The heart of Chinatown is now home to a trendy Irish pub, a Latin nightclub, a German cultural institute, a Texas barbecue restaurant and a chain sandwich shop. All politely display their names in Chinese as well as English. But inside, few of the employees, managers or customers are Chinese.

Since MCI Center opened six months ago, skyrocketing property values have made Chinatown Washington’s hottest real estate market. A new convention center on the horizon just two blocks away will likely speed the transformation of Chinatown into a glittering American entertainment zone.

"Chinatown will eventually be the hottest area in Washington," said real estate agent Jim Persechino, who said he hopes to lease a defunct Vietnamese restaurant on Eye Street to someone who can turn it into a nightclub and pay $17,000 a month in rent. "There are deals going down right now to build hotels, nightclubs, offices.

"It’s not just Chinese any more," he added. "There’s a lot of normal businesses."

Meanwhile, rents in the neighborhood have tripled. Property taxes are expected to follow. Proprietors of small family-owned Chinese restaurants and gift shops say they probably can’t afford to stay. Besides, many of their landlords, hoping to make big bucks off upscale tenants, may not renew their leases, they fear.

Angie Lee, who owns Coffee House takeout restaurant on H Street, thinks her 15-year-old business may be the next to go. Just because her landlord is Chinese doesn’t mean he won’t raise her rent, she said.

"Why should Chinese be different from anyone else?" she said. "This is money we’re talking about."

A martial arts store, herbal medicine shop and several small restaurants already are gone. The biggest Chinese grocery in town is rumored to be closing.

"We’re losing our culture," said Randall Lee, (no relation to Angie) a fourth-generation Chinese-American born and raised in the neighborhood. "In a little while, there may not be a Chinatown left."

Most of the property in Chinatown not owned by big developers is owned by a few wealthy Chinese families who also operate some of the city’s most well-known restaurants. Most of them live in the suburbs and rent enthusiastically to non-Chinese businesses like Starbuck’s and the Fado Irish pub.

"It’s not really a question of ethnicity; it’s a question of class," said John Cheng, professor of Asian-American studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Among the leaders promoting non-Asian development in China-town is Linda Lee, a prominent Chinese businesswoman whose family owns two restaurants in the neighborhood. She said the changes in Chinatown are for the better.

"Assimilation in mainstream America is every immigrant’s dream," she said. "It’s unavoidable."

In a community where even first-generation immigrants take American first names, no one wants to live in a Chinese ghetto, she said. They want to blend in. If small Asian-owned businesses have to close, then so be it.

"That is the economic system," she said. "I don’t think anybody should expect subsidized rent."

Linda Lee, who helped promote the idea of building MCI Center among other Chinese business owners, now runs a restaurant concession inside the arena. Some in the community call her a traitor.

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For anyone who has visited Chinatown in San Francisco or New York, D.C.’s one-block Chinatown seems strange — more like a stop at Epcot Center than a real community. Whole ducks still hang in the windows and the air in the gift shops still hangs heavy with the scent of hand-ground Chinese herbs. But tourists hoping to immerse themselves in a foreign culture will be disappointed.

Around the corner from Chinatown’s arch and its famed restaurants is an area few tourists see — two blocks of ramshackle row houses along Eye and Sixth streets. Here are the remnants of what was once a thriving working-class community of immigrants in the restaurant, grocery and laundry businesses. There are perhaps two dozen Asian families left.

The residents themselves are nearly invisible during business hours, when the streets are filled with well-suited businessmen, construction workers, and homeless people hustling for change.

But in the evenings the last residents of Chinatown emerge. Old men in stocking feet sit on the stoops to read the Chinese papers or tend the snow peas in tiny front yard gardens. It’s a place where pig tongues and chicken feet are not bizarre curiosities, just dinner.

Tucked away in basements and alleys, often marked by signs only in Chinese, are an acupuncturist, a garage and two basement beauty shops. A small Cantonese opera orchestra rehearses in a basement.

And around the corner on 6th Street, incense from the Temple of Cun Yum wafts into the street.

The temple is busy on the 1st and 15th of each month, traditional days of worship, said Han S. Jan, chairman of the board of the Buddhist temple. Worshippers enter quietly, light sticks of incense and kneel before the golden figure of the goddess. They fold their hands and bow deeply, praying for health, safety and long life. Buddhist music thousands of years old plays from a tiny boom box.

Hand carved in China from a 100-year-old tree, the golden goddess presides silently over a host of carved attendants and bowls of fruit offered as gifts. In a smaller room, worshippers pray in memory of departed ancestors.

The temple used to be on 7th Street, closer to the heart of Chinatown, but recently moved to escape rising rent, Jan said. The temple survives on donations. Chinese tourists from New York and Hong Kong visit often, he said, but few Americans ever come.

Whatever happens to China-town, the temple’s future is safe, Jan said. He owns the building. But tenants in the tumbledown apartments nearby are probably out of luck. The buildings will soon make way for a glittering American-style entertainment district, Linda Lee predicted. "This is only the beginning."

The threat of displacement is strangely familiar in this neighborhood. About 100 Asian families were cleared out to make room for the old convention center in 1971 and, in a deal with the city, were promised first priority in Wah Luck House, a subsidized high rise at the corner of 6th and H streets, built a few years later. About 200 people, mostly elderly Chinese, live in the building and a long list of others are waiting to get in. Most of the residents do not speak English but are happy about the new CVS that opened down the street, where they can walk to get prescriptions filled. Soon they may be able to walk to much more.

A giant mixed-use complex proposed by Western Development Corp. calls for 120 residential units, retail stores, a 30-screen movie theater and 1,000 underground parking spaces at the corner of 7th and H streets. But the mall isn’t being built for the residents.

"It will be another typical suburban shopping mall with nothing to do with Chinatown." said architect Alfred Liu, who came to the United States in 1961 and designed the ornate archway that marks the entrance to the neighborhood. "My arch will be a joke."

Linda Lee argues Chinatown would have died out anyway. Most of the new immigrants settle in ethnic pockets in the suburbs, she said.

The new Chinatown does have advantages. Nearly everyone says the streets are cleaner and safer than they have been in years. Needed tax dollars are flowing into city coffers. Restaurant owners report moderate increases in business on nights when events are held at MCI Center. But it’s nothing close to the boom they said they were led to expect.

The ban on street parking from 4 to 7 p.m. has driven regular customers away from grocery stores and restaurants, owners say.

"Who is going to pay $20 parking to eat in a restaurant?" Liu asked. "How are you supposed to carry home a heavy bag of rice?"

Liu has sued the city over the contract awarded to Western Development for the mixed-use complex at 7th and H, which he said violated D.C. contracting procedures. A judge recently denied Western’s move to have the case dismissed. At a meeting July 19, small business owners and concerned Chinese vowed to preserve what is left of Chinatown. The Save Chinatown Coalition collected 2,000 signatures, he said.

Current city ordinances do little besides require some Chinese-style design elements, such as the current streetlights shaped like red and green lanterns.

"Lanterns don’t make Chinatown," Liu said. "People do."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator