Mapping Chinese American Houston
Houston’s Chinatown was never just one place.
Across more than a century, Chinese Houstonians built, lost, rebuilt, and redefined community across a changing city. Follow seven chapters to see how labor, exclusion, redevelopment, institutions, and representation repeatedly moved the map.
Chapter 1 of 7
Before Chinatown
A Community Before a Neighborhood
Houston’s Chinese American history does not begin with a Chinatown. Chinese laborers entered Texas through railroad work, helping build the infrastructure that connected Houston to the rest of the state. Their story complicates the idea that a community begins when a neighborhood appears on a map. Before storefronts, associations, or a recognizable enclave, there was movement, work, and the search for opportunity.
Open the image, sources, and full detail.
Present-day pressure
Can a new center become vulnerable too?
Bellaire Boulevard became a new center of Chinese Houston as businesses and institutions moved southwest from downtown. That landscape is changing too. Longtime Chinese businesses have closed, and major apartment complexes have been demolished for newer, trendier concepts. Across Houston, 52.6% of renters are housing-cost burdened. These facts do not prove that Chinese residents are being displaced from Asiatown or, by themselves, establish gentrification. But they raise a familiar question: when a community builds a place that becomes valuable, who gets to remain as the place changes?
I first got interested in interactive websites while building one for an online portfolio of my research projects and their findings. I liked the process almost as much as the research itself, so when I heard about an opportunity to create something for a broader Chinese-American student initiative, I wanted to see what that same format could do with history. A map felt like the natural next step.
At first, I thought I was mapping landmarks: important restaurants, institutions, neighborhoods, and historical sites around Houston. But the more I researched, the more the movement between those pins interested me. A 1937 fight over property rights, the rise and decline of Old Chinatown, the growth around Bellaire, and more recent expansion farther west began to tell a larger story about where Chinese Houstonians were able to build communities and how that changed over time.
That realization changed the website. Instead of collecting as many locations as I could, I started asking what each one added to the story. The hardest part became deciding what I wanted a reader to understand, then arranging the research so someone would actually want to keep clicking through it. Design mattered, but only if it made the history clearer rather than distracting from it.
The map is now being incorporated into the larger Chinese-American initiative, where I will help lead its Houston chapter. I want someone clicking through it to see what I eventually did: how much of the story lies not just in the pins themselves, but in the movement between them.
Location image
Location image
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