The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has just accepted Ming's Cafe (above), a print from FINDING CHINATOWN, into its collection. I am very honored.
Ming's Cafe, was taken from my trip through California's Central Valley in the inland city of Bakersfield.
I loved the trip for it crossed history and explained a lot about the migration of not only Asian (primarily Chinese and Japanese) immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s/early 1900s but also a terrific examplar of how American absorbs immigrants. I have posted previously about this in my post on Fresno.
In Bakersfield, a city where Chinese immigrants first came for agriculture, a large freeway exit points to Ming's Boulevard, one very prominent family. The early Chinatown was large. Today, with the generations of early Cantonese families gone and, in an area subject to earthquakes, one of which decimated the city and the Chinatown with it, there are remnants but also a burgeoning new "Chinatown," not centered as before but replete with newer immigrants from the Mainland and Taiwan.
So it was, in driving around Bakersfield's older center, that I saw construction close to this
"old-school" Chinese restaurant, Ming's Cafe. Plans are expansion and modernization however the interiors now, red "leather" booths and traditional ornament remind me of the Chinese restaurants of my youth.
I ventured in, way before the lunch hour, where I met Wendy and her husband, recent immigrants from Hong Kong who had purchased the restaurant and were in the midst of renovation. Still open for business with older patrons in for their morning cup of coffee or tea, they were also preparing for their son's applications for law school.
Change continues in the Americas as each new person who arrives settles into our routines, not forgetting the old but adapting, joining and contributing their history and culture, their entrepreneurship, their expertise and best of all their intelligence and work ethics to our continual melting pot.
UPDATE
Sadly change does affect some of our historic places, as evidenced by another Chinatown I photographed on this same trip: that of the community of Hanford, further up. There a small group of preservationists are working hard to save the historic buildings and small museum. It is authentic, accurate and so worth saving. http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/wireStory?id=13867051#.TxnjTCMih1w
