A Gateway for Asian Popular Culture: Chinese-Language Movie Theaters in North America

This chapter will introduce the Chinese-language movie theaters in North America project and early observations drawn from its evolving data set, developed from archival and private collections, government records, newspapers, trade journals, ephemera, and oral histories. A comparative analysis of four metropolitan regions with a high concentration of Chinese-language movie theaters—New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.—illustrates variations in the timing of theater openings and closings; the geographic clustering of the cinemas; and their modes of advertising. These variations suggest a range of causal forces behind their establishment and closure and potential differences in audiences and moviegoing cultures. Collectively, Chinese-language movie theaters in North America played a significant role in priming generations of varied moviegoers for continued engagement with East Asian media and presaged its explosive overseas success in the streaming era decades later.