Opening Reception: Homeward Bound

HOMEWARD BOUND: GLOBAL INTIMACIES IN CONVERGING CHINATOWNS uses photographs, oral histories, and multimedia archives to highlight stories of migration, displacement, and everyday resilience in Chinatowns around the world. This exhibit is the first of its kind to honor, preserve, and build on the history and present day issues of Chinatowns through community-led and curated narratives from residents globally. The curators’ work centers the radical intimacies of strangers and the possibilities of narrating diasporic movement, estrangement, and belonging. Their work draws from four years of ethnographic research and oral history interviews with the Chinese diaspora that spans nine countries and thirteen cities, including: New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle, Lima, Havana, Johannesburg, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Sydney. As Chinatowns around the world continue to change and the diaspora uprooted, it is imperative that oral histories also at risk of being displaced are preserved for future generations.

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Diane Wong is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Politics and M.A. in Comparative Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration from Cornell University. Her current research focuses on intergenerational resistance to gentrification in New York, San Francisco, and Boston Chinatowns. Her work draws from a combination of methods including ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews with tenants, organizers, restaurant and garment workers, small businesses, public health workers, and elected officials. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Mellon Foundation, New York Council for the Humanities, New York Public Library, and Cornell University’s Engaged Research Program. Her work has appeared in Urban Affairs Review, Asian American Policy Review, Push/Pull, East Wind ezine, and a variety of public media outlets, edited book volumes, anthologies, and podcasts. Diane is based in New York City where she works in close collaboration with community groups like CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Chinatown Art Brigade, and The W.O.W. Project.

Huiying Bernice Chan is a writer, multimedia storyteller, and community organizer from New York City. They write on race, gender, migration, and intergenerational resistance. In 2016, Huiying received the Knafel Fellowship to travel solo to Chinatowns in eight countries around the world documenting global stories of migration and resilience across the diaspora. Their writing has recently been published in Open City Magazine, Culture Push’s PUSH/PULL Journal, The Blueshift Journal, and the Asian American Journal of Psychology. Huiying has received fellowships and awards from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, American Education Research Association, Random House, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They work closely with the Chinatown Art Brigade and The W.O.W. Project.