Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Oakland Chinatown: Economics

By Claudia, Amairani, Jasmin and Ernesto

The stores that we saw around Chinatown are a lot of super markets, bakeries, Bubble Tea places and florists. They also have a lot of jewelry and Japanese and Chinese restaurants. Jobs we saw were mostly working in restaurants and small food stores, and there were a lot of restaurant owners, bakery owners, and much more.

In Chinatown, it seemed that there were people from different economic backgrounds. The people in Chinatown were often dressed professionally, but there were also people that were dressed with regular clothing - not all fancy. We also saw people wearing working clothes, some were all dirty and others were really clean. We saw many people driving nice cars, some were expensive, some were just reliable and well-kept. For example, most of our interviewees said they drove Hondas and Toyotas, and we also saw many people driving BMWs, Mercedes and Odysseys.

We interviewed people from Chinatown and a lot of people seemed to not want to talk about what they do in their spare time. A guy who worked in the bank said he likes to play tennis. They didn't really tell us what were the most popular things people in Chinatown do for fun, because they thought it was too personal a question.

In Chinatown, there are a lot of banks that give services in both Chinese and English. There was Bank of America and Wells Fargo branches right there, as well as a few others. It seemed like people around the area can go an open an account pretty easily, and we didn't see a lot of check-cashing places (like we do in Fruitvale). It is good for people to open an account to have interest in the money they would put in, and have a safe place to keep their money.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Did you read the section on Safety? Some of your classmates found that the way that many people in Chinatown stayed "safe" was by not showing that they had expensive things. Do you think that this could have effected your impression on economic status?

Tyron from Baltimore