"I’m Going to the Atomic Café!" Intersecting Histories of Asian-Owned Venues and California Punk

“Look out, get out of my way! I’m going to the Atomic Café,” sings Milo Auckerman, the singer punk band, the Descendants, in the problematic song, “Kabuki Girl.” The song resounds, in spite of itself, to the importance of the Asian-owned venues as constitutive of California punk. It also reveals the racialized and gendered formations of Orientalism and exoticism that have marked U.S. popular culture and punk subcultural expressivity (Liu 2021). Waves of Southeast and East Asian immigration have been constitutive in the economic, social, and cultural milieus of California cityscapes, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Many fled their homelands due to hardship, such as war or political strife (Ngô 2012). Businesses, such as restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, generated income and offered meeting places with culinary, musical, and other aesthetic reminders of home for the diasporic community. During the 1970s recession, tourism declined, reducing profits in L.A.’s Little Tokyo and Chinatown and San Francisco’s North Beach area. Simultaneously, early punk bands struggled to find places to perform. Drawing on archival and interviews, this presentation focuses on the importance of Asian-owned businesses as infrastructural necessity for the growth of punk and new wave music (based on the curatorial choices of Esther Wong, owner and booker for Madame Wong’s). In doing so, I document the histories of four venues—Atomic Café (Little Tokyo, LA), Madame Wong’s and Hong Kong Café (Chinatown, LA), and Filipino-owned Mabuhay Gardens (North Beach, SF)—and how they created the conditions to become “spaces of survival” (Sekizawa 2023) for both the diasporic communities and punks. In addition, I also explore tensions that emerged between the differently marginalized communities, particularly in terms of the problematic racialized and gendered stereotypes mapped onto some of the club owners.