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SPEAKER_06: The most recognizable feature of LA's Chinatown is its central plaza. It's an outdoor pedestrian mall that's almost overwhelmingly colorful.
SPEAKER_07: Producer Vivian Lai.
SPEAKER_06: Brightly painted buildings are topped with sweeping pagoda style roofs and then accented with fluorescent neon lacing. For decades, Chinatown's central plaza was a thriving tourist area. But by the late 1970s, it had fallen on hard times. The neighborhood's neon lights still glowed over the shops and restaurants, but there was no one there to take it all in.
SPEAKER_14: Things had taken a significant nosedive. There really wasn't anyone on the street or going anywhere and, you know, downtown was dead.
SPEAKER_06: It was this deserted Chinatown in 1978 that captured the interest of Paul Greenstein. Back then, Paul was a 20-something. He liked music and hoped to run his own club as a promoter. Instead, he did a lot of odd jobs around the city for money. You know, restoring jukeboxes, fixing toys, designing ads for a local cafe.
SPEAKER_07: Paul would sometimes spend nights wandering around Los Angeles with a friend. And one night he found himself in Central Plaza. The streets of Chinatown were quiet as always, but a sound caught his attention.
SPEAKER_14: We can hear this really wild party going on. So we kind of gravitated to where all the noise is coming from, and there's this place called Madame Wong's.
SPEAKER_07: Madame Wong's was a restaurant right in Central Plaza. If you enter through the famous East Gate, you'll see an ornate two-story building with a curved pagoda-style roof and an intricately detailed wooden balustrade lining the balcony.
SPEAKER_14: They were obviously, you know, it was packed. And we're looking around, well, there's nobody here in Chinatown, but this place is packed. So we go upstairs.
SPEAKER_06: Paul and his friend went up to the second-story entrance of Madame Wong's, expecting to have to squeeze his way through the door. But…
SPEAKER_14: There's nobody there. It was a recording. It was a recording of a party.
SPEAKER_06: According to Paul, the owners of the restaurant had been blasting party ambiance through speakers to give off the illusion that it was packed with customers.
SPEAKER_14: So we went, oh God, that's so funny. What a rip. This is great. We love it. You know, because it was obviously a really lame trick. And we thought that was funny.
SPEAKER_06: Funny enough that Paul kept coming back to Madame Wong's. He would ride his motorcycle over to Central Plaza to get lunch regularly and would find himself having long conversations with one of the owners of the restaurant, a man named George Wong.
SPEAKER_14: And I talked to George and he'd tell me stories, whether they were real or not. I never knew. But he said, oh God, you know, I was with the Flying Tigers in China and I grew up in San Francisco and I had a 1937 Indian just like yours. And I used to ride it up and down the hills. And he'd just tell me stories and I'd tell him stories and I'd have a beer, you know, and then I'd go back to work.
SPEAKER_06: Madame Wong's was an island-themed restaurant and club. They served tropical drinks and at night, Polynesian bands and dancers performed on a tiki-themed stage decorated with seashells and dried grass.
SPEAKER_07: Like a lot of businesses in Chinatown, the restaurant wasn't doing well. By 1978, the tiki craze that gripped the nation had officially burned out and Madame Wong's would be lucky to get in a few dozen people during the evenings.
SPEAKER_06: But Paul had an idea, one that he hoped would put asses in the seats and Paul on the map. Why don't I start a club in this restaurant that's dead all the time?
SPEAKER_07: Paul wanted to turn Madame Wong's into a hot new music venue, a venue he would book and promote.
SPEAKER_06: He had all sorts of ideas for the club. He imagined putting on rockabilly shows one night, then the next night a jazz band, even sitar music. So he asked George if he'd be willing to let him book some local musicians at Madame Wong's.
SPEAKER_14: Basically, he said, let me talk to my wife. Next time he came in, I said, talk to your wife? And he goes, yeah, she says no. I went, why? He goes, I don't know. She just says no.
SPEAKER_06: The eponymous Madame Wong, George's wife Esther, passed away in 2005. But from every account that I've read or heard, she was a force to be reckoned with. Esther was born in 1917 in Shanghai, the daughter of a wealthy automobile importer. She was well educated and well traveled, but in 1949 was forced to flee China to escape the incoming communist regime, losing her high end lifestyle. She made her home in Los Angeles and worked as a clerk for a shipping company for 20 years before opening Madame Wong's with her husband, George.
SPEAKER_07: Esther Wong was not interested in working with Paul, but he was insistent. So I said, you know, what's your worst day?
SPEAKER_14: She said Tuesday. I said, give me Tuesdays.
SPEAKER_06: After some convincing, Esther decided to let Paul experiment with their slowest days and book some local bands.
SPEAKER_07: What Esther probably wasn't anticipating, though, was at this very time in L.A., there was a rising musical scene just screaming for a new venue. Punk. Well, I think at the beginning, promoters felt like punk is a new thing.
SPEAKER_12: And there were just a handful of places that welcomed punk with open arms in 77. This is Alice Bagh. I am an old school punk rocker who started playing in a punk band in 1977.
SPEAKER_06: The band she was playing in was the trailblazing first wave punk band The Bags. In the late 70s, punk had just begun to take root in Los Angeles. And Alice remembers a burgeoning scene where people like her fit in.
SPEAKER_12: There were a lot of bands that had women, queers, people of color. That was very, very inclusive scene. And there were a lot of really unique voices. So I think when you listen to L.A. punk, it is maybe a little bit quirkier.
SPEAKER_07: But the issue was that almost no one, not the biggest arena or the smallest clubs, wanted to host these local bands because, well, you know, from my personal experience, The Bags
SPEAKER_12: got a bad reputation for our fans being too aggressive and destroying things.
SPEAKER_06: Alice isn't exaggerating about that reputation. Take for example, in 1978, when The Bags played this very famous L.A. rock club called The Troubadour.
SPEAKER_12: It was later called the trashing of the troubadour because there was a lot of craziness.
SPEAKER_07: Rather than providing a dance floor, the troubadour put down tables and chairs, expecting the audience to remain seated the whole night. And as soon as the show started, things began to go immediately awry.
SPEAKER_12: If you had a punk show at one of those places and you didn't move the tables and create a dance floor, well, the punks were going to do it for you.
SPEAKER_06: Soon enough, the audience started hurling those tables and chairs across the room.
SPEAKER_12: You know, the furniture ended up in a pile, actually, like tables and chairs in a pile. And there are, there's actually video footage, I think, where you can see us playing on stage and you see like every now and then a chair flying across.
SPEAKER_06: There's this photo that was taken after the chaos had subsided. Wooden chairs and table pieces are strewn into a frenzied pile, as if the audience was trying to barricade the place from a zombie apocalypse.
SPEAKER_12: But then of course, The Bags never were, were never allowed back at the troubadour. And I think for a while, punk bands in general were not allowed at the troubadour. So yes, unfortunately, these sort of things closed doors for us.
SPEAKER_06: It wasn't just the troubadour banning punk bands. It was most clubs. So punks had to make do. They'd try sliding in through the back door of alternative unsuspecting venues. Some bands would book shows in abandoned synagogues or Ukrainian cultural centers or the performance hall of the benevolent and protective order of the Elks.
SPEAKER_07: But as soon as the establishment figured out what was happening, they'd pull the plug or call the cops.
SPEAKER_06: The plan for Madam Wong's was to book all types of music, not just punk rock. But by opening her club up to the scene, Esther Wong was about to form an uneasy alliance with the punks knocking at her door.
SPEAKER_07: Paul jumped in immediately and designed flyers and posters and stapled them to telephone polls all over town.
SPEAKER_06: After a few months of planning, Paul kicked off the weeknight shows in the fall of 1978 with a musician named Gary Valentine. You know, in the beginning, Madam Wong's was very exciting.
SPEAKER_14: I wish I had kept a bottle of the adrenaline that I got every night out of that place.
SPEAKER_06: Madam Wong's featured different types of music, but the punks were the ones who really turned up.
SPEAKER_04: When she started, she was serving dinner until my next. And so then all of a sudden, instead of having like 20 people, there were like 300 people.
SPEAKER_03: This is Ann Suma and Jeff Spurrier.
SPEAKER_06: Ann was a prolific photographer of the L.A. punk scene, and Jeff was a freelance journalist. They were drawn in early and watched as Madam Wong's crowds grew bigger and bigger. They said Central Plaza was a good vibe. It was super fun to go there.
SPEAKER_03: You could park there really easily.
SPEAKER_04: And there was a big space out in the plaza. You could stall in the plaza and you would not disturb neighbors. But aside from the cool vibe and convenient location, there were intangible qualities
SPEAKER_06: that lured young punks to Chinatown. Well, I certainly liked it better than Hollywood.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, it was much, it felt safer. It felt safer.
SPEAKER_04: But it was still, you had like that element there to make it feel a little edgy.
SPEAKER_06: Chinatown was safer than a lot of other punk hangouts in L.A. And sure, who's going to argue with easy parking? But let's not mince words here. A big part of the appeal for punks coming to Chinatown was this quote edgy aesthetic. And Chinatown seemed edgy mainly because it wasn't rich and it wasn't white.
SPEAKER_07: Punks weren't the first outsiders to be drawn to Chinatown. And that's because it was designed to draw outsiders in.
SPEAKER_05: I would feel that what was going on in the punk scene is kind of similar to what happened in Chinatown for decades beforehand.
SPEAKER_06: This is William Gao, assistant professor of ethnic studies at Sacramento State University. He says that L.A.'s Chinatown is actually considered new Chinatown because the original neighborhood was torn down in the 1930s to make way for Union Station. When Chinese American business leaders rebuilt the community, they purposefully designed its central plaza with a quote unquote exotic eastern aesthetic in order to lure Anglo American tourists to Chinatown.
SPEAKER_05: What type of agency does a Chinese American merchant have but to find ways and to take the perceived ethnic difference and to make it sellable. And so the Chinese American merchants are trying to make Chinese American difference palatable to a larger white audience in a way that will empower them.
SPEAKER_06: So in the late 1970s, decades after new Chinatown drew in outsiders with its deliberate chinoiserie, Esther and George Wong did something similar. They capitalized on a new crowd by selling them an experience they couldn't get anywhere else.
SPEAKER_05: If you have Chinese American businesses whose lifeblood are people outside of the community, you know, the punk scene is just going to be another aspect of that. It's going to be a part of a broader history of a type of symbiotic relationship in which Chinese American businesses are catering to and sometimes profiting from folks that are coming into the community and spending money there.
SPEAKER_07: As with the case of Paul Greenstein and Esther Wong, this sticky symbiosis had its tensions. Paul and Esther had different ideas for the club. So after just a few months, Paul left Madame Wong's and Esther was charting her club's destiny.
SPEAKER_06: In order to keep bringing huge crowds to a restaurant, Esther began working with professional bookers.
SPEAKER_15: People always thought she was like very tough. And like I definitely saw her be tough, but like she wasn't just tough. That wasn't her thing. Like otherwise, like why am I at her house for Chinese New Year's?
SPEAKER_06: This is Jonathan Daniel, one of Esther's music bookers. Today he's the co-founder of Crush Music and works with artists like Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Miley Cyrus. But back then he was just a 19 year old kid trying to learn about the music industry when he met Esther Wong. I mean, I was just, I was so young that I don't think I fully appreciated like where
SPEAKER_15: she came from. I just knew it was different.
SPEAKER_06: Jonathan respected Esther on a professional level and on a personal level, he liked her. Sometimes she would even take him to the horse racing track with her because mama loved the ponies.
SPEAKER_15: She was like incredible at betting on horses. And that was sort of a myth. That's how she had made the money was horse betting, which I don't know if that's true, but it's an amazing story.
SPEAKER_06: And although Esther had a reputation for having a temper, Jonathan says she was easy to work with as long as the shows were full.
SPEAKER_15: She gave me a lot of rope, especially for a kid. Every once in a while she would call up and she would say, call Martha. Cause she loved the motels and she loved Martha Davis or the Plimsolls was another. And those bands had been very successful at the beginning. And so she would always be like, call these bands.
SPEAKER_07: Within a year of opening, Esther had turned Madame Wong's into a prestige gig. It went from being the place that you played because there was nowhere else to go to being the place that you had to play.
SPEAKER_10: We're here in downtown Los Angeles, deep in the heart of Chinatown at Madame Wong's. Now this is a club that's given birth to many new rock acts. In fact, some people even say it's the center of new talent on the West coast.
SPEAKER_06: Madame Wong started booking, not just local unsigned LA acts, but big musicians from all over the world.
SPEAKER_04: She worked hard, Madame Wong, and she made that place happen. And she made that scene happen.
SPEAKER_06: Journalist Jeff Spurrier again. As a result, she had people like the police playing there and she had people like the
SPEAKER_04: B-52s would come into town and they played there. That stage was tiny. It was a tiny, tiny stage. Yet they played there because she was the place to play.
SPEAKER_06: Oingo Boingo played Madame Wong's. The Go-Go's played Madame Wong's. Even the Ramones. There's actually a story that Esther pulled two members of the Ramones off the stage to
SPEAKER_07: make them clean up graffiti that they scrawled on the bathroom walls.
SPEAKER_06: Esther and George doubled down and opened up a second, even larger location in Santa Monica called Madame Wong's West. The Wong's were savvy business owners who were strategic about how they ran their clubs. Since Madame Wong's made most of its money through the bar, Jonathan said that George Wong would keep all sorts of detailed notes on the types of audiences that certain bands would bring in. He would watch all the bands because the place was super small.
SPEAKER_15: And so he would write things like ice water drinkers, meaning the crowd didn't buy liquor. And they would write, no, no draw if there weren't enough people. I do like the idea of like George money balling it, like keeping tabs.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, definitely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: It was, he was a hundred percent money ball. Yes. Yeah. He had a binder.
SPEAKER_07: George had his money ball books, but Esther was the figurehead of the clubs. She took it upon herself to listen to the stacks of tapes from interested bands and personally chose who got to perform on her stage.
SPEAKER_06: But at best she tolerated the stuff being played at Madame Wong's. In 1979, the same year, the B-52s and the police were playing on her stage. She told the LA times quote, before I didn't think I'd ever liked rock music. Now I can turn it on and it doesn't bother me.
SPEAKER_15: I wouldn't, I think she cared for the culture. I think she really liked when the club was crowded and people were having a good time. I don't think she likes that and listened to the music. That wasn't her thing.
SPEAKER_07: She may not have been into it for the music itself, but there was something about the noisy rock lifestyle that Esther couldn't resist. She liked the energy and took a lot of pride when a band would get signed out of her club.
SPEAKER_06: As Madame Wong's reputation grew, so did Esther's. Here she is being interviewed by the musician Bob Welch for a show called Hollywood Heartbeat. Behind the bar, we have the legendary Madame Wong, Esther Wong.
SPEAKER_09: Hi Esther. Hi Bob. What do you think about the music? Do you like it? Well, it's different.
SPEAKER_01: It's altogether different than anything else. Everybody had their different music and I like that the most. Do you realize that you're a legend, becoming a legend, already a legend in Los Angeles?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I wouldn't say that. Yes, you are.
SPEAKER_06: Soon Esther had a new nickname.
SPEAKER_04: She was the Godmother. They called her the Godmother of punk.
SPEAKER_06: As a 62-year-old Chinese immigrant, Esther was getting all sorts of attention as the unlikely Godmother of punk. And although it made for a catchy nickname, there were a lot of people in the scene who resented that moniker.
SPEAKER_12: Was she like really hosting punk? I'd say no.
SPEAKER_06: Alice Bagg again. Despite what the media had dubbed her, other punks like Alice knew that there was a different story there.
SPEAKER_12: I don't think she deserves to be called anything that would frame her in terms of supporting punk. Maybe, you know, that could be adjusted to new wave, but not punk.
SPEAKER_06: Around the time that Esther discovered rock in the late 1970s, punk music was changing and a new style was splintering out into its own separate genre, new wave.
SPEAKER_07: New wave is a lot like punk. If you added ironic lyrics, mainstream appeal, and a couple of synthesizers.
SPEAKER_06: To many punks, the distinction between the two genres meant everything. But to Esther Wong, these subtle musical differences weren't enough for her to put up with the rowdy punk crowd. So as business began picking up, Esther pivoted and focused on booking new wave over punk. The new wavers tended to act a little more professionally and drawn slightly tamer audiences.
SPEAKER_07: My guess is Unko Wunko probably didn't tag Esther's bathroom.
SPEAKER_12: I am pretty sure that our first show in Chinatown was at Madam Wong's and it was also our last show at Madam Wong's.
SPEAKER_06: Alice says that the bag's first show at Madam Wong's ended a lot like the trashing of the troubadour. Things got out of hand and a lot of furniture got damaged. Esther got tired of the sort of thing and began straight up banning a lot of punk bands. So punk had to find another venue and lucky for us, the Hong Kong Cafe opened.
SPEAKER_07: After the break, the Hong Kong Cafe opens and the Chinatown punk wars begin. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com the home for every brand.
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SPEAKER_06: In 1979, less than a year after Esther and George began booking rock shows at Madam Wong's, a different music promoter happened to find himself in Chinatown. His name was Kim Turner. Well, I was looking for a place from the minute I got here.
SPEAKER_06: Kim was fresh off the plane from DC and already looking for a space to run shows out of. One night he went to Madam Wong's in Chinatown and he thought that Central Plaza with its neon lights and architecture should have more than just one single rock club. It had the potential to be an entire music scene. So as he was walking out of Madam Wong's, he got an idea. I came down the stairs and I looked across the way there and I saw the Hong Kong Lo restaurant.
SPEAKER_13: I go, wow, that would be a perfect place for a band, for a nightclub.
SPEAKER_06: Kim saw that literally steps away from Madam Wong's. There just happened to be another struggling Chinese restaurant big enough to host the shows he had in mind. It was called Hong Kong Lo.
SPEAKER_13: So I went over and I talked to, I introduced myself to Bill Hong. We sat down and talked.
SPEAKER_07: Bill Hong had been the owner of Hong Kong Lo for decades and was a prominent and well-liked member of the Chinatown community. He was the executive secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, where he helped new immigrants settle in Chinatown in the early 70s. He also helped organize the annual Lunar New Year parade.
SPEAKER_06: What was his personality like? I'm just kind of curious.
SPEAKER_13: He was very, I don't know. He ran a good business. Well, you saw it in one picture of him, that was a good description of him.
SPEAKER_06: Kim was referring to a photo of Bill that he'd sent me before our interview. Bill's holding up a lobster that he had just pulled out of Hong Kong Lo's live seafood tank. He's wearing a bow tie and has this huge playful grin across his round face. He looks like a sweet, happy dad. No one I spoke with had a single bad thing to say about him.
SPEAKER_07: And luckily for Kim, Bill was open to turning Hong Kong Lo into Chinatown's second rock club.
SPEAKER_13: I said, well, let me get back with you. I'll come back tomorrow. And he said, yeah, we'll do this.
SPEAKER_07: Hong Kong Lo was a large two-story building. On the ground floor was the main dining area. And on the second floor was a private banquet room that Bill booked out for buffets and special events. The banquet room was mostly unused and their idea was to convert that space into a new club called the Hong Kong Cafe.
SPEAKER_06: Kim brought on two other partners, a woman named Susie Frank, who died in 2022, and a man named Barry Seidel.
SPEAKER_02: We opened that club not knowing that we were going to be a premier punk club. We did not know that.
SPEAKER_06: This is Barry Seidel. Like Esther Wong, Barry did not originally set out to be a champion for punk music, but he and Kim had overheard the angry grumblings of punk bands who had been booted out of Madame Wong's and they saw an opportunity.
SPEAKER_02: As soon as we opened, we realized that we had an enemy next door that was threatening all the bands. So then we started to become aware of, oh God, so many punk bands that were not being used. People were afraid of them. And we figured, what the hell? We could really do something with these bands if we can get by with it, if we can handle it.
SPEAKER_06: Barry and Kim built a stage from scratch and published a press release for the official June 5, 1979 opening of the brand new Hong Kong Cafe. It advertised the best in rock, live seafood and live entertainment.
SPEAKER_07: And every choice that Madame Wong's made, the guys at the Hong Kong purposely went the other direction. Esther made Madame Wong's 21 and up. So the Hong Kong was all ages. If Madame Wong's was going to cast out the unruly punk bands, the Hong Kong would take them in.
SPEAKER_06: Even if they were trouble.
SPEAKER_02: The first night that we were running a big punk show, everybody said, watch out for Black Randy. I said, what's that?
SPEAKER_07: They were referring to Black Randy and the Metro Squad. You know, I'm new in L.A. here, you know?
SPEAKER_02: They said, well, just watch out for Black Randy. He's a toilet breaker. I said, what's a toilet breaker?
SPEAKER_07: That one actually turned out to be pretty self-explanatory.
SPEAKER_02: So the night's over, the toilet's broken. Water all over the place. So that was one of the first lessons that we had. And if you're listening, Randy, we're on to you.
SPEAKER_06: The shows took a toll on the Hong Kong cafe, but Barry, Kim and Bill eventually worked out a deal that any damage done to the club would be taken out of the band's cut of the night.
SPEAKER_08: Bill was kind of a happy-go-lucky guy. You know, he was picking up bottles, you know, in the plaza. He always had a smile. He always had a little chuckle. And he said, hey, it's kind of like maybe a cost of doing business.
SPEAKER_06: This is Ken Chan. His family owns Phoenix Bakery, which is a business that's been in Chinatown for over 80 years. He says that in the beginning, both Esther and Bill got some pushback from the local community because of some vandalism. But Esther and Bill stuck up for the shows.
SPEAKER_08: There was some vandalism. There was some trash. You know, every night, Bill would go out there with a broom and he started sweeping up stuff. Bill would tell me, hey, you know, I got to keep the place up and running. I got to pay my rent. I got to play my staff.
SPEAKER_06: The shows and audiences could get chaotic, but it was all worth it to draw bigger crowds into Central Plaza. Bigger crowds meant more money spent at the bar and in the restaurant, which went straight to Bill.
SPEAKER_13: We were both helping each other out. He was giving us a place to do our business and he was doing well with all the people, you know, coming in. Not only would they go down and eat dinner downstairs, but then they would come upstairs and drink too, you know, and watch the bands.
SPEAKER_07: And although it was mainly a business decision for Bill, the Hong Kong cafe ended up becoming hugely important to the punk scene.
SPEAKER_12: It gave a forum to people that might have a difficult time finding a place to perform.
SPEAKER_06: Here's Alice Bag again. She appreciated that the Hong Kong was a place where artistic expression could run rampant. People like her had the freedom to get weird and experimental on stage.
SPEAKER_12: I just wanted to say that one of the most impactful shows that I saw at the Hong Kong cafe was Joanna Went. Have you ever heard of Joanna Went?
SPEAKER_06: Here's Barry again. He remembers this show very well.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Joanna came to me and she wanted to play the Hong Kong. Well, she's a performance artist and she does weird stuff. So I said, I said, what do you do? And as far as I can remember, word for word, she said, well, first I cover the stage with a plastic sheet and, and there's a lot of blood and it's kind of messy, but I clean up afterwards.
SPEAKER_06: You can watch some of Joanna Went's work online and to be honest, it will probably f*** you up a little bit. But to her credit, she did clean up afterwards.
SPEAKER_12: You know, that's something that made the Hong Kong cafe really unique, like that it would host a performance artist that was known for like being a little bit out of control for using stuff like that would get on the furniture, get on the floor, get on the customers. And they weren't afraid of that.
SPEAKER_07: And the blood soaked shows were blowing up. Kids who were turned away at the door were scaling the roof and breaking in through the air conditioning ducts.
SPEAKER_06: Kim Turner told me that one time a person was so desperate to get into a show that he fell through the vent and nearly impaled himself on the drummer's high hat. And it wasn't just punks. All sorts of people heard the buzz around the Hong Kong cafe and started showing up in Central Plaza.
SPEAKER_02: John Belushi used to come in all the time. And also Donna Summer became a friend of mine. She's very small and she loved the Hong Kong cafe. And she would come in and I'd say, Donna, you must wear this hat and go sit in that corner because if they knew that was Donna Summer, they would have ripped her apart. The disco queen, you know.
SPEAKER_07: Night after night, punk bands kept the second floor of Hong Kong lows packed, maybe even too packed.
SPEAKER_02: The place wasn't that big. I think the legal crowd in there was only 250. And we would put maybe 400 people in there. And downstairs in the restaurant, I used to get scared because you could look up at the ceiling. And when there was like 400 people in there jumping around and doing a mosh pit and everything else going on, you could see the ceiling just kind of bouncing up and down. It was kind of scary. We got busted by the fire department many times for overcrowding. Madam Wong probably called them.
SPEAKER_07: One person who is not a fan of the Hong Kong's chaotic, punk loving vibe was Esther Wong.
SPEAKER_13: She would be sitting because both clubs were on the second level.
SPEAKER_06: This is Kim Turner again, Barry's other partner at the Hong Kong. And you could see her behind her bars looking, you know, with her binoculars into our club
SPEAKER_13: seeing what was going on.
SPEAKER_07: In the beginning, Esther was actually quoted in the L.A. Times welcoming the competition in Chinatown. But that attitude quickly changed.
SPEAKER_06: She didn't talk very openly about why she didn't like the Hong Kong cafe. So it was assumed that it was just sheer territorialism on her part. But it went deeper than that.
SPEAKER_15: I think she she felt like there was a rivalry and like the Hong Kong cafe's like sort of culture was disrespectful to her.
SPEAKER_06: As far as I know, Esther didn't have a problem with Bill Hong, but she was not a fan of Barry and Kim. It may have all started when Barry took out an ad in the weekly promoting the opening of the Hong Kong cafe. Barry took a swipe at Madam Wong's by writing, You've tried the first and finest, now tried the biggest and the best. I thought it was very funny.
SPEAKER_02: She did not like that stuff at all.
SPEAKER_07: It then snowballed when Esther's then promoter instituted a three to four week cooling period for bands that played the Hong Kong. To them, it just made business sense that they wouldn't want to book a band that had just played the venue 30 yards away the night before.
SPEAKER_06: But most people interpreted this as a blanket ban on any band that played the Hong Kong cafe. This policy, along with the fact that Esther stopped booking punk bands, gave her a reputation for being vindictive. It also drew a line in the sand in Central Plaza. On one side of the courtyard was Esther Wong and her skinny tie wearing new wave bands. And on the other was the Hong Kong and the punks. Yeah, I mean, they were like steps away from each other like kitty corner.
SPEAKER_12: I am very, very close. So you can actually see like, you know, the new wave audience lined up for a show at Madam Wong's and like the punk rock audience lined up at the Hong Kong cafe.
SPEAKER_06: The LA press got wind of this tension in Chinatown and stoked the flames of the feud. The local media gave the whole clash an unfortunate nickname.
SPEAKER_02: I guess we're going to get into the Wonton Wars now. I might as well, right?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the Wonton Wars. It was also dubbed the Chinatown syndrome. And then thank God later just referred to as the Chinatown Punk Wars.
SPEAKER_07: Berry openly admits that the war between the Hong Kong and Madam Wong's was gined up by the media. The tall tale of these two warring restaurants was media gold. But the press also recast the godmother of punk into a new role because like every good story, the Chinatown Punk Wars had to have good guys and bad guys.
SPEAKER_06: And the villain was an obvious choice.
SPEAKER_02: So when the press would hear something that she would say or complain about, which was a lot of things, I guess, they would come running in, they would take her story, then they'd come to me. And I, of course, was the nice guy from New York that everybody loved. And anybody can play the Hong Kong, you know.
SPEAKER_06: He says that he remembered journalists telling him that when they came to do stories about the Hong Kong at the time, they would photograph him in flattering ways. They'd stage him with flowers and potted plants to make him look endearing, like a harmless woodland creature. But on the flip side with Esther, they would shoot her from the ground up.
SPEAKER_02: They told me that that's what they would do and because it made her look like evil.
SPEAKER_07: The Chinatown Punk Wars generated a lot of attention for the Hong Kong cafe. And Barry says at times he even took advantage of this dynamic.
SPEAKER_02: Whenever Madam Wong was not complaining, it was not good for business. So we would do something to make her complain. And then we would just, I didn't know I didn't do it. I don't know what she's talking about.
SPEAKER_06: The most infamous example of this was an elaborate prank called the Trojan Tape.
SPEAKER_07: The story involved a musician named Dwight Twilley, who was releasing a new album. At the time, clubs like Madam Wong's had sound guys who played cassettes over the speakers in between musical acts so the audience would have something to listen to. And with Dwight Twilley's new album coming out that week, Barry got an idea.
SPEAKER_02: What we did is I got my friend Kenny who does a little disc jockey kind of thing as a joke all the time. So I said, come on Kenny, listen, we're going to get the Dwight Twilley tape and very carefully open the cellophane, open the tape, and then you go to like the second cut.
SPEAKER_06: A few minutes into the cassette, Barry and his friend recorded a secret message, resealed the tape, and then sent it to Esther along with a forged note from Twilley.
SPEAKER_07: Sure enough, thinking that it was a promotional gift, Esther's sound person played the cassette in the club that night, and halfway through track two, the music cut out and a voice said, come on over to the Hong Kong, it's the best place in Chinatown, just a couple of hops
SPEAKER_02: and jumps away from you from where you are, you know, whatever. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with that. So did the press, they liked it.
SPEAKER_07: But Esther Wong did not. According to witnesses that night, Esther was fuming and lost it in front of the entire club.
SPEAKER_06: Barry had lots of stories like the Trojan Tape. As you could tell, he had a lot of fun with the Chinatown Punk Wars. Unlike Esther, he always came out on the other side unscathed.
SPEAKER_02: Madame Wong was the nasty club owner, and Barry Seidel and Kim, we were the nice guys from the East Coast that didn't want to hurt anybody. We just wanted to be good guys, you know? And that's the way it played. Some of the things we did to her behind the scenes to make her keep going because she was serious. We knew it was funny. She did not.
SPEAKER_07: It wasn't funny to Esther because she and Barry were very different people with very different stakes. Esther wasn't some young white dude who was in it for a good time. She was a 62-year-old immigrant entrepreneur who was constantly being criticized for the way she ran her business.
SPEAKER_06: In an article from 1979, Esther said of Barry and Kim, quote, They can go to hell. They're the lowest of the low. I don't want them here. I don't care what they say. They're liars. I hate them. End quote. If you just went off the context of that article, she sounded unhinged. But this was a few months after the Trojan Tape incident, and after hearing some of the things Barry put her through, I get why she seemed so angry. This was her restaurant and her livelihood.
SPEAKER_07: Her frustration was justified. But in the press and in the wider music scene, she started to earn a very specific kind of reputation.
SPEAKER_15: I think it was a stereotype, like dragon lady, they used to call her.
SPEAKER_06: Jonathan Daniel, Madam Wong's booker again.
SPEAKER_15: People didn't realize how hard it was to be a woman, you know, let alone like not a white woman doing that. Like it's insane that she did that and built it up. But people didn't realize that. All the things that were her strengths became like the things that people would pick on as a stereotype.
SPEAKER_06: Because she had the audacity to make her own business decisions and stand up for herself, Esther went from being called the godmother of punk to the dragon lady. I repeated that without really thinking about what it meant.
SPEAKER_12: Alice Bagg again. And now I realize that that is a racist term. So I want to apologize if, you know, I want to apologize for my ignorance of her for using a term like that. I think it's easy to pick on people who you might see as like having less power than other people. So if this was a club on the West Side, and it was run by an affluent white man, you might just think, oh, that's a business decision.
SPEAKER_07: Punk music in Chinatown burned bright, but it burned fast. Within a few years, the genre had evolved. And by 1981, bands like The Bags, The Alley Cats and The Dills, who helped define the sound of first wave LA punk had drifted out of the scene.
SPEAKER_06: Punk wasn't dying, but it was changing. The music was being overtaken by hardcore bands and audiences. It was faster, harder, more aggressive, and tended to bring in a very different crowd. Yeah, I think we started seeing like a skinhead ethos and also like a white male jocks getting
SPEAKER_12: into the slant pit and kind of like taking it to a place where it wasn't fun, or where the women that used to be at the front of the stage suddenly felt like uncomfortable being there because they would get, you know, they were going to get hurt.
SPEAKER_06: The party was over for the Hong Kong cafe as well. Despite its popularity, they closed down shop in 1981, after just a year and a half.
SPEAKER_02: There wasn't much money at all. And it just got to a point, Kim actually said to me, he said, I'd like to close after New Year's if that's okay. I said, it's okay with me.
SPEAKER_07: Esther stuck it out with Madam Wong's longer and the party raged on for a few more years. Her clubs managed to survive punk and the introduction of MTV in the early 1980s. But after a while, the hassle just wasn't worth it anymore.
SPEAKER_06: The improbable alliance that Esther formed with her rock-seeking customers in Chinatown had come apart. In 1986, she told the LA Times, quote, the kids that come here now, they drive me crazy. They come here and they act like spoiled brats. Some of them plugged up my toilets and one band set fire to some paper towels and set up our sprinkler system flooding the whole basement. It's got me pretty discouraged.
SPEAKER_07: After that fire in 1986, Esther announced that she was closing Madam Wong's East in Chinatown. It's not clear if she regretted the experience, but when she was asked what she would miss most, she concluded in her very straightforward way, I'll miss the bands I liked, but I don't think I'll miss anything else, not anymore.
SPEAKER_06: In 1991, after featuring bands like REM, Guns N' Roses, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madam Wong's West closed its doors as well. By this time, Esther was well into her 70s, and the music landscape was a completely different place.
SPEAKER_07: Esther Wong died from emphysema in 2005 at the age of 88, even though her legacy was disputed over the years. The LA Times eulogized her as the godmother of punk.
SPEAKER_08: Handed to them and Madam Wong's, they thought of something new. They brought another crowd in.
SPEAKER_06: This is Ken Chan from Phoenix Bakery again. Ken gets why the punk thing fascinated so many people, but he also kind of casually waves off this moment in the neighborhood's history. He's seen these fads come and go over the years.
SPEAKER_08: I think the punk rock, you know, it was an era. It was a time, but it brought people into Chinatown. I think they maybe saw something on Chinese architectural. Maybe they saw some knickknacks, but they got a little something in their memory bank. Chinatown may have been deserted, may have been closed, but we had a good time.
SPEAKER_06: These two rock clubs meant so much to people in the punk scene, but to someone like Ken, they're just a couple of stops on a walking tour of Central Plaza. These days, there are just too many bigger things to worry about. The neighborhood moved on, and after the punks left, the art galleries moved in, and then the hipster restaurants, and then the developers. Punk ended up just being a phase that, like so many people, Chinatown eventually grew out of.
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivien Leigh, edited by Kelly Prime, original music
SPEAKER_07: by Swan Rial, with Mia Byrne on guitar, sound mix by Martine Gonzalez, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Jelani Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Jason De Leon, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Jan Lin, Pamela Goodchild, Chip Kinman, and Ron Louie, whose interviews did not make it into the piece, but were super helpful to the story. And an extra special thanks to Lawrence Smith, the producer of Hollywood Heartbeat. Not only did he allow us to use that very rare interview audio of Esther Wong, he shipped Viv the DVD from across the country, above and beyond. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
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