"That was his whole dream," his wife said.
But Chin was never able to secure funding for the project. Meanwhile, the old Chinatown began to dissolve as the first waves of immigrants died and their children and grandchildren moved out of the city and let go of the old traditions.
Recent immigrants and students from China, who generally speak Mandarin, unlike the older generation who speak Cantonese, rarely visit the 300 block of Park Ave., except perhaps to pick up tea and noodles at the Potung Trading store.
"I don't think [the new Chinatown plan] is going to work because Chinese people are not concentrated in the city," says Jerry Tsang, the store owner.
On a shelf in the doorway of the store stands a statue of a warrior brandishing a sword. The warrior, Tsang explains with a chuckle, is there "to keep evil out."
Inside, the shelves are stacked with cans of soursop nectar and white lychee fruit, boxes of milk tea, jars of lotus nut paste and packages of something lacy and bone-colored labeled "dried white fungus." Handmade dumplings, whole fish and sweets including a "Winter Melon Cake" pack the freezers, and a glass case holds brightly colored packages of medicines and herbs with exotic names such as Angelica and Sea Coconut.
When Tsang opened his store in 1990 - he was attending Glen Burnie High School then - most customers were of Chinese descent. These days they make up only a small part of his business.
Most days, his wife, Ying-Hua Wu, who is eight months pregnant with their second child, works beside him. Sometimes, his parents help for a few days.
Standing beside his mother, Tsang slices the tips off creamy white stalks from bok choy cabbages and tucks the dark green leaves into bags. "I'm not going to let my children do this," he says. "It's a hard job."
Tsang chats with Jieshou Liu, a slightly stooped retired chemist who has come in for a bag of sweet rice to make into rice wine.
Liu, 72, who moved to this country in the 1980s, lives around the corner in an apartment building for seniors, but he yearns for more connections with Chinese culture. He can't find books in his native language in stores or the library and spends much of his free time watching Chinese television over the Internet.
Once the city's Chinese-American community was much more cohesive - partly because racism isolated them from other ethnic groups.
