This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 1968, George Soy stepped off a plane from Hong Kong and into the San Francisco International Airport.

It was his first time on American soil. At 22 years old he had

left his homeland of China and traveled across the ocean to build a new life for himself

and his young wife in this land of opportunity.

When immigrants first come to the US and this is such an old trope and an old story is that you

expect, you know the streets are paid with gold. This is Bonizoy

George's daughter. She's also the author of a book about American Chinatowns.

Even today like Chinese people still call San Francisco Gamsan, meaning gold mountain.

This is where you find your fortune in San Francisco.

George Choi's very first stop in San Francisco, his very first stop in America,

like generation

of Chinese immigrants before him was San Francisco's Chinatown.

And he was not impressed.

To George, San Francisco's Chinatown felt out of date.

All the things he saw in Chinatown, these pagoda roofs, these dragon gates, these flourishes that, you know, to us signal China and Chineseness they were things that he

actually hadn't seen in back in China for years and years and years and they were

not used in that architectural vernacular back there.

And so he wondered how Chinatown in this, you know, really supposedly modern America was,

why did it feel older than the oldest parts of Hong Kong where he grown up?

Because it was designed that way.

That's producer Chelsea Davis.

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