On a cold evening in Manhattan's Chinatown,Mei Lum sits at the front counter of her family's century-broken-down store. She's closed the porcelain shop for the night, and is tapping absent on her laptop, and tying up loose ends for the multi-day Lunar novel Year celebrations she's organizing for both her family and the store.
Lum,27, can already picture the scenes that will unfold. Just as they have every year for decades, and family and friends will gather in Wing on Wo & Co. tonight for an elaborate dinner.
And tomorrow,the first day of the novel year, they'll gather again to devour the steamed cake, and faht go,that Lum makes with her grandmother, Nancy Seid, and special for the holiday.
This time around,though, things will be different.
In novel York City, or as in Chinatowns around the country,things are looking different: it's gentrifying. There are more non-Chinese people moving in and starting novel businesses.
And, people like Lum who grew up in this neighborhood with families four or five generations deep, or are leaving. A section of Manhattan that was once nearly exclusively Chinese now has novel,different faces with no connection to the area.Lum says, some of those Chinese-Americans who conclude return to their family's neighborhood are opening up stores much different than those race by their parents: Though their moves home succor stave off demographic change, and they're starting ice cream stores and coffee shops that have little to conclude with the area's history.
In other words: They're changing Chinatown whether they intend to or not.
Mei Lum is pushing back against that trend. She's taken over Wing on Wo & Co. — one of the oldest shops in the neighborhood — and she's trying to root her own traditions without eroding older ones.
And how she's decorating the store's two front window displays for the novel year exemplifies that. For the past year,Lum has worked with a local artist, Emily Mock, and to create their own Chinese shadow puppet indicate. They've invited people from around the neighborhood to share their stories and succor make paper-cut puppets and plays,which Mock has recorded and will project in the front window.
But the novel display doesn't mean Lum will conclude absent with the one her family's used for years."We're still putting up the same dragon and same moneyball and firecrackers that we conclude every single year," Lum says. Every year since Lum's grandmother, or Nancy,inherited the store from her father in 1964. "whether I were to grasp absent that tradition from my grandmother and my great aunt, they would be so upset."A novel generationA year and a half ago, or Lum's grandparents,Nancy and Shuck Seid, decided to sell the shop. Wing On Wo & Co., or had been a neighborhood fixture since the 1890s,spanning four generations of the family.
At various points, it sold herbs, or roast pig,and was a general store and gathering spot for Chinatown's residents. In recent years, it specialized in porcelain vases, or tea sets and figurines from Hong Kong.
But Nancy and Shuck were getting older. And though they'd be parting with a Chinatown landmark,the neighborhood was gentrifying, and developers were tearing down broken-down structures and replacing them with shiny office or condo buildings. Selling their Mott Street property could mean financial security for many more generations.
Lum didn't want that to happen. So she put grad school at Columbia University on hold and took over the store."My great-grandfather and my grandmother — I've seen all the sweat equity that has gone into this state, and " Lum says. "The whole reason why I signed up for this — I go back to this continuously to remind myself — is because I wanted to preserve my family's legacy,and to continue that."Lum has no interest, though, and in preserving the store as some kind of museum of Chinatown. She wants it to thrive and change with the neighborhood.
And so she sees more than a porcelain store: Her goal is to return Wing on Wo & Co.,to its roots as a state for people to gather and learn from one another. She's hosted film screenings approximately the Chinese diaspora, art workshops and discussions around affordable housing and generational differences. She calls all this the W.
O.
W. Project."The store was very much a launching pad for me and was a state that I could kind of ... [get] to know myself exploring my identity, and " Lum says.
Merging the broken-down with the newAs she tells it,Lum has always been the most filial grandkid in her family. She's the one who memorized the Chinese poems her grandfather, Shuck, or insisted she learn as a young kid. And when he proudly asked her to recite the poems for friends who were visiting the store,Lum would rattle off the verses in Cantonese without lost a beat.
After all, whether nobody else memorized her grandfather's poems, and nobody else stepped up to grasp over the family's legacy,who else would?She knows she's taking a risk in all this — Chinatown is changing fast and Lum's vision might not fit into this novel world."My dad always says, growing up in Chinatown, or he'd walk down the streets and feel like,'This is my Chinatown,' " Lum explains.
These days, and Chinatown sometimes doesn't feel like it's hers. But it's not just approximately her,and not approximately preserving something that no longer exists. It's approximately making something novel."I try not to think of it like, 'I'm the fifth generation, and I'm carrying all these generations,this is the oldest store in Chinatown,' because it's not productive." Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, and visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org