The proprietors of Traditional Guilin Noodles counted the patrons of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio as regular customers.

Not so anymore — not after Jan. 21, when a gunman killed 11 as they celebrated Lunar New Year in a Monterey Park dance hall that was popular with older Asian residents of the area. 

There are no more lights or hungry dancers in the studio, which shares a wall with the restaurant near the intersection of Garvey Avenue and Garfield Avenue — it has been closed ever since. There is almost a cloud there that in some ways casts a shadow over everyone else in the suburban community and its small, family-run businesses.

“Things like this never really happen. It’s a very calm community. It’s very safe,” said Zhen Wu, whose family owns Traditional Guilin Noodles. “We never would have imagined this happening so close to home. We didn’t even know how to process it at first.”

This month marks six months since the tragedy, the memory of which lingers like a specter to those struggling to process what happened.

“The general mood was, of course, shock and sadness,” recalled Catalina Kamimura, owner of Bachan’s Take Out on South Garfield Avenue. “And then there was a very unspoken, somber feeling that we just had. We felt it everywhere.”

Asian enclave

The Garfield-Garvey intersection is certainly inviting for denizens of Monterey Park
and visitors from elsewhere in the San Gabriel Valley.

Small restaurants and eateries offer a wide variety of East and Southeast Asian cuisine, and a handful of Asian grocery stores serve as anchors that bring foot traffic to the area. It’s easy to see why there’s a large Lunar New Year celebration there each year.

“Business that day was booming,” Wu recalled. “Normally, my parents would stay here longer, but that day we wanted to celebrate Chinese New Year at home. We had the meals prepped at home already.”

Traditional Guilin Noodles usually closes at 10 p.m. That night, the family locked up and left early, around 9:30 p.m. Had they kept to their usual schedule, it’s likely they would have still been there cleaning up at 10:22 p.m., when the gunman entered the dance studio next door and began his rampage.

“We were just very fortunate that my parents weren’t here when it happened,” Wu said.

Wu’s family, like so many others in Monterey Park, is one of immigrants. His family moved there from Guangzhou, China, when he was in elementary school. His mother, who’d cooked for numerous restaurants throughout her life here, opened Traditional Guilin Noodles in 2019. Wu, who has a background in aerospace engineering, and his sister began working there, and he spends his spare time concocting new ideas to improve the restaurant’s operations.

The eatery typically attracts people passing through the area during the lunch or dinner hours — families utilizing the nearby childcare facilities, local businesspeople during lunch breaks or civil servants from nearby Monterey Park City Hall. While the Wu and his family did not personally know any of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio regulars very well, those dancers frequently ate at the noodle shop before or after dancing sessions at the studio.

Wu said the tragedy changed that dynamic.

“Foot traffic dropped pretty drastically afterwards,” he said. “Not a lot of people wanted to visit or be around this area.”

Still a cloud

Kamimura’s restaurant is farther away from the studio — around 2 miles south on Garfield Avenue, just north of the 60 Freeway. The city is small enough, however, that she and her colleagues still felt the cloud from the tragedy once the initial frenzy of law enforcement, media and politicians faded.

“After that, it seemed like not too many people wanted to talk about it,” she said. “I understand. It was hard knowing innocent people were killed up the street.”

On the night of the shooting, Kamimura and her husband — the couple have lived in Monterey Park since the 1970s — had dinner in Pasadena. They observed the police presence around the dance studio as they returned home, and by morning they’d learned fully what happened. Coincidentally, her husband had driven down to Torrance the day after the shooting, to pick up supplies from a restaurant wholesaler. Police had located the gunman’s van, in which he’d killed himself, at around the same time.

As the investigation unfolded in Monterey Park, Kamimura said the law enforcement officers and detectives would stop by her restaurant in groups.

“The general feeling that I got was that they all wanted to treat each other to lunch,” she said. “It was just this camaraderie — ‘Let’s stick together, we’re all humans.’ That was a nice thing that I noticed that Tuesday after.”

On the days following that period, the streets grew quieter, Kamimura said. The once-thriving lunch and dinner rushes were notably muted, and it would be months before diners resumed to their usual dining patterns. Though Kamimura’s lived in town for decades, Bachan’s Take Out had moved from its longtime Rosemead location to its current site only four months before the shooting.

“We’re brand new here, and we’re finding that there are still a lot of people who are just now finding out about us,” she said.

Grant helps

It was obvious that the decline in business would spell financial difficulties for Wu, Kamimura and other restaurateurs in the area, business owners in a sector with notoriously low profit margins.

The Restaurants Care Resilience Fund, a Covid-inspired initiative of the California Restaurant Foundation, recently helped out, pitching in $5,000 grants to scores of smaller restaurants throughout California that were impacted by the economic fallout of the pandemic. Traditional Guilin Noodles and Bachan’s Take Out each received the grant, along with Monterey Park restaurants The Clam House — which is located just across the street from the dance studio — and Duck House.

Wu said his restaurant gained five months of rent and employee retention bonuses with the grant, while Kamimura said she was finally able to procure new signs with updated menu prices for her restaurant. Wu noted that the added media attention from the grant announcement has put a spotlight on the plight of Monterey Park’s businesses.

“For us, we’re trying to just work, just day by day, and hopefully in time, we’ll heal,” he said. “We’re very grateful for the help.”

And there has been some community solidarity borne of the tragedy. 

Soon after the shooting, the city unfurled a banner reading “United We Dance” spanning Garfield Avenue just north of the Garvey intersection. And in the time that followed, regular customers made sure to stop by Traditional Guilin Noodles to check in on its proprietors.

“A lot of customers came here to hug my mom. That was really nice, just to make sure that we’re okay and she’s okay and checking up on us,” Wu said. “It’s very comforting knowing that we’re not fighting this alone and there’s a whole community behind us.”

Kamimura said she was unsure what to expect for the next Lunar New Year celebration. Certainly, she acknowledged, there’s plenty of reason for one to think it would be more muted, either out of respect for the shooting victims or numbness from the prior holiday.

“But at the same time,” she added, “people don’t want to be ruled by fear and sadness. They want to go out and have a good time.