I recently finished reading Willow Lung-Amam's Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia. It's an interesting read if you're interested in the Asian American suburb, using Fremont, the quintessential Silicon Valley ethnoburb as its case study.1 The book covers a lot, but there was one part which especially grabbed me: the phenomenon of the Asian mall.
Malls
If you've been to any major East Asian enclave in North America, you know the Asian Mall. Even though I've never been to Fremont, Lung-Amam's description of its Asian mall reminded me of every newer East Asian enclave I've been to in North America, - whether its Richmond, LA's Koreatown and Little Tokyo2, or Flushing. Anyway, if you've seen one of these places, you've seen them all. Your run-of-the-mill Asian mall is likely going to anchored by an Asian grocery store, have a food court which is going to give you some serious bang for your buck, boba shops, karaoke places, maybe an izakaya or cafe depending on what ethnicity the mall's specifically catering too, and a lot of the other typical stuff you'd see in any other mall, just geared towards an East Asian audience. Lung-Amam makes the point that these malls serve as a multigenerational meeting point, a place for immigrants to feel more at home, somewhere for second-gen people to feel more Asian, and all that other stuff which allows first- and second-generation Americans/Canadians navigate their experiences in this continent. I don't mean to dismiss the importance of all of this - it's actually pretty interesting and it's undoubtedly very important to understanding the (East) Asian American experience, but as I was reading the chapter, the question that kept knawing at me was why aren't there any South Asian malls?
So, to be clear, there are actually South Asian malls in the US. Or, well, as far as I'm aware there a few, but not as many compared to East Asian malls. From my quick research, there's Global Mall in Gwinnett County3, a complex in Houston, and an under-construction mall in Chicago. There are probably more, but it's clear they don't exist in abundance, and in the Bay Area and metropolitan New York - the two major centers of South Asian settlement in the United States - as far as I'm aware there are none. Lung-Amam does note this the East Asian focus of the malls in her book, though she tries to reconcile this difference a bit by noting that many South Asian frequent East Asian malls and that they're a center for South Asians to get a lot of their daily tasks done and whatnot. Regardless, a comparison of two populations makes it clear that for whatever reason, the ethnic mall doesn't play a similar role in experiences of both communities.
Why is this the case? I don't have a good answer, so I'm just going to give a bunch of baseless speculation. First, I asked my friend in San Jose why Indian malls weren't a thing there. His response was the Indians/South Asians don't have the chains to sustain a mall. I think there's an element of truth to this. It's hard to take of many South Asian chains which have become big in North America - off the top of my head, Patel Brothers and some other grocery stores are the only ones which come to mind. Lung-Amam points out that a lot of Bay Area Asian malls are populated by branches of businesses previously established in San Francisco's Chinatown and San Gabriel Valley malls, while anyone who's spent time in a 'regular' mall is well aware chain businesses form the backbone of any mall. I'd go further and say that this lack of connection to central-city businesses is a major reason too. In comparison to East Asian communities, many of which still have strong footholds within the cities proper of where they immigrated, South Asians effectively skipped the 'settle in the city' part of moving to America and went straight to the suburbs4.
Even more baselessly, I'd argue that a South Asian American youth and young adult culture that'd likely need to be necessary to sustain malls still hasn't developed yet, This is an argument that I want to flesh out a bit more in a later post, but there isn't really a South Asian equivalent to things which I've noticed East Asian friends do. There are no South Asian cultural activities which have the same cache as going out for hotpot or KBBQ, drinking boba, karaoke, etc. For all intents and purposes, there still isn't really much of a South Asian American culture5, (or to be more particular, a South Asian commercial culture) and, in my opinion, this plays a major role in why spaces like these don't exist in significant numbers.
1 For those who don't know, an ethnoburb is a suburb most populated by immigrants and their decedents. The classic example are the Chinese suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, but this typology is become prevalent across the country.↩
2 Mild disclaimer: it's possible the mall in Little Tokyo is a result of a midcentury urban renewal scheme instead of that of some aspiring immigrant East Asian commercial real estate developer, so it might not fit the typology as well. The lack of post-65 Japanese immigration also makes it a harder fit. .↩
3 I've actually been to this one lol. .↩
4 Journal Square, Jackson Heights, and Devon Street are notable exceptions, though only so much. That being said, it's not uncommon to see chains of South Asian stores in the Greater New York area and it's likely not coincidental the the planned mall in suburban Chicago is pitched as 'Devon Street under one roof.' .↩
5 I've heard arguments that there isn't an East Asian American culture also, but maybe one is forming in light of recent events (this podcast makes an eloquent version of this argument). I agree with the latter point, but I'm not sure how I feel about the former one. It's probably not my place to say so, but from the outside looking in, there seems to be something of an East Asian American culture. Would be interested in seeing what other think about this. .↩
