CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – University of Illinois doctoral student Grace Yan was born and raised in China, but when she visited Chicago’s Chinatown to collect data for a study on identity and ethnicity issues related to tourism in that neighborhood, what she found was largely unfamiliar.
“I’m Chinese, but I consider myself a stranger to that culture and landscape of Chinatown,” she said. “Every time I visit there, I feel like I am living in a movie, in China in the 1930s.”
In large part, according to Yan and U. of I. recreation, sport and tourism professor Carla Santos, the image of China that many Americans tourists cling to is that of an exotic place with ancient, ornate architecture, colorful lanterns hanging everywhere and restaurant menus offering unusual delicacies such as duck, and chicken feet.
That’s because when they visit Chinatown – either the one in Chicago or similar neighborhoods located in several other urban centers around the world where Chinese immigrants have settled – “they’re peeking into a China that doesn’t really exist,” Santos said. “It’s a privileged peek at Chinese history, not something you’ll find if you go to China.”
While Americans may not be particularly familiar with actual, present-day Chinese culture, Santos doesn’t fault them for having an outdated perspective.
As tourists, they’re more likely to have visited a Chinatown neighborhood than they are to have traveled to China. And what tourists find in Chinatowns is a social and economic construct that has more in common with a stage set on a studio back lot.
She doesn’t blame Chinatown residents for cultivating and feeding that image to tourists either. Instead, she said the research she and Yan conducted – supported by a grant from the U. of I. Research Board and published in the current issue of the journal Annals of Tourism – makes sense, considering the backdrop of society’s intense interest in multiculturalism.
“What we found in (Chicago’s) Chinatown is that Chinatown is living within a multicultural agenda,” she said. “We hear a lot about it. There’s an assumption that if we just bring everybody together, we will all get along. And if we just understand someone else’s culture, it’s all beautiful.
“But what we are failing to recognize is that these multicultural agendas are a white, middle-class idea. It works for us, but it doesn’t necessarily work for those on display.”
Nonetheless, Santos said, many of the 26 Chinatown residents she and Yan interviewed in depth understood and accepted their roles in this culture, especially as it relates to commerce and sustaining their way of life.
“That’s their social reality,” she said. “So what they do is feed back to us what we expect of them. Scholars put so much emphasis on what is authentic in tourism. And yet, what we found is that individuals in Chinatown are not really that concerned about whether something is authentic or not.”
Santos said that’s because residents – including the owner of a tea shop they interviewed who admitted many of the wares she sells aren’t Chinese – “recognize there are authentic practices in Chinatown.” Those practices usually take place in the “backstage areas,” outside the view of casual observers.
“But when it comes to tourism,” she said, “they are going to give us that which we demand. It’s a business.”
And in recent decades, it’s become a business that elected officials and other urban leaders have been courting aggressively. Although Chinatowns originally tended to become established in areas isolated from other city neighborhoods, and historically became associated in the American consciousness as being “dirty, seedy places” that have attracted prostitution and drug cultures, that has changed to a large extent, the professor said.
“Chicago’s Chinatown has worked very hard to put out a new image of themselves. They’re putting a new façade to it.”
In the report on their work, which received this year’s Travel and Tourism Research Association award for best research conference paper, Santos and Yan noted that urban ethnic tourism is hardly a new phenomenon. The practice dates to the early 20th century when white, middle- and upper-income visitors “would visit metropolitan areas inhabited by the poor or socially disadvantaged to shop and gawk at the residents.”
“What makes the contemporary situation different is the fact that those interviewed (in the current research) promote and welcome the opportunity to be gawked at.”
Even though the situation may be mutually negotiated – albeit, unspoken – Santos advised that “when going into these places asking for authenticity, we need to be cognizant that what we’re going to get is what we’re asking for.”
