Pacific Rim

I met Ted Lee, chairman of San Francisco-based Urban Land Co., about a year ago in Hong Kong. I was in the city for an International journalism convention and he was there to help promote better understanding across the Pacific - having lived through what happened between Japan and the U.S. in World War II.

  I was introduced to him as a real estate and land development reporter in Sacramento, where he happened to have developed and built a vital part of downtown Sacramento's redevelopment - the Chinatown Mall.  At the time it was called the Chinatown Renaissance Project.

   Lee told me about growing up in Stockton, a city about an hour south of Sacramento, and learning the fundamentals of real state and urban planning at Harvard and UC Berkeley. It was from Lee that I learned first that Asian governments had steered clear of Wall Street's subprime junk on the global market and thus, hadn't stumbled badly when those investments went to hell in 2008.

  A few weeks ago I walked through the Chinatown Mall on a lunch break and took the pictures that follow. The Mall is a distinctive part of the downtown Sacramento landscape - and gives the city a nice aura of being on the Pacific Rim when Europe is ailing and all signs in California and Asia point to the Pacific Century.

Public Square

The last pay phone in California (not working)

I Street Gate

I

I have the sense that Chinatown Mall is an older generation's idea of China. It contains a traditional Confucian school and a temple, and a statutory tribute to the founder of modern China, Sun Yat Sen.

Here's a similar memorial to Sun Yat Sen on the grounds of Hong Kong University.