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 t

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