Chinatown

Sometimes it's hard to do good. For example, donating leftover banquet food to charity. Shirley Wei Sher, a Marina del Rey immigration lawyer, discovered how challenging this can be when she recently tried to prevent leftovers at an upcoming meeting of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Assn. from being thrown away. Sher, 33, sits on the board of the organization and is helping plan the group's annual awards banquet at a Chinatown restaurant next month. As many as 1,000 people are expected to attend.

Los Angeles attorney David Chan has eaten at more than 6,200 different Chinese restaurants, and he can prove it . He studied accounting at UCLA and for about three decades he has kept track of each meal on an Excel spreadsheet with 6,297 entries.  Scrolling to the beginning of the spreadsheet takes you not just to Chan's first meal, but a time when the only Chinese food in Los Angeles was in Chinatown and less than 1% of the city's population...

On a high shelf in Henry Chang's bustling herb shop sits a glass jar with a coiled, plump rattlesnake drowned in whiskey. It is smiling. There are worse ways to die. "You want to drink some of my rattlesnake whiskey?" Chang offers. "It's good for you," says the agile, 84-year-old proprietor of Essential Chinese Herbs in Chinatown, for more than a century a supplier of herbs to doctors of traditional Oriental medicine in Los Angeles.

Re "Political Wind Shifts in S.F.'s Chinatown," July 18: I agree with Rose Park's comment that the continual fighting between KMT [Kuomintang] in Taiwan and Communist China to win over the San Francisco Chinese does not advance causes of the Chinese community. Overseas Chinese communities have been used as battlegrounds in the past. This extension of the civil war in China since 1911 into major cities in North America has drained much-needed resources in the Chinese community to deal with local issues.

Cimino's film "Year of the Dragon" and Sheila Benson's review of it, are both travesties of information (" 'Dragon'--A Compelling Look Inside Chinatown," Aug. 16). Benson implicates her woeful lack of knowledge of any Chinatown by calling the film "part documentary." "Year of the Dragon" is about as much a documentary as is a soft drink commercial. The real danger in this film is that it reinforces an unrealistic portrayal of people. Film and TV do influence us. If all we see are the Chinese as gangsters, women as victims and policemen as corrupt, we slowly begin to believe it. Benson's review sadly reinforces the celluloid image as a true one, and as such is an act of irresponsibility.

Felix Wu, a restaurateur who wanted to represent Asians in French politics, lost last weekend in the first round of voting to run a Paris district that includes Chinatown. Wu, a 36-year-old Chinese Frenchman, took the very un-French tack of mixing ethnicity and politics. He received less than 3% of the vote in the 13th arrondissement but did well in Chinatown. He said his candidacy forced the other parties to add an Asian to their tickets, guaranteeing that the 13th's municipal council would include an Asian no matter which party wins Sunday's runoff.

Kathleen Johnson, the widow of Los Angeles Police Officer Duane Johnson, who was killed in December in a gun battle with armed robbery suspects in Chinatown, gave birth to a girl Wednesday in St. Jude Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Fullerton. Two suspects died at the shooting scene, and three others are in custody awaiting trial.