![]() And upstairs, there would be this crazy punk stuff going on. Maybe you’d get flak from other Chinatown people, but otherwise, how much was going to be damaged by doing something that was not socially acceptable?” “Downstairs, there would be Chinese people eating dinner with their families. “And, culturally, maybe it helped that they were already not part of the mainstream. “It’s a weirdly practical business thing,” says Shigekawa, speculating about her great-uncle’s motivation. In other words, the restaurant owners needed entertainment the punks just happened to be the ones who showed up. Ngo, an associate professor of Asian American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois and the author of a 2012 paper on the intersection of Southeast Asian refugee identities and punk music in late-’70s LA. “In some ways this was just like setting up any performance space, to try and draw in more customers to your restaurant with live music,” says Fiona I.B. Bands played in the restaurant’s upstairs banquet hall nearly every night. ![]() Show calendar for the Hong Kong Café, June 1979. “You could see them going up the stairs, and people would be like, ‘Uh…’ Sometimes the ceiling would be shaking.” And upstairs, there would be this crazy punk stuff going on,” says Christy Shigekawa, Bill Hong’s great-niece. “Downstairs, there would be Chinese people eating dinner with their families. Unbelievably, the Hong Kong continued dinner service as usual during gigs, which took place almost every night. ![]() The Hong Kong wasn’t even the first place in LA’s Chinatown to host gigs: the restaurant across the courtyard, Madame Wong’s, had already been doing the same for at least a year. ![]() At eateries like Sacramento’s China Wagon and Kin’s Coloma, or San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens, now-iconic bands such as X, the Germs, and Black Flag played some of their most memorable early gigs. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, from Sacramento to San Francisco, some of the state’s most important punk venues were actually Chinese and Filipino restaurants. Hong’s restaurant-known as the Hong Kong Café to showgoers-was far from the only Asian restaurant to incubate the California punk scene. Nor did he know how many times the restaurant’s toilet would get smashed in the process. He never could’ve foreseen that his family’s establishment, the Hong Kong Low-located on a small street called Gin Ling Way-would become a focal point for a seminal music scene: West Coast punk. He knew the restaurant needed more customers maybe letting a few young bands play could help bring them in. When Bill Hong said yes to the promoters, he was trying to be practical. More recent Chinese immigrants had started moving to suburban enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley, bypassing Chinatown and its businesses completely the non-Chinese customers who used to flock to the neighborhood for exotic chow mein dinners were now avoiding downtown altogether. The entire country had plunged into a deep recession just a few years prior, and now Chinatown and the city’s downtown areas were falling into disrepair. Bill Hong was a Cantonese immigrant dad in his late 40s, running a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown neighborhood with his sister Anna Hong and her husband Arthur, when two young promoters approached him with a business proposition: What did Hong think about renting out the restaurant’s upstairs banquet hall on the evenings when it wasn’t being used?
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