebration would begin with a showing of a series of videos about Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, so that alone would be sufficient reason to attend.
Arriving at about 4:15pm I was surprised to see the Golden Dragon parking lot filling up and people lining up to register. After reaching the head of the line, the lady checking me in exclaimed “David Chan!” She introduced herself as Marji Lee, head librarian at the UCLA Asian American Studies Library. I had gone to the library some 25 plus years ago looking for a place to deposit some of my Asian American periodicals which were getting out of hand, and spoke to Marji at that time. I’m not sure why I didn’t transfer them at the time. I even had my daughter follow up when she enrolled at UCLA in 2000. I started to recount this to Marji, who had no recollection of ever meeting me, and she had recognized me when I checked in from some of my writings. Anyway UCLA's loss was Stanford's gain, as those newspapers took a circuitous path (without my knowledge) to the Green Library at Stanford University where there is now a David R. Chan collection of Asian American publications
From there I went to the bar where the video presentations had already begun, but without sound because there were still leftover diners from a late lunch. When they left the volume turned up and I was able to watch all the videos which I had never seen before. At the end of the show I was wondering what I would do until the start of the dinner, except that I discovered that most of the people had already been seated. I sat next to Professor Kelly Fong from UCLA, who was editing a book called The Five Chinatowns of Los Angeles, and Professor William Gow from Sacramento St., also involved with the book, and who had previously done an oral history interview with me for CHSSC.
The Five Chinatowns of Los Angeles is a joint project between the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. While I have been inactive in the Society for many years, I still received their newsletters, and my interest was piqued by the announcement of this project over four years ago. Mainly because the materials describing the project said the term Five Chinatowns of Los Angeles had been coined by a local historian in the 1980s. But wait a minute. I published an article called "The Five Chinatowns of Los Angeles" in 1972. After that fact was documented, the descriptive materials were changed to attribute the term to myself. And in the process, I decided to write a chapter in the book about growing up Chinese in Los Angeles, with touch point references to all five Chinatowns. Not having heard a peep about the Five Chinatowns book in a couple of years I presumed that it wasn’t happening, but Kelly assured me that production was about to begin.
The program started with an extended lion dance. As I was seated right by the podium I had lions dancing in my face for several minutes.
As the dinner presentation carried on, Gene Moy started to mention CHSSC charter members, and specifically called me out, and particularly for eating at “8,000 restaurants”. Later he asked all the charter members and their families to stand up.
During dinner the TV screens ran a slide show noting past CHSSC notables such as the original founders and past presidents. Then I looked up and I saw my face, so I hastily pulled out my iPhone and got one shot of the slide before the next one came on.
A little while later I noticed they even had slides for people who had disappeared and for whom no information was available. At that point I stopped, camera waiting, for one of an old friend’s name to appear. The bad part is that each slide was kept up for a considerable amount of time, keeping me waiting for my friend’s name to appear. Of course, if the slides hadn’t progressed so slowly I never would have been able to photograph my own slide. Finally after a long wait, my friend’s slide was displayed.
During the festivities one of my followers, Isaac Chu showed up and introduced himself. It also turns out that a couple of people at my table also were Instagram followers. Also spoke to a few other people out of the past, making for an enjoyable evening. I’m also thinking this was my first banquet at Golden Dragon since my own wedding banquet here in 1980. Obviously the menu had changed quite a bit, and the dining room had been nicely outfitted with three television screens. And of course this was Chinatown, so it really wasn’t worth going for seconds of much of the food, particularly with everything else that was going on.
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