The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 10

A-10 Sunday, April 15, 1990 SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER A tectioll oflkeSu FantiKO Sundty Enmiim tod Chrawb ill The gut-level reaction is that no one is going to help us out, so we have to do it ourselves. services often performed at be' low-market prices. ASIAN from A-l ti l'" Workers tend knitting machines in a have made San Francisco the nation's family savings account and ultimately a home. The basements and upper floors of buildings along Market Street, Third Street and South of Market are honeycombed with small factories owned by Chinese who employee mostly immigrants. The Elegant Knit factory on Market Street, across from the empty Hibernia Bank, is a good example.

The upper two floors and basement vibrate with the hum of sewing machines and computerized knitting machines. Here, 85 workers, mostly women, turn out 38,000 cotton sweaters and 30,000 other garments a month for places like The Emporium and Mervyn's. The pay ranges from $4.25 to $7.50 an hour, lunch included. At those pay scales, the owners have trouble finding skilled workers and sometimes import technicians from Hong Kong. "These are the workers who cannot fmd employment in the mainstream.

In many cases they do not have the language skills needed to find work. So this is kind of the colonized work force, colonized in that they cannot leave the Chinatown economy," says UC-Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki, author of an acclaimed history of Asian immigration, "Strangers From a Different Shore." One of Elegant Knit's employees is Fay Lee. A 34-year-old As the immigrants produce and earn, established American business forces are paying for marketing studies and making the most of the new consumers, Mike Sherman, station manag er of KTSF Channel 26 in Bris-. bane, commissioned a marketing study to make the most of the station's 9 p.m. Cantonese news.

"We looked at the Chinese market in the Bay Area. We wanted to shatter the chicken-on-a-string theory, where Chinese just go to Chinatown to shop. They; donV The newscast, 13 months old, now draws 240,000 viewers an evening. Matt Davis, marketing director for the Asian Yellow Pages in San Francisco, says 90 percent of the advertisers are non-Asian business owners who want to reach Asian Americans. In business eight years, the publication's sales are increasing 10 percent yearly.

Some 220,000 of the books go out to California homes and businesses each year. "Every time you guys do some thing on Asian buying power, our phones light up," Davis says. In a thriving immigrant economy, bilingualism is an asset. Pacific Union Residential Brokerage, for instance, competes for Chinese dollars with brokers who, speak the dialects of Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese and Toi-Sunese. What Pacific Union and other companies have in mind are customers like contractor Samson Ng.

As a child in the Sunset District, Ng often worked at his family's, small Tenderloin restaurant. But Ng wanted to get into the building trade. He earned a degree from Sacramento State, came' home and spent four years working, living at home and saving. -When he had accumulated $30,000, he bought a truck, some tools, hired a couple of extra hands and went into Today, his Landmark Building Engineering employs 16 Chinese-speaking workers. He works mostly for non-Asian clients.

In five years, Ng hopes to have a crew of 30. Ng is a second-generation Chinese-American. His attire is from Macy's and Neiman-Marcus. But he also retains his ethnicity. When it came to buying a home, he and his Hong Kong-born wife settled in the predominantly Chinese-American Richmond District.

They go to the Pagoda Theater on Columbus. They frequent Chinatown's Hong Kong-style coffee shops. San Francisco lawyer Bruce Quan, whose great-great-grandfather came to The City in the 1850s, says the first Chinese immigrants formed business associations to protect themselves. "This economy was a true subculture into the 1960s. Now the Chinese who have been here for two and three generations are becoming a part of the main economy," Quan said.

"For the first time, we have the critical mass. We interact with the larger society because the larger society realizes there are economic benefits to doing business with the Chinese." TV documentary "The Hong Kong Connection," a documentary produced by KQED-TV in association with The Examiner, will be broadcast Friday, May 25, at 9 p.m. on Channel 9. Produced by Spencer Michaels and Michelle Riddle, the television special is based in part on The Examiner's New City series "The Hong Kong Elite" and on today's report, "Beyond Beyond Chinatown owned businesses operate in the Bay Area. This is a far cry from 1960, when Chinatown, suffering from strict immigration quotas, had shrunk to little more than a line of shops and empty storefronts along Grant Avenue.

San Francisco is not unique. In various ways, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles and other areas throughout the state are experiencing similar transformations, because of the influx of different ethnic groups. From the moment they arrive at San Francisco International Airport, new Chinese immigrants are surrounded by Chinese-speaking services aimed at getting a piece of their dollar. One Hong Kong-based thrift, United Savings Bank, offers newcomer packages with advice on how to get a driver's license, how to open a family checking account, how to get a mortgage, how to become a citizen. Often the new arrival has a job waiting on the recommendation of a relative already living here.

Others can fmd a Chinese network of job opportunities, including restaurant, construction and assembly-line work. 1 "There are more Asian roofers, gardeners, brake repairers, auto shops we even have Chinese running Italian restaurants," said Henry Der, who heads a China- town nonprofit group called Chi- nese for Affirmative Action. I There has always been an im-' migrant economy at work in San Francisco, but because of relaxing immigration quotas it is stronger than ever. The number of Asian Americans rose to 6.5 million in 1988 from 3.8 million in 1980. They will reach 10 million by the year 2000, according to census projections.

Asian Americans earn more than $110 billion a year in this country. Chinese Americans lead the pack. Yearly income for a Chi-nese-American family was $37,500 last year, compared with $23,000 for the national average. In the Bay Area, Chinese Americans are the largest part of the Asian community. In San Francisco, they number about 225,000 a quarter of The City's residents, according to state and city agencies.

The Asian Yellow Pages puts the number of Chinese-American households at 78,000 in the Bay Area. But like all new immigrants to this country, obstacles to success are common. Despite an increasing number of Chinese newcomers, the "gut-level reaction is that no one is going to help us out so we have to do it ourselves," says Der, a Chinese American. "I I wouldn't want your readers thinking that we are trying to set up a separate economy, but many Asians have no choice." Indeed, a tremendous obstacle hinders new Chinese Americans trying to break into the mainstream. Most don't speak English well enough to work in a non bilin-' gual environment.

i As a result, many Chinese Americans live in their own nomic world when they arrive just survive. The Chinese-American econo-l my is built on three pillars: immigrant capital, hard work, strong family ties. Chinese Americans run infor- mal loan clubs for raising money and often hire one another to work in their businesses. For the newest immigrants, even the lowest-paying job contributes to a 4 Market Street factory. Immigrants Hong Kong immigrant, Lee has worked on and off in the garment business for the past 10 years.

Over the years, Lee and her husband, a union hotel engineer, have saved enough for what she calls a "so-so" home in the Mission District. When Lee is at work, her mother cares for their three children. For most workers in the immigrant economy, jobs such as Lee's are not an end, merely a means. Working in a restaurant or sewing factory can take an immigrant only so far. "Eventually," said George Woo, professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, "you have to make a choice to belong in the mainstream." Some advance through education.

Lee's brother, for example, is working on a doctorate at UC-Da-vis. For others, the bridge is to open their own business. A family will pool its money, rent a handful of machines and start its own factory, employing in-laws and cousins. "These are small operations. You are talking about a room this size with maybe eight sewing machines, but it's producing a lot of garments," says Takaki.

These new businesses are transforming San Francisco's outer neighborhoods. For example, Leland Avenue in Visitacion Valley is becoming a 4 I EXAMINER PHOTO third largest garment manufacturer. "In San Francisco, a dollar turns over five or six times in the Chinese business community, while in most black communities, dollars leave before they turn over even once," writes John D. Kasar-da, director of the Center for Competitiveness and Employment Growth at the University of North Carolina and a researcher of ethnic economies. Whatever the business, their owners share a common desire: success.

"At times the new competitiveness even startles old-time immigrants like me," says Woo, the ethnic studies professor. The competition has bred tension: In the Richmond, some white residents are antagonistic toward Chinese who buy homes, demolish them to make room for bigger homes and small apartment houses. A similar situation is brewing in ivy-covered Hillsborough, home to many wealthy Hong Kong immigrants. Changes have brought problems within the Chinese-American community itself. "There is a lot of hostility between the old Chinatown and the new the rich and the not-so-rich, the old family associations, and district associations and the new social service agencies," says UC-Berkeley anthropology Professor Aihwa Ong.

Many Chinese employers are staunchly anti-union. For example, the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Union is fighting to organize the Pare Fifty Five Hotel in San Francisco. Owner Lawrence Chan of Hong Kong has refused to recognize the union. In San Francisco's garment industry, there is a continuing struggle to unionize immigrant stitch shops and make the factories safer. "It is not an easy fight," says Katie Quan, who heads the International Ladies Garment Workers Union chapter in San Francisco.

For most people, changes wrought from the growing Chinese-American economy are sometimes subtle, nearly always beneficial. For homeowners, it means strong housing appreciation. Today, Chinese immigrants are buying homes all over The City, but they are especially active in neighborhoods once thought to be on the decline. For consumers, it means shirts at low prices, meals for less than $5 and a host of other consumer "Business" or "job" young version of Clement Street in the Richmond. Dozens of service businesses are springing up around a mushrooming Chinese-American community.

At least 16 Chinese or Korean businesses are located on the two-block stretch of Leland between Bayshore Boulevard and Rutland Street. Ten years ago, there were four. The newer stores include May May Beauty Salon, Sewing a garment subcontractor that hires Chinese women sewing machine operators, Simon Wong's certified public accounting service and Golden Star Video, which carries Chinese tapes. Mama's Papa's is still an Italian deli, but a Korean family now owns it. iwlr RauuaTZ I I'.

ii Zr', yC- ltitX ill -r All Samson Ng, whose Landmark Building Engineering employs 16 immigrants, takes a break at a job site. 1 I C3 CJ.