Oakland Chinatown: Diversity

By Delilah, Vanessa R., Jackie B. and Beatriz

On our way to Chinatown, we didn't see a lot of diversity. There was different kinds of Asians, but the most common that we saw were Chinese. Many of the older Asian people didn't speak that much English. They don't call it Chinatown for no reason!

When we walked by, people would look at us weird. This was probably because we were a different race from them, and we were all out during the school day. The economic differences in Chinatown really doesn't seem to be that great; everyone seems to be in the same class as everyone else in Chinatown (nobody is wealthy, but they're doing good enough to get by).

But, then again, there are some people in Chinatown that are very well off. There were a lot of very fancy cars parked in the street, and some people were dressed very nicely. We saw a lot of jewelry stores (3 on 1 block!); we saw a jade bracelet that was $4,000! And even though there are like 100 different markets in Chinatown, it seemed as though everyone of them was full of people buying things (which, of course, means that people have money to spend). But because so many of the stores, especially the clothing stores, get a lot of customers, it seemed that the prices are cheap without reducing the quality of the product.

Every restaurant and food shop had some different things on the menu, but it was pretty much all the same from store to store. There wasn't much diversity when it came to food. They had a lot the same resturants -- Chinese food, with some Veitnamese and Japanese places.