Asian Businesses Unite

by Helen i-lin Hwang

Chinatown’s shops have traditionally acted as a bunch of separate entities. But with more than 100 businesses in the vibrant neighborhood, community leaders saw a need for a collective voice to lobby in terms of marketing, vendor pricing and city services.

Thus, the nonprofit Greater Delaware Valley Asian Business Alliance was recently formed to provide a voice for businesses. In cooperation with the Center City District and Philadelphia Multicultural Affairs Congress, a division of the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, the coalition was created to market the uniqueness of a growing Chinatown and represent the smaller businesses as if they were one large organization.

With this new coalition, "no one else says what we are or who we are," says Kenneth Wong, an alliance co-chairperson who also serves as chairperson of CIG Asia Ltd., an insurance company. (Other board members include JoAnna Pang of the Trocadero Theatre, Michael Chow of Sang Kee Peking Duck and Josephine Wang of Asian Bank.)

One of their aims is to capitalize on the visitors to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. For example, Wong says conventioneers from Iowa, where there isn’t a Chinatown anywhere in the state, might want to visit Philadelphia’s during their stay.

The coalition is as much about making money as it is about creating a community organization. Chinatown businesses haven’t typically worked together, partly due to a cultural difference. New immigrants are struggling and working so hard to get established that they seldom organize collectively.

"We want to do a better job helping businesses so they’ll have better opportunities for success," Wong says. Basic services like trash pickup through a private company can be negotiated in their favor if they’re treated as one large business.

For the predominantly privately owned shops, profit margins are "slim," but they can thrive with better marketing, especially if owners are disadvantaged by speaking less-than-fluent English, Wong notes.

The first initiative was the unveiling of a new user-friendly brochure with categorized listings of restaurants, bakeries, hotels, specialty services -- like lion dance entertainers -- and bus companies that run trips to New York City. Addresses and phone numbers are listed in easy-to-read columns. The brochures are already being distributed in hotels, the Convention Center, Independence Visitor Center and Reading Terminal Market. Soon there will also be walking tours and a dining-out club, which encourages people to try diverse cuisines, including Malaysian, Vietnamese, Szechuan and vegetarian.

The Chinese New Year celebration, which traditionally lasts two weeks, will now include an indoor festival at the Troc on Jan. 25. This event will show the Chinatown community as well as the rest of Philadelphia that, as Wong puts it, "we can deliver what we say we can deliver."

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