Today I went to Chinatown in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful day, the right day to film some impressions in Chinatown. Chinatown in Los Angeles, California is known as a commercial center for Chinese and other Asian businesses in Central Los Angeles. The area includes restaurants, shops and art galleries but also has a residential neighborhood with a low-income, aging population of about 10,000 residents. The original Chinatown developed in the late 19th century, but it was demolished to make room for Union Station, the city's major ground-transportation center. A separate commercial center, known as "New Chinatown," opened for business in 1938. There are two schools and a branch library in Chinatown, as well as a city and a state park and a medical center/hospital. Many motion pictures have been filmed in the area. New Chinatown is served by the Gold Line of the city's Metro Rail; parts of Old Chinatown were uncovered during excavation for another portion of the L.A. subway (the Red Line connection to Union Station). The Metro Rail station in Chinatown has been described as a spectacular pagoda-themed facility and as a cliché of neo-pagoda architecture by Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic. In 1996, an Academy Award-winning (for the Killing Fields in 1985) Cambodian refugee, physician and actor, Haing S. Ngor, was killed in the Chinatown residential area in a bungled robbery attempt by members of an Asian gang. It had been speculated that he was assassinated for his activism against the Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia, but this idea was later proved unfounded.

• published: 27 Dec 2014
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