Bill Belew has raised 2 bi-cultural kids, now 34 and 30. And he and his wife are now parenting a 3rd, Mia, who is 8.

Chinese Americans

Gentrification – what is it?

It sounds like when daddies teach their little boys how to treat mommies and little girls. But, it’s not.

Gentrification is when old parts of towns get renewed, rebuilt so that middle-class or even rich people can live there with the result that the poor people who used to live there have to move somewhere else.

It means that Chinatowns are disappearing.

Lots of Chinese came to the US and settled in the same location or wherever other Chinese had settled before they got there. That makes sense.

Chinese can get help from those who have gone before them.

Read: Best Bilingual Children’s Books for Chinese-Americans  

It also means that for many, from the very beginning they did not try blend in to America. So, they built a place where they could be at home even they weren’t at home.

Life goes on. Cities grow. More people move in. It used to be that poor people went to major cities to work. Now, people who work are looking for places in cities to live. Something has to give.

The St. Louis Cardinals destroyed Chinatown in St. Louis to build Busch baseball stadium in 1966. That stadium is no longer there.

A bigger question than should we allow Chinatowns to disappear is to ask whether they should have been created in the first place?

What do you think?

Talk to Bill and others about their experiences raising bi-cultural Japanese-American kids.