Chinatown, not China

Last week I received a comment from a reader on my video “A Glimpse of Chinatown”:
It said:
The problems mentioned in your video could be common in almost every Chinatown around the world. It's hard to solve these problems. It's some kinds of Chinese problems. Anyway, I don't think Chinatown is an elegant place. In most cases, Chinatown means cheap and dirty.
I partly agree with him that it is a problem of every Chinatown. Though Philadelphia’s Chinatown proudly ranks among the biggest Chinatowns around the America, it gives visitors the same impression as all Chinatown: ubiquitous smells of Chinese food, trash everywhere, in short, dynamic business atmosphere, but dirty. To find a decent and clean restaurant in Chinatown is not a easy job. It is not only the same in every Chinatown, but the same, say, in past 30 years, if not longer. Chinatown never changes.
One Chinese American living in Chinatown for 20 years regards it as a cherished tradition, but their argument is not that “We Chinese lived and will continue to live in this way”, but that “Laowai (the foreigner) is addicted to this exotic image of Chinatown so we keep deliver it to them”. Is the argument right?
An American friend echoed agreement. He claimed Philadelphia’s Chinatown is exactly what he saw in China. He may have a point here. He had been to Gansu and Hunan two provinces in China’s hinterland. Gansu is especially famous for being poor.
However, Gansu and Hunan do not represent the whole picture of China. There is Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, which stand out as truly international metropolis. Actually, China’s southeastern seashore region has become very much modernized. Moreover, even Gansu, Hunan and other inner provinces have improved a lot.
Grown up in Southeastern China and working in Beijing, I found Chinatown and China are two different worlds. Restaurants are a good example. The food, decoration and songs played in the restaurants, though authentic, are 20-year outdated.
The real thing is that China has changed, but Chinatowns have not. Why?
May be that is because in the past 30 years, since China open its door to the outside world, those who come from China to the U.S. usually don’t live in Chinatown anymore. Unlike their predecessors, they are educated from American universities, find a decent job and settle down in mainstream society. They may sometimes go to Chinatown for Chinese food. And that is it.
In the same time, Chinatown boxed in by more and more public constructions from different directions, has limited housing or public service. New people come and move out. It becomes a working-class transmit community but not a good neighborhood for long time settlement.
Maybe that is why you don’t frequently see highly education young Chinese in Chinatown. Maybe that is why Chinatown population obviously gets older and older.