Also this issue: Icepack -A.D. Amorosi

November 14-20, 2002

naked city

Voices of Chinatown

She Knows This Town: Police Officer Cate Fan-Rawlings at the wheel of her squad car. Photo By: Rodney Atienza

An oral history of a changing neighborhood.

by Kevin Plunkett

Behind the parking lot of the Holy Redeemer Church and School, ground was broken at Ninth and Wood streets over the summer for the Sing Wah Yuen townhouses, cousin to neighboring seven-year-old Hing Wah Yuen -- the first housing complex erected north of the Vine Street Expressway to accommodate Chinatown's burgeoning growth.

In such construction lies the future of Chinatown. A few blocks west, the Asian Arts Initiative is opening doors to the neighborhoods present and past.

The photo exhibition, Chinatown: Scene Unseen, opened recently at the Initiatives 13th and Cherry Street gallery. A look at Chinatowns across the country and the world, the display includes photos of people involved in a project with a more local focus: Beyond Borders: Oral Histories from Philadelphias Chinatown. These interviews with 17 Chinatown residents and workers, conducted by the Initiative last spring, represent an important step toward creating a living history of the over-4,000-strong neighborhood -- a history often obscured by stereotypes and language barriers.

Project coordinator Lena Sze, a native of New Yorks Chinatown, said recording the voices of Chinatown today was the impetus. Part of the idea was to try to challenge the notion that this community is just a tourist site or a site of cultural entertainment.

The two-hour interviews reflect the neighborhoods diversity. Subjects ranged in age from 17 to 82, with roots in China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. English, Mandarin, Cantonese and several dialects of Chinese were spoken.

Dr. Kathryn Wilson, director of education and interpretation at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, helped train staff from the Initiative and volunteers from several local colleges in conducting oral history interviews. Sze, 23, a recent Swarthmore graduate, also received assistance from the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New Yorks Chinatown for the first-time project.

Work was an overarching theme, Sze says. We are trying to give testimony to the history of work that has created Chinatown.

One interviewee was a 23-year-old Chinese Malaysian waiter employed at two Chinatown restaurants, who labored at factories in Malaysia and Singapore before emigrating. When people talk about migration for economic purposes and globalization in a very theoretical way, observes Sze, it was amazing for me to see how that process of flow of resources and people and labor actually happens, because he experienced it.

What Chinatown is today -- a bustling and increasingly affluent 20 square blocks of homes, churches, markets and offices, computer stores and cultural institutions, Asian fusion restaurants and trendy bubble tea cafs -- appears nearly a mirage to several older oral narrative participants.

William Chin, the owner of Joes Peking Duck House, and Joseph Eng, an 82-year-old World War II Navy submarine vet and retired Philadelphia Navy Yard worker, recalled a different world entirely: a gritty, municipally neglected interzone, almost deserted, lacking any community facilities. The men described a bachelor society of Cantonese immigrant men working to save enough money to bring over their wives from China and Hong Kong. That Chinatown was Philadelphias red-light district -- a tenderloin of saloons, burlesque houses and gambling dens that proliferated because Chinatown possessed neither political nor financial leverage to oppose anything.

One woman in her 40s who works in a laundry described a poverty-stricken childhood in Hong Kong, followed by employment at a Chinatown clothing factory where she sewed buttons for $1.60 an hour. Cate Fan-Rawlings, a community relations police officer for Chinatowns Sixth District headquarters, has happier memories: coming to Chinatown in the early 1970s with her parents from their West Philadelphia home to eat Chinese food on Sundays, going to New Years Eve celebrations so bundled up I could barely see what was going on. I distinctly remember the smell of sulfur from firecrackers and, of course, the boom of firecrackers and hearing the clanging of chimes. And I remember seeing the lions dance.

A majority of the people interviewed spoke with evident pride of the two successful grassroots battles fought by Chinatowns residents against the city: the nearly 20-year effort to preserve the Holy Redeemer Church and School from demolition to make way for the Vine Street Expressway, and the fight in 2000 against plans for building a Phillies stadium in the heart of Chinatowns expansion zone.

Cecilia Moy Yep is the retired founder of Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, which spearheaded the fight to save Holy Redeemer and has worked to provide affordable housing for Chinatowns residents. In her interview, she explained those years from the mid-1960s through the 70s.

We didnt have any money, we didnt have any political power and we didnt have the numbers, said Yep. So the fact that we won that battle says something about the community. One thing we do have is perseverance and determination.

Today, a new wave of arrivals from all over Asia and the world is enlarging and redefining Chinatown. Summing up the 132-year-old neighborhood she has known since birth, Fan-Rawlings said, Despite the literal obstacles placed in Chinatown over the past hundred years, Chinatown has survived and it has thrived and will continue to do so. It will take more than bricks and mortar to break Chinatown, or to separate it. It will always be here.

“Chinatown: Scene Unseen,” photographs by Rodney Atienza, Asian Arts Initiative,1315 Cherry St., second floor, 215-557-0455. An overview of “Beyond Borders: Oral Histories from Philadelphia’s Chinatown” is available at www.asianartsinitiative.org/oralhistory/. Oral narrative transcripts are available by appointment with Lena Sze.