The Lesson Of Monterey Park

The white merchants of this Los Angeles suburb decided they didn't want the Chinese trade. Now, many of them are out of business

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Only a decade ago, Monterey Park was a sleepy, all-white suburb on the eastern fringes of Los Angeles. Each morning businessmen gathered, as in a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, at a coffee shop to discuss local goings-on. And come election time, it was the same group who often dictated who would serve as mayor and city councillor, and who would not.

Since those days, Monterey Park has taken off in ways that would make most merchants envious. Spurred by an influx of well-educated, affluent new residents, there are today scores of new office buildings, shops, and restaurants in the downtown districts and in new outlying shopping centers. Commercial space that went for $5 a square foot back in the early 1970s now goes for $45 and more. Deposits in local commercial banks jumped $400 million.

Yet if prosperity has come to Monterey Park, few of the merchants who once gathered at the coffee shop are still around to enjoy it. For rather than welcoming the Chinese and Southeast Asian families who now comprise more than 40% of the city's population, many of the city's white businesspeople have spent the better part of a decade fighting them. Some have sold out grudgingly -- and greedily -- to Chinese interests and moved away. Others tried to hold on to a shrinking base of white customers before closing down or going bankrupt. And those still left behind spend much of their energy still trying to push back the Chinese tide, pressing for restrictions on further development and a ban on signs written in Chinese characters.

"You have a group of suburban, uneducated people out here who would like to turn the clock back to 1950 and hang a Chinese from every lamppost," explains George Ricci, past president of the local Chamber of Commerce. "These people didn't do anything to market to the Chinese. They left themselves open to be replaced."

Not everyone sees it quite that way. Marie Purvis, one of Ricci's predecessors at the chamber, runs a small art gallery and framing business and still longs for the good old days when "American" rather than Chinese restaurants lined Garvey Avenue. In fact, Purvis insists there is a Chinese conspiracy brewing to drive the white businesses out of town.

"It's deliberate. They have a plan, not that I know what it is . . ." says Purvis, who moved to Monterey Park from East Boston 35 years ago. "I am not used to being prejudiced against. We've always been discriminating against the newcomers, but no one has ever turned the tables on us before."

But if there is a conspiracy, Kelly Sands has not found it. Seven years ago, Sands took over Bezaire Electric Co., his family's contracting business. Sales seemed to have peaked at $300,000, and virtually all of the developers and major contractors who had worked with Sands's father and grandfather had either gone out of business or left town.

But Sands, a college dropout in his early twenties, noticed the rising number of Chinese developers around town. And rather than disdain these often well-heeled new players, he courted them. He hired a staff of young, aggressive Chinese managers to help communicate with his new market. He also adjusted his schedule to accommodate the demands of the hardworking Chinese entrepreneurs, who often held business meetings late into the night.

As a result of his efforts, Sands is one of the few white entrepreneurs to cash in on Monterey Park's demographic boom. He estimates that Bezaire gets at least half of the area's Chinese-related electrical contracts, which have boosted sales to $3.7 million. Nearly 80% of his customers are Chinese. His biggest project these days: a Buddhist temple going up several miles east of town.

"I think it's all in the mind-set," says Sands. "Either you adjust your mind-set to reality or you'd better get out of the way."