Our Chinatown by Lily Xie

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ABOUT THE MURAL

“Our Chinatown” was a temporary mural created by local youth in summer 2020 and installed at 150 Kneeland Street in Chinatown.

In collaboration with Chinatown Story Cart, youth from Asian Community Development Corporation’s A-VOYCE program created personal writing and drawings about their experiences in Chinatown to fill this mural.

Read on to learn more from the youth, in their own words!

OUR VISION OUR PROCESS As AVOYCE interns, we created “Our Chinatown” to showcase the history of Chinatown and create a space to share our personal stories. We made a timeline of Chinatown’s history to teach people that walk to or from South Station, who might not know anything about Chinatown. This building is going to be torn down to build a micro-hotel, which is very ironic because it’s physically tearing down history and doing exactly what we are fighting against, which is gentrification.

Through this piece of artwork we wish to encourage others to also share their voices with Chinatown Story Cart. Through showcasing the history and our voices in the mural, we wish to activate the space and to reclaim the borders of Chinatown, even if it is temporary.

With teaching artists Lily and Crystal, we began our design process by creating a sketch in Photoshop of what we envisioned the mural would look like. We thought about what type of information we would like on the mural - this led to us deciding to present the history of Chinatown alongside our own personal stories. As a group, we agreed on the placement, color scheme, and layout of the mural.

During the installation process, posters that once covered the wall had to be scraped off. Then came two layers of pastel yellow paint. The history timeline and personal stories were printed and wheat-pasted onto the yellow background. We were pleasantly surprised that the final mural looked so much like the plan on Photoshop!

What’s in the future for Our Chinatown?

The mural will be taken down by August 24, 2020 to make way for a new micro-hotel where this building once stood. This micro-hotel is just the latest luxury development in the area that threatens to erode the already tenuous borders of our neighborhood.

While the destruction of community art for non-residential use can be taken as a defeat, it is a victory that the mural was put up in the first place! We were able to artistically and creatively bring a voice to the community and its history. This is just a stepping stone towards elevating community needs and issues to the forefront.

Artwork and writing by youth artists: Angela Guan Jung Shen Kuo Michelle Nguyen Wendy Zhu Eva Yuan Donald Ma Layout by: Lily Xie You can learn more about this project and explore the writing and art in-depth on our website at :

www.chinatownstorycart.com/our-chinatown-mural Chinatown Story Cart is created by Lily Xie & Crystal Bi Wegner in collaboration with Asian Community Development Corporation