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Before last year’s inaugural Oakland Chinatown Night Market, community leaders had long dreamed of hosting a big, rollicking night market event — the sort of outdoor bash you’ll find in cities across Asia. Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council (OCIC) Executive Director Tony Trinh says the hardest part was getting the Chinatown shopkeepers and restaurant owners themselves to believe such a thing was possible.
“A lot of the merchants were very doubtful that we could pull off an event like that. Historically, Chinatown is a ghost town by like four o’clock,” Trinh says. When fears of anti-Asian violence surged during the COVID era, he explains, “Everybody was just too afraid to be out here.” As a result, only a couple of Chinatown restaurants set up booths at last year’s market. Most of the food vendors wound up coming from outside the neighborhood.
In that sense, the inaugural event was a proof of concept — a test to see if Oakland Chinatown actually could host a bustling night market. And it proved to be even more successful than Trinh and his team had dared to hope: 14,000 people poured into the streets of Chinatown on a Saturday night. Food vendors were completely sold out by 8 p.m. Even the restaurants that chose not to actively participate still benefited, reporting a 200% increase in revenue that night, Trinh says.
It’s with bolstered confidence, then, that OCIC is running the event back this year. The second annual Oakland Chinatown Night Market will take place this Saturday, Sept. 13, 5–10 p.m., bringing the neighborhood to life with a mix of street food, antique trinkets, sports and live music — this time with much more robust participation from businesses within Chinatown…