The second surprise – or complication – to put it that way for my friend came the moment he opened his mouth. His Mandarin was rusty, but met with a firm shake of the head. But she’s Chinese!
New York’s Chinatown is, of course, a largely Cantonese-speaking one. The broader history of Chinatowns in the US are fairly well-documented, through academic and oral histories, memoirs, and cultural accounts. In brief, the first wave of Chinese immigration began in 1848, buoyed by demographic, environmental and socioeconomic problems in China and attracted by the boom of the Gold Rush in California and work offered by the expanding Union and Central Pacific railroads. The vast majority were from Canton (romanized today as Guangdong) province, the coastal origin of the vast majority of Hong Kongers, and many Malaysians, Singaporeans. The earliest Chinatown was in San Francisco, with the opening of the restaurant Canton in 1849. The Cantonese demographics and identity of the Chinese population were crystallized with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely restricted immigration to relatives and dependents of existing Chinese-Americans. In the words of one resident of Mott Stree1t, as interviewed in Ava Chin’s memoir, “if John F. Kennedy hadn’t opened up the Immigration Quota, most of us would be incestuously related.”
In Singapore, the linguistic flattening of Chinese into Mandarin was a rapid project occurring over five decades: today, little traces of vernacular exist in the city and its media landscape. On Mott Street, one is more likely to encounter the twelve-pointed white star of the Republic of China flag – not for the Taiwanese, but for generations of migrants from the Chinese mainland who had departed the (moderately-) ancien, pre-1949 regime. Mandarin Chinese was an imperial project, embraced fully only after initial waves of Chinese migration to the US: the Chinese Communist Party and standardised in its current incarnation as putonghua (Standard Speech) in 1956, simplifying written ideograms to reduce illiteracy. Curiously enough, firmly anticommunist Singapore still recognized that the path to economic development was through some degree of alignment with the People’s Republic, mandating schools teach with simplified characters in 1971. Save for my sojourns to Hong Kong Chinese iconography and architecture where I am from is therefore devoid of the radicals and greater stroke-counts that define its predecessor.
The signs characteristic of Manhattan’s Chinatown therefore shifted into becoming Traditional Chinese. The juxtaposition is apparent regardless of one’s relationship to a Chinese language – to grossly simplify, the Simplified Script is taught to and used by the mainland Chinese, Malaysians and Singaporeans, whereas Hong Kongers and Taiwanese adhere to the older script – even as the former speak Cantonese and the latter Mandarin and southern Min/Hokkien. Ethnic Chinese form the majority in Singapore, meaning that the bilingual or quadrilingual (Malay and Tamil; I almost never see trilingual signs) signs dispersed throughout the country are largely in simplified Chinese. Manhattan’s Chinatown is immensely busy visually too, but with a far more unstable equilibrium. Simplified Chinese seems to arrive with newer establishments originating from mainland: the sleek, sterile and flattened ‘AirSpace’ interio2r of bubble tea stores, backed by Shanghainese capital, hotpot restaurants that whisk ingredients with startling efficiency into bubbling, Sichuan-style broths, the flattened corporate logos of mainland Chinese banks serving an expanding clientele.
(Despite the sign being in Traditional Chinese, a handwritten sign offering part-time work is in simplified Chinese. Photo: Author, Apr 12 2025).
Still, my feelings differ greatly from Tracy Ma, a New York Times visual editor, who writes that “the Simplified script alludes to—among other atrocities that feel intense to mention on a design blog—the erasure of history and a rejection of the Traditional form of writing.”3 Ma hails from Hong Kong, a city-state where the linguistic clashes of Cantonese vs. Mandarin, Traditional vs. Simplified are a microcosm of an existential battle over political, social and cultural autonomy, one that Beijing through extralegal detentions, constitutional erosion, and socioeconomic policy levers ranging from education to migration. What journalist Louisa Li deems the “Indelible City” is not even Hong Kong qua palimpsest, with histories and conflicts etched into its urban core or streetscapes. Rather, “phantasmagorical, like a shimmering chimera that was constantly changing shape”, Hong Kong stubbornly exists as a concept, an “in-between space, a site of transgression, a refuge where behaviour not acceptable in mainland China was permitted and even celebrated”.
Li is thinking primarily of the ‘King of Kowloon’, graphic artist Tsang Tsou Choi, whose scrawled claims to the island’s sovereignty now lies largely invisible on painted-over lampposts, mailboxes and now-anonymous street walls; Ma’s wrath is directed against non-Chinese businesses that have chosen Simplified Chinese to brand themselves within a neighbourhood that has generally resisted gentrification thus far. The King of Kowloon died in 2007: reading Indelible City, I found it impossible to imagine him operating today in a political environment that for a time criminalized even black jackets, a sign of sedition against Beijing. Ma’s diatribe is a real one, against a real estate logic that sprawls and captures, but ultimately is one that can be resisted. Too often, canonical accounts of New York reify power and opposition into triumphant forces: as Sharon Ruskin ponits out, even the iron fist of Robert Moses, most (in)famously chronicled in Robert Caro’s heaving 1975 The Power Broker, was depended on a symbiosis with real estate interests while unravelling in the face of grassroots opposition, while today’s would-be brokers would have to overcome community boards, popular opposition and real limits to structural authority.4 Chinese scripts – both in the smallest of fragments and formal signage – appear more like microcontestations, written and overwritten time and time again,
The King of Kowloon at work, 1996-7, photographed by Lau Kin Wai, (Art Research Institute, Hong Kong)5
- Chin, Ava. Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming. Paperback edition. New York: Penguin Books, 2024, p.340. ↩︎
- Chayka, Kyle. “The Tyranny of the Algorithm: Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same.” The Guardian, January 16, 2024, sec. News. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same. Chayka’s article traces the flattening aesthetics of globalization and its relationship with Instagrammability, something more associated with new-wave coffeeshops or coworking spaces, but I fear the same has come for my milk tea. ↩︎
- Ma, Tracy. “Tracy Ma Takes Us on a Typographic Tour of Manhattan’s Chinatown.” Eye on Design, November 26, 2018. https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/tracy-ma-takes-us-on-a-typographic-tour-of-the-signs-of-manhattans-chinatown/. ↩︎
- Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage Books, 1975; Zukin, Sharon. “Moses Operandi.” New York Review of Architecture, December 13, 2024. https://nyra.nyc/articles/moses-operandi. ↩︎
- Art Research Institute, Hong Kong. “King of Kowloon: The Life and Art of Tsang Tsou-Choi.” Google Arts & Culture. Accessed April 10, 2025. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/king-of-kowloon-the-life-and-art-of-tsang-tsou-choi/VQXxH4_4OwhUIA.
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