Play in the Chinatown

Coming up from the train station and crossing one crossroad, my partner and I glanced at each other with happiness in our eye, because the gate of Chinatown shining under the sunlight appeared in front of us. With the distance of the gate and us becoming shorter and shorter, more and more people with black eyes and black hairs walked around us, and we heard some familiar Chinese words. At that moment, my heart was full of pleasure and surprise. After several weeks of being away from my hometown, it was my first time to see so many Chinese people and words. My partner read every word she saw, and took as many photos as she could to memorize this afternoon. Some restaurants put their menus on the window, and almost all the food we have tried in China. We stood before the window and seemed that we have come back to the previous life in China.

We walked around the roads again and again, and the excitement started to appease. Finally we sat in a Chinese restaurant where all the waiters and waitresses were people with black eyes and hairs. Then we ordered some food in Chinese spontaneously: the Xiao long bao, vegetable fried rice and Jiuniang yuan xiao. To my first surprise, I found the waiter did not write Chinese words on the paper, and he wrote in English. Then the second came: the thick cover of Xiao long bao and the filling of yuan xiao.

‘What happened in the kitchen? I never find filling in such Jiuniang yuan xiao.’ My partner asked me when her eyebrows furrowed.

‘Neither do I. What about your rice?’ I tried to pick up my Xiao long bao by chopsticks.

She signed. “It’s tasty but…unfamiliar.”

‘Yes, unfamiliar.’ I agreed.

We finished the dinner in silence, and when we came out and visited the bakery and supermarket, we lost our excitement at all. No matter in the bakery or the supermarket, the fitment there was so outmoded that I felt that I came back to my age of three. Also, the goods were strange for me, even they were described in Chinese. We decided to come back to college and walked on the street for the last time the day. Instead of excitement and surprise, disappointment and weariness filled my heart.

What is the Chinatown? Why people built it? Why I feel disappointed there? On my way back, I thought over many questions appearing in my mind.

Last century, because more and more Chinese people moved in America, they lived together and the place they lived was called ‘Chinatown’. It is really common to understand their behavior, because when I study abroad, I looked forward to something familiar, too. I preferred to talk with Chinese girls in school because we can use our special language and can understand each other easily, and we have similar background and talking topics. The first generation that migrated in Philadelphia built the Chinatown to increase the communication and provided continence to find the ‘familiar’ feeling, to make people feel they still stayed in China. The Chinatown, a limited area in Philly, is actually a ‘play space’ that mentioned by Mary Flanagan’s book ‘critical play’. She described the play spaces are ‘…generally fantasy spaces, players often experience real stakes when inside them…’ Those people who built Chinatown must try their best to represent their China by the Chinatown. Also, the behaviors in Chinatown such as communicate in Chinese, use Chinese words or eat Chinese food, are the critical play, because people behave in Chinatown spontaneously for a goal: create China in Philly. The first migrators, or I can call them artists by the definition “The term artist…to refer to those who are creating outside commercial establishments, and often, those who are “making” for “making sake”…”in Mary’s book, are the designers of the play.

However, Mary also wrote in her book that the obvious challenge is to “find ways to make compelling, complex play environments using the intricacies of critical thinking to offer novel possibilities in games, and for a wide range of players.” And the reason of my disappointment is because the Chinatown does not successfully rise to the challenge. I’m not sure how many people in Chinatown today have been to China. Some of them are the children of the first migrators and never come to China. The Chinatown is built in America, and the American cultural enters it by osmosis: under the Chinese words on menus also list the English name of the food and waiters record the food in English. It is hard for new migators or students to be satisfied because the Chinatown today still belongs to the people who lived one century before, not to them. I think the main reason is the distance. Because of the long distance between people in Chinatown and people in China, the people in Chinatown cannot receive the information of real Chinese life today. They cannot hire the best cookers to make delicious Chinese food and even do not know the tiny changes in China today.

Then, the existence of Chinatown for me is to remind me that I am in another city, another country, not in Nanjing, in China. Which Chinese city will build a Chinatown?