San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

While the neighborhood continues to receive newer immigrants and maintains a lively
and active character, suburban flight has left the neighborhood relatively poor, decrepit in
many parts, and largely elderly. Grant Avenue has changed completely into a tourist
street.
Today, the historic and multistory Sam Wo Restaurant is among the most popular and
notorious Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and a favorite late-night hangout for college
students throughout the Bay Area. It once had the supposedly "world's rudest waiter"
named Edsel Ford Fong, who was born and raised in Chinatown and died in the 1980s;
Eddie refused to serve customers who got on his wrong side and would take the liberty of
changing orders that he thought were stupid. The restaurant has been used as a location
for several television series and films.
Demographics
In recent decades, Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and Mainland China
has gradually led to the the replacement of the Taishanese dialect with the Hong Kong
Cantonese dialect as a lingua franca. Cantonese has over 70 million speakers worldwide,
and its Hong Kong form become fashionable among teenagers in other parts of China
because of the popularity of Hong Kong movies worldwide.
Taishanese is spoken less and less, even in China, and will probably be gone in a
generation from America. There is a degree of mutual intelligibility between Taishanese
and Cantonese, but the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation have major differences.
Taishanese speakers born in China can usually understand Cantonese; American-born
Taishanese speakers can typically understand only about 10 percent of what they hear in
Cantonese and have great difficulty remembering the right tones when trying to speak it.
Many working-class Hong Kong Chinese immigrants began arriving in large numbers in
the 1960s and despite their status and professions in Hong Kong, immigrants had to find
low-pay employment in restaurants and garment factories in Chinatown because of
limited English ability.
Miscellaneous
San Francisco's Chinatown is home to the well-known and historic Chinese Consolidated
Benevolent Association (known as the Chinese Six Companies), which is the umbrella
organization for local Chinese family and regional associations in Chinatown. It has
spawned lodges in other Chinatowns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including
Chinatown, Los Angeles and Chinatown, Portland.