Chinatown unbound

From popular fiction to the cinema screen, academic text to restaurant guide, social media post to photographic archive, to news account and beyond, Chinatown, the world over, is a richly storied place. In its usual characterization, Chinatown is an ethnic enclave with a variously noble and ignoble history. Once the stigmatized and closeted ghetto of aliens, it is more often portrayed today as a valued tourist destination and multicultural asset to cities as distant from each other as Singapore and London, Toronto and Port Moresby, Naples and Vancouver, Sydney and Lima, and Manila and San Francisco. Strewn globally, Chinatown is a positional good in a world of circulating city symbols. More often than not, too, multiple rather than single Chinatowns figure as welcome features of the cities to which China's vast diaspora has migrated, either permanently or temporarily. What follows is an account of a research project (see Acknowledgments) under way in Sydney, Australia's most Asian city, about a Chinatown of growing strategic significance to its diversely Asian and non-Asian publics. With an eye to "new horizons of the global" (Ong 2011, 1), the chapter elicits a Chinatown that is increasingly unmoored from a Western reference point of the kind that has informed much commentary about that place, including my own Vancouvers Chinatown (Anderson 1991).