“Ugh, don’t call it Asiatown.” 

My dining companion sneered across the table at House of Bowls after I used the newer term to describe the neighborhood along Bellaire Boulevard. I chuckled, unwrapped my chopsticks, and corrected myself: "It's Chinatown," I reaffirmed, digging into a plate of wok-fried noodles. "I only really call it Asiatown when I have to."

The stretch between Beltway 8 and Southwest Freeway, which is formally Google-mapped as Chinatown and the Vietnamese-dominant Little Saigon, has sparked similar debates for decades. While Chinatown and Asiatown are the most common terms for the area, the neighborhood is known by many names. Some call it the southwest side, or name it after specific plazas or grocery stores they frequent (for example, Dun Huang Plaza, Hong Kong City Mall, Jusgo Supermarket). In Cantonese and Mandarin, it's 唐人街—Tong Yun Gai or Tang Ren Jie—literally, “Tang people street,” referring to the Tang Dynasty. Most simply, it's Bellaire, a reference to the boulevard. 

For me, it’s always been Chinatown. Growing up, some of my favorite memories happened on Saturday mornings, when my mom would wrangle me and my siblings into our light-blue Ford Windstar van for a 30-minute trek down to the southwest side. I’d stare out the window, waiting until we made the familiar turn from Beltway 8, where street signs began to shift into Chinese characters—Corporate Drive to 合作路, Bellaire Boulevard to 百利大道. 

Like many Chinese families in Houston, we’d spend hours in the plazas: at dim sum brunch where we’d stuff our faces with har gow and siu mai; on grocery runs for gai lan (Chinese broccoli), century eggs, White Rabbit candy, and haw flakes to stock our pantry; and final stops at New Olympic Chinese Bakery for traditional Chinese breads and Suzhi Teahouse for boba milk teas and fruit smoothies. 

Today, that landscape looks a lot different. Many veteran Chinese stores have disappeared, replaced by sleek international chains, including bubble tea brands, hot pot shops, and Korean barbecue joints. With its widening breadth of Asian cuisines and cultures, Bellaire Boulevard has been recast as "Asiatown," a term I use only to clarify the area I’m discussing for transplants, visitors, or in my professional writing. What I’ve learned: Houstonians can’t seem to agree whether that name is accurate, offensive, overdue, or just confusing.

For Beatrice Wong, co-owner of Diho Square, “Asiatown” is the more accurate descriptor for what the neighborhood has become. Her family helped build the Chinatown core along Bellaire Boulevard, beginning with their first Chinese grocery store, 99 Market, in Ding Ho Square. Also known as Ding Ho Guang Chang (頂好廣場), the hub sold affordable groceries to both the city’s large Chinese community and the local Hoa population, Cantonese-speaking Vietnamese people of Han Chinese descent. “At that time, there was no global market. There was no globalization, so it was very hard to buy Asian goods at a cheap price,” she says. 

In the 1980s, the neighborhood reached its peak as a Chinese enclave, dominated by businesses that used Cantonese as their primary language, Beatrice recalls. Over time, that core aged, younger shoppers drifted away, and the customer base grew more diverse. When Bellaire Food Street opened in 2020, the strip center added Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Malaysian dining options, as well as more international chains to the boulevard. The transformation accelerated. 

The Wongs adapted. They rebranded Ding Ho Guang Chang as Diho Square, also known as D2 or “D-Square,” renovated the exterior, and diversified the tenants. “My family’s goal was to make sure everything was affordable and that Chinatown, or Asiatown, serves everyone," she says. Longtime Chinese standbys like Hong Kong's Cafe, Shanghai Restaurant, and Tapioca House have remained, but Korean barbecue joints, Japanese ramen spots, shabu-shabu chains, and even a Vietnamese dessert café moved in, too. 

As the cuisine offerings evolved, Beatrice noticed that conversations surrounding the Asiatown vs. Chinatown debate changed as well. Many argued in heated exchanges online that Chinatown was now “Asiatown.” But for Beatrice, it was far less emotional and more pragmatic.  She likens the newer cultural moniker to a name change after marriage: It may feel abrupt or strange at first, but in the end, you’re still the same person. 

“We just acknowledge the evolution of the area,” Beatrice says. “…To [some], it's always going to be Chinatown, because that's how they love it. And to others, it will just be Asiatown because they care about the experience of diversity.”

Not everyone agrees. Houston chef Sherman Yeung dislikes “Asiatown” for the opposite reason.

“It generalizes the culture and…doesn’t highlight the specific area where the food comes from,” says the restaurateur behind Katy’s Tobiuo.

He remembers Bellaire Boulevard in its heyday: dining at Chinese mainstays like Yuan Ten and Tan Do, followed by a trip to one of the grocery stores; hearing Cantonese chatter from diners, cashiers, and shop owners; and the unmistakable feeling of being in a Chinese district. As he got older, he watched the neighborhood change, he says. Several longtime mom-and-pop shops closed, paving the way for larger, more generalized establishments that appealed to broader crowds, and major apartment complexes were demolished to make way for trendier concepts. Still, the nooks and crannies—the core—of Bellaire Boulevard are Chinatown, he says. The neighborhood still offers a variety of services catering to the Chinese population, including grocery stores, banks, apartments, and remains home to Houston’s Chinese Community Center. Cantonese is still commonly spoken, though Mandarin is now more prevalent.

“If you just say Asiatown, it kind of dilutes all those cultures into just [one] culture,” he explains. It’s a familiar problem in American culture, where many people still lump all Asian cultures together. Specificity—calling it Chinatown—allows people to learn and pay homage to the history, he says.

For Houston transplants Nick Wong and Lisa Lee, the name “Asiatown” feels right. The co-owners of the Heights Asian American diner, Agnes and Sherman, spent much of their lives in New York City and San Francisco, where Chinatowns are historic, walkable areas with dense Chinese populations. A visit to Houston’s notably smaller, younger, and more diverse Chinatown, then, was puzzling. Bellaire Boulevard, with its massive sprawl, is an amalgam of car-friendly strip malls stuffed with award-winning restaurants, dentist offices, and hair salons, anchored by major Asian grocery stores across a few city blocks. Dialects of Chinese are spoken alongside Vietnamese, English, and Spanish, and non-Chinese visitors are the dominant group. Houston's enclave didn’t resemble the Chinatowns they were accustomed to, but calling it “Asiatown” also felt odd, Nick says. He decided on “Bellaire,” then quickly realized that the boulevard could be confused with Bellaire, the city. 

No name has really felt right, he says, but each is accurate in some way. “Bellaire Boulevard” feels the most geographically accurate, and while the history of Chinese and other Asian cultures isn’t explicit in its title, most diners still infer, based on personal experience, memories, and observations, that Asian businesses dominate the area. Houstonians are known to intuitively project the context for the cuisines they expect, Nick says, likening it to how diners know that sprawling streets like Hillcroft Avenue and Long Point Road are home to specific cuisines, such as Indian, Pakistani, Persian, and Korean restaurants.

Demographically, “Asiatown” feels the truest. “Is it really a Chinatown?” Nick asks. “If it’s majority Vietnamese folks living there, how would they be able to start calling it Chinatown?”

Lee, who worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles in the tech industry, adds that the term “Chinatown” has racially fraught origins, similar to “Chinamen,” which was historically used to label any cluster of Asian individuals, regardless of background or ethnicity. “White people needed a shortcut,” she says, and “every place that [had] more than two Asian people just became Chinatown.”

The naming becomes even more complicated when you realize that Houston’s original Chinatown was actually in the Downtown and East Downtown areas, Nick says. 

Chinese immigrants arrived in Houston via Galveston as early as the 1870s to help build the Houston and Central Texas Railroad. By the 1930s, a small Chinese business district had formed near today’s Alley Theatre, says Melody Li, an associate professor of UH’s Chinese Studies department, who maps the Old Chinatown district through archival and oral histories. Around 10 years later, Houston had more than 500 Chinese residents, many of whom opened businesses near East Downtown, where rent was cheaper. 

A vibrant community of thriving businesses, social services, and community centers soon followed, say scholars Zen Zheng and Yali Zou (the duo researched both Chinatowns for their cowritten book, The Significance of Chinatown Development to a Multicultural America: An Exploration of the Houston Chinatowns). Old Chinatown began to take shape in 1951, when the Houston chapter of the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association debuted its first three-story building. Housed at 801 Chartres St, the association’s building operated as a community and business center. A gathering space for local organizations, the association also hosted mahjong games, a dormitory for newly arrived bachelors, ancestral worship, and cultural celebrations, including Lunar New Year parties and weddings, Zheng says. Nearby, the Chinese Baptist Church served as a social and religious center.

Then came the downtown revitalization in the 1970s. The city invested $1.5 billion in new development, including the George R. Brown Convention Center, but the flourishing Old Chinatown and its residents were excluded. “George R. Brown Convention Center really was the culprit for the demise of the lower Chinese neighborhood, because it cut off several key accesses from the Old Chinatown to Downtown,” Zheng says.

The development of US-59 in the 1980s further strangled arterial streets and “physically and psychologically separated the Chinese neighborhood from the downtown core,” he explains. Businesses and foot traffic in Chinatown declined, and the Chinese community slowly but surely left Downtown. The once vibrant On Leong building was demolished in the 1990s to make way for the convention center, and by the 2000s, most of the community had migrated south to Bellaire Boulevard, creating what Zheng and Zou call “New Chinatown.”

This name acknowledges the history of Houston’s original Chinatown while highlighting the neighborhood’s cultural significance. “The danger of naming this area ‘Asiatown,’” Zheng warns, “is to oversimplify and misrepresent the actual cultural composition of this area. After all, this area was started by Chinese entrepreneurs, and it's deeply rooted in Chinese tradition and heritage.”

With so much history, who gets to decide what Bellaire Boulevard is called? While “Asiatown” acknowledges the area’s modern diversity, “Chinatown” preserves the legacy of the families who built it. Still, no single term fully captures its nuance.

“Language is imperfect,” Nick says, “but having context is what really matters.”

For Lee, the priority is education.
For Yeung and scholars, it’s preservation.
For longtime Houstonians, it’s memory.
For transplants, it’s clarity and diversity. 
For Beatrice Wong, it’s simply how people relate to the neighborhood itself.  

What matters is understanding why those names carry meaning at all.