As wealthier immigrants move to the suburbs and downtown real estate gets more expensive, urban Chinatowns are at risk of becoming ghost towns.“They’ll just be tourist traps—Disneyfied. You won’t find a lot of Chinese walking around, unless they are tourists themselves,” says Leong.

America’s new Chinatowns are basically strip malls in the suburbs, says Leong. The town of Exton, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia where the average home value is about $340,000, is a good example of one. During a recent visit, I noticed a handful of Chinese restaurants and grocery stores scattered among big-box retailers like Walmart and Toys “R” Us. In 2000, only six percent of Exton’s residents were Asian. Now, about 20 percent are. Many Indian and Chinese immigrants who live there work for big financial and pharmaceutical companies in the area.

Cheryl Wang, a risk analyst for a large U.S. bank, lives in Exton with her husband and their two children. She says about half of her neighbors are Asian and the other half are white. Wang, 42, is representative of many of the new Chinese immigrants: She has two master’s degrees, one in information sciences and the other in business administration, and has spent most of adult life in the Philadelphia suburbs. She avoids Chinatown at all costs. “Our backgrounds are very different—we speak different languages,” says Wang, who speaks Mandarin. “I really dislike [Chinatown]. It's not as clean as the suburbs and there are a lot of crowds.” Wang says she prefers the peacefulness of the suburbs, where, unlike in China, she doesn’t need connections to get her children into good schools.

About 33 miles away from Exton, the Friendship Arch welcomes visitors to Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Cantonese merchants from southern China first began settling there in the late 1800s, opening up laundromats, restaurants, and grocery stores. Many had originally arrived from out west in search of gold, but the violence of white workers competing with them for jobs eventually pushed many of them to cities on the East Coast. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment across the country led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese workers from moving to the United States and from obtaining U.S. citizenship. With few exceptions, it wasn’t until the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965 that the United States began welcoming non-European immigrants again.

Now, Chinese people in the United States are more likely to come from Taiwan, and China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces, places where Mandarin is becoming more common than Cantonese. Today’s Chinese immigrants are also more likely to be wealthy, arriving in the United States with professional degrees or obtaining them at American universities. In 2014, the average annual income for a Chinese immigrant in the United States was about $38,000, more than double the average in 1990.