Los Angeles Times

After 157 years in Chinatown, Los Angeles' oldest hospital shuts its doors

LOS ANGELES - Xiaoyuan Yang was pregnant and her husband Weiming Lei needed a job when they moved more than 20 years ago from Guangzhou, China, to Los Angeles.

"We knew nothing, and we didn't understand anything," Lei said. "Someone told us to live in Chinatown."

There, Yang found work at a Chinese restaurant, and their neighbors told them about a hospital just down the street where the staff spoke not only Mandarin and Cantonese, but the Toishan and Zhongshan dialects as well.

A Chinese doctor at the Pacific Alliance Medical Center gave them medical advice and taught them how insurance works. On June 1, 1995, after nearly a full day of

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