Lucky Houses: Home Builders in Southern California Are Learning to Heed the Chinese Art of Feng Shui

FOR MORE THAN fifty years Los Angeles’s Chinatown, a foursquare-mile enclave just north of downtown, has fulfilled the daily needs of urban Chinese people while also attracting tourists and others hungry for food and atmosphere. Yet it’s hard to spend much time in southern California without seeing Chinatown as an expression of conditions that are increasingly losing force. Most of today’s Chinese immigrants do not live or work in Chinatown; for them, living as large extended families in apartments close to the shops is neither necessary nor appealing. More often than not, Chinese immigrants now choose to do something very different: become suburbanites.

As the Chinese settle into subdivisions miles removed from Chinatown, home builders are trying to learn to design and market houses in ways that will attract them. The 1990 census showed that people born in Asia or on the islands of the Pacific, or with ancestors from that part of the world, make up nearly a tenth of the state’s population. During the 1980s California’s Asian population grew 127 percent, to 2.8 million. The influx has come from many places, among them Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

The Caucasian building company considered most attentive to the Chinese is Lewis Homes, a family-run firm based in Upland, in San Bernardino County. Five years ago, when Lewis Homes bought thirty acres of land in El Monte, about fifteen miles east of Los Angeles, Randall Lewis, the company’s marketing director, began visiting other builders’ developments nearby to find out what was selling. “Everybody said, There are a lot of Chinese buying here; you’d better study the feng shui,” Lewis told me.

Feng shui (pronounced fung-shway) is an intricate subject to master. Sarah Rossbach, in her book Feng Shui, calls it “the Chinese art of placement.” Derek Walters, in his book Feng Shui, calls it “the Chinese art of designing a harmonious environment.” By all accounts feng shui is ancient, having been developed over thousands of years of Chinese civilization. Its tenets have won a following not only in Chinese lands but also, in varied forms, in Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Its aim is to create an auspicious relationship between human beings and their surroundings, both natural and man-made. Correct placement is believed to augur well for residents’ health, harmony, and prosperity.

Two years ago Lewis hired a Chinese-American “cultural consultant,” Angi Ma Wong, to familiarize his company’s designers and marketing personnel with Asian behavior and beliefs. When I visited Lewis Homes’ Covina Palms development, in Covina, about twenty miles east of Los Angeles, Lewis invited one of the development’s homeowners—Michael Ho, a seventy-year-old retired professor from Hong Kong—to come talk with us.

Ho, a lean man with gray hair, said that before deciding to settle at Covina Palms, he had looked at a house in a subdivision called Hillcrest but had decided against it. “The front and rear doors were in a straight line, without any obstruction,” he said. Feng shui authorities believe that an unimpeded straight path from front to rear door allows cosmic energy (known as ch’i) to flow in and out of the house too fast.

Is it true, Lewis asked, that when energy flows out of the house too swiftly, the resident’s finances will suffer? “It is not only money,” the professor answered. “It is also one’s quiet heart.”

The Hillcrest house had another major problem, Ho recalled: “It was difficult to find a suitable place to put the bed.”Feng shui dictates that the owner’s bedroom be in a particular part of the house—most commonly the house’s southwest corner, but it can be elsewhere, especially if the owner’s horoscope indicates a different point. When the foot of the bed faces the door, some Chinese regard it as a terrible portent, because it echoes the funeral custom of positioning the deceased with feet toward the door. At Hillcrest it would have been difficult to put the bed in a position other than facing the door. At least the master bedroom at Hillcrest did not have a beam above the bed. When a beam runs lengthwise over the middle of the bed, the couple who sleep there are said to be at greater risk of separation or divorce. A beam running across the width of the bed foretells injury, sickness, or even early death.

Lewis listened to Ho intently. How could he not? Hillcrest is one of his own company’s subdivisions. Obviously, even Lewis Homes still has some distance to go in dealing with feng shui.

MANY AUTHORS OF books on feng shui call it a cross between art and science, or a pseudo-science, because it employs meticulously gathered facts from geography, meteorology, and astronomy but does not analyze them with modern scientific procedures. The information gathered for feng shui is applied mainly to three kinds of settings—gravesites, workplaces, and homes. Raymond Cheng, an architect and developer in the suburban town of Alhambra, says that designers pay more attention to feng shui when shaping individual houses than when designing apartment buildings. This does not mean that apartment dwellers feel free to ignore feng shui. Often Chinese-Americans try to avoid apartments that exhibit bad feng shui characteristics.

Many California home builders first learned about feng shui by accident. “In areas where there were a lot of Asian home buyers, builders would sell most of their houses but find that certain houses wouldn’t sell,” says Angi Ma Wong, the daughter of a former diplomat for Nationalist China. “Even when the price was lowered, Chinese wouldn’t buy them.” A house facing the end of a road or the terminus of a cul-de-sac was hard to sell to Chinese, because the street represents a “killing force,” which it is felt should not be directed at the home. As sometimes occurs with feng shui, a belief that probably stemmed from observable hazards of nature has been extended to the point where it looks like superstition.

The slowly traveled cul-de-sac is treated as if it were as risky as a rushing highway. Salespeople asked customers why they had rejected the houses, and found out about feng shui.

When a house is specifically designed for a Chinese client, its siting and other features may be submitted to a feng shui master, also known as a spiritual adviser or geomancer. Even when considering a tract house, many Chinese employ a geomancer to tell them whether the house is acceptable and how any defects can be corrected.

Four out of five Hong Kong-born Chinese follow feng shui, according to Danny Chang, the publisher of Asian Homebuyers Digest. “Taiwan buyers are a little less superstitious; maybe fifty percent believe in it,” he says. A large gulf exists between professionals such as engineers and scientists, many of whom scoff at feng shui, and entrepreneurs, who tend to take it very seriously. Immersion in the modern world tends to erode such beliefs. For example, secondor third-generation Chinese-Americans are much less likely to embrace feng shui than are those who were born in Asia. And “the Japanese people I deal with are pretty much contemporary-minded,” says David Tsai, a Chinese-born architect in Monterey Park, a close-in suburb that is 56 percent Asian. When I suggested to Wong that belief in feng shui would inevitably decline in the United States, she disagreed. “Westerners, especially those who do business in Hong Kong and Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan, are having a rising fascination with it,” she observed. “I see references to it all the time.”

WHEN THE market for new houses began to feel the effects of the recession two years ago, a number of builders became more alert to Asians’ concerns. On average Asian-Americans in California enjoy healthy household incomes. Chinese newcomers with businesses in the Far East frequently have substantial savings at their disposal. Many Asians’ practice of pooling money from parents, grandparents, and other relatives further enhances their ability to buy houses, even in an expensive state where the median newhome price exceeds $190,000. Since 1988 eight of the state’s largest builders, and also banks and other businesses, have hired Wong to give seminars or training sessions. Some builders have hired salespeople of Chinese, Korean, Filipino, or other Asian ancestry. Builders such as Akins, which operates in Orange County, and Warmington Homes and Kaufman and Broad, which operate throughout California, have tried to refine their marketing techniques.

Because builders of tract houses do not have the luxury of tailoring each house to its buyer, they look for a set of simple rules that will work for most buyers. The rule that every builder seems to remember best is that it’s bad to have a staircase face the front door; fortune can run out of the house. Often builders refrain from planting a tree directly in line with the front door, since it may inhibit the incoming flow of cosmic energy—and wealth. They may be careful to position something between the range and the kitchen sink—opposites that represent fire and water. Wong sometimes functions as a kind of Mrs. Fix-It. She suggests placing plants, mirrors, aquariums, or furniture in certain locations to redirect energy and ameliorate deficiencies. “They’re like Band-Aids,” she says.

Builders have started to learn not only feng shui but also other aspects of Asian cultures, enabling them to be more successful in dealing with customers as well as in designing desirable houses. A prime characteristic attributed to the Chinese is high regard for education. Where a sales brochure directed at Caucasian home buyers might stress “life-style,” Warmington Homes’s brochure for its Timberline subdivision, on a hillside in Walnut, about twenty-five miles east of Los Angeles, emphasizes local schools, reporting that “the Walnut Valley School District rates among the top 25% at all grade levels, and the campuses of Cal Poly and Mt. San Antonio College are also very close by.”

Salespeople have been attempting to learn patience. “They’re very cautious in making a decision,” Nancy Long, a saleswoman at Timberline, says of the Chinese who are buying there. “They come back six, seven, eight, nine times before they buy.” Chinese who are interested in a house may assemble the whole family and stay in a model for an hour, discussing it and moving the furniture around. When I was at Timberline, two Chinese-American men, both about nineteen years old, wearing T-shirts and shorts, entered the model center. I expected Long to treat them in a peremptory manner—what chance could there be of selling a $350,000 house to a pair of college students? But she gave them a warm welcome. “Many times the kids go out and look at houses,” she told me. “If they like them, their parents come back.” In fact, it can be difficult to know who will be living in the house and how many people will be involved in the decision to buy. Even when a young couple will be the only occupants, parents or grandparents who seemed to be just tagging along on the model-home tour may have a large say in the decision. The young couple may not believe in feng shui themselves, but they may follow it in deference to older relatives. Builders are placing more emphasis on keeping the customer happy after the sale. Shea Homes, which builds houses throughout southern California, reported in 1989 that every sale to a Chinese buyer led to three additional sales. Word of mouth is the best advertising, and for it to succeed, the customers must be satisfied.

Practical concerns of Chinese home buyers also receive some attention. “I tell builders that if they have only a limited time to spend on designing the house, they should spend fifty percent of it on the kitchen,” Wong says. “Asians still cook on the range a lot, as opposed to microwaving and ovencooking, and we cook for crowds because of our extended families.” A kitchen designed to attract Chinese will have a stove or cooktop fueled by gas, with generous space overhead to accommodate a wok, and a ventilation system powerful enough to expel smoke and grease to the outdoors. Designers will avoid placing a cabinet or a microwave oven low over the stove and will avoid downdraft ventilation systems, which don’t draw well from woks (or from tall pots, for that matter). The kitchen will have ample counter space for chopping and preparing food, and it may even have a metal-lined drawer for bulk storage of rice (or flour, for the non-Chinese).

Builders say it’s a good idea to have a number of sizable secondary bedrooms and perhaps a ground-floor den large enough to be used as a bedroom by a parent or grandparent. Because many Chinese wash clothing by hand, they want a laundry sink in the house—not in the garage, where some California builders put the washer and dryer.

Security matters a great deal to the Chinese. Asian-American gangs know that some immigrant Chinese, mistrustful of banks, keep a cache of money and valuables in the house. Both the Lewis Homes subdivisions I visited—Covina Palms and El Dorado, in nearby West Covina—are what the builder advertises as “walled and gated” communities.

BECAUSE OF continuing immigration, a number of close-in suburbs, including Monterey Park, Alhambra, San Gabriel, and San Marino, are expected to retain their already large Asian populations while places much farther out, such as Ventura County, central and southern Orange County, and the Chino Hills west of Riverside, are expected to receive new influxes of Asians.

With great rapidity institutions important to the Chinese are becoming established deep in the suburbs, making it easy for many more Chinese to follow. Near the crest of the Puente Hills, in Hacienda Heights, approximately fifteen miles east of Los Angeles, is the grand, sprawling Hsi Lai Temple, completed two years ago by the International Buddhist Progress Society. Fresh-looking shopping centers near the Pomona Freeway have names mounted in both Chinese calligraphy and English lettering. In Los Angeles and Orange counties two supermarket chains, Hong Kong Supermarket and 99 Ranch Market, specialize in prodigious quantities and varieties of Oriental food, eliminating the need to go into Chinatown or— perhaps more to the point—to Monterey Park, which several years ago surpassed Chinatown as the main shopping area for Chinese-Americans.

Builders find themselves in the sometimes sticky position of actively seeking Chinese home buyers—by running ads in Chinese-language newspapers, for instance—and yet not wanting their developments to be so heavily Asian that other racial groups will be made uncomfortable. Often certain streets in a development become predominantly Asian—perhaps because of favorable feng shui, but also because family members buy near one another and because many Asians, like many Americans of other backgrounds, prefer to live next to people like themselves. The clustering of nationalities probably helps to maintain tighter social networks than would otherwise exist in suburban subdivisions. But it clashes with the American public ideology of integration, and it draws attention to cultural differences.

Although self-segregation occurs in Chinese suburbs, just as it has long occurred in cities among immigrants of many nationalities, it doesn’t seem to have the bitter undertone that accompanies racial division on, say, university campuses. Many Chinese seem to expect eventually to assimilate into predominantly white society. Chinese often “don’t want to live in Monterey Park,” says Chang, of Asian Homebuyers Digest. “They feel it’s too concentrated with Asians. Maybe they feel they’re better than the new immigrants—at one time they were new here, but five years later their English has improved, they have some money, so they want to move to a white area where they feel more American.” Chang expressed satisfaction with the explosive growth of the Asian-American population—in Los Angeles County it jumped from about 450,000 in 1980 to 907,000 in 1990. But he also mentioned, unhappily, that the population of non-Hispanic whites had dropped by 335,000, or over eight percent. It was as if their departure meant that the Asians had had less of an opportunity to be welcomed into the mainstream.

FOR ALL THE talk about feng shui, the dwellings I visited that were built by companies intent on attracting Chinese were typical California see-through houses: anyone who came in the front door—whether a cherished friend or a delivery person from UPS—would be given an unrestricted view of the living room, probably the dining area, perhaps part of the kitchen or family room, and usually a portion of the back yard. The designs aimed for a feeling of spaciousness, even at the expense of privacy. The tall, open interiors seemed stirred-up, dynamic—not at all the haven for “one’s quiet heart” that Professor Ho had talked about. The typical master bedroom had no door to separate it from the master bathroom. The tub was invariably set into a corner next to large transparent windows, just as in subdivisions where, presumably, unembarrassed Anglos enjoy soaping up in full view of their neighbors. Houses like these seem to me to be dubiously suited to an ethnic group known, at least by outsiders, for modesty and reserve.

I think there are two explanations for this seeming mismatch between Asian-Americans and the houses they’re getting. First, builders avoid risk. So far they have tried to use their typical showy California tract-house designs and incorporate a few gestures toward Chinese cooking habits or feng shui anxieties, but they have not been interested in genuinely reinterpreting domestic architecture for the benefit of one subculture. Second, as David Tsai, the architect, put it, the Chinese arriving from Asia are “part of an international culture.” He explained, “They can drive, they can speak English, they can watch the Channel Seven news just like anyone else. They have learned about America from movies, TV series, magazines, books. The people coming here do not want to live as they lived over there. They want to live like Americans.”

I have a hunch that given their preference, some Chinese might get more enjoyment from houses that reflect their native culture more strongly than do the stuccoed, vaguely Spanishstyle, exhibitionist dwellings now rising on roads with names like Balboa Street, Columbus Drive, and De Gama Lane. But it would take courage on the part of builders and customers alike to inject a deeply Chinese influence into California houses, the way Frank Lloyd Wright once infused his extraordinary architecture with Japanese inspiration.

In southern California in the 1990s approximately 240,000 new Asian households are expected to be formed—nearly five times the number of new non-Hispanic white households, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, in Palo Alto. The limited changes of the past few years might presage more substantive changes to come. In any event, builders talk as if they do.

“Southern California as a marketplace is very different from what it was ten years ago,” says Lewis, who is clearly enthusiastic about the challenge of adapting to a changing society. “I really think that Los Angeles is a border town, except that it’s border to the whole world.”