Chinatown in the 21st Century – Tradition and Innovation: Growth of Chinatown Through Arts and Culture

Thomas Tam: 9-11 really affected Chinatown’s economy. It also affected other social sectors. What is the effect on Chinatown’s arts and cultural agencies?

Charles Lai: That is a tough question, because the way the question is framed suggests that different sectors of the community are separated. Historically, that’s how the community has functioned. The non-profit sector with the art: organizations and social services agencies each doing their own thing; much of it is just for survival. There is so much work to do that there is not even time to build the necessary coalition. That’s how the arts organizations are not working with the social service agencies for collective funding.

Given the significant impact of 911 on Chinatown, our entire community literally stopped. Economically, there was a loss of jobs, not temporarily, but long-lasting. The primary occupations are in garment, restaurant and other service industries. When there is high economic stoppage and the jobs are not coming back, there’s not enough money to keep the household going. When the garment industry is not functioning, they can’t spend money in the restaurants. When there is not enough money in the restaurant business then everybody is laid off. Subsequently, parents are scraping around to afford the necessities. They need to put money on the table to feed the kids.

Of course, there are some kids traumatized by September 11. If they are not doing well in school, that is a double whammy for the parents who have to figure out the stresses of economics and school. At the same time, the school system and some social service agencies have to deal with these issues. That is how the economic situation seeps into the non-profit community.

How do you get people to come back to the community? The marketing of Chinatown is more than just a three dollar lunch or a six dollar dinner; it’s the total experience of Chinatown. This is where the arts and culture community fits into this grand scheme. We are all in the same boat; unless we work together, our community will not survive. Our entire community, with its different sectors, personal, and political viewpoints, must recognize this interconnected web. We actually depend on each other to do well. We need to do well simultaneously and not one before the other.

Thomas Tam: You talk about the need for coalition not only for businesses, but together with the arts and culture agencies. In terms of funding, what’s the situation? Is it optimistic or pessimistic? Amy, do you want to address that?

Amy Chin: What? Is it because I work with funding sources?

Thomas Tam: Let’s just say, you are more connected.

Amy Chin: Well, I wouldn’t say that. I agree with Charlie that it is really important for the non-profit and especially the arts community to connect to other sectors of the Chinatown community. Only by working together can we build a force that is greater than the sum of the whole.

After September 11, Chinatown was hit very hard and it was virtually shut down from the rest of the city and the world.

In the weeks that we couldn’t get back to our office, I was in the playground outside Chinatown and I heard someone call my name. I turned around; it was a five year old girl who comes to our center to take dance and art classes. Her parents ran up to me and said, “Are you guys opened yet?” This was only two or three days after the attack. I said, “No, but we hope soon.” It was strange to me that it would be the first thing they would ask. It said to me how important the arts were to the sense of well-being and the sense of community. That moment continues to move me today.

As much as Chinatown experienced the impact of 9-11, the arts groups in Chinatown experienced it tenfold. In a year or so after the attack, Councilman Gerson called together a meeting which evolved into an organization called CREATE, the Committee to Revitalize and Enrich the Arts in Tomorrow’s Economy in Chinatown. We’ve been working steadily trying to get funding and support for a world class arts center to be built in Chinatown. It will be a home for the many arts and cultural groups in Chinatown. It took a disaster like Sept. 11 for artists and people who have worked in Chinatown for a long time to ask ourselves, “How can we strengthen the arts?” The arts are the third leg of the stool for Chinatown.

My husband grew up in the suburb of Detroit. They have their own Chinese schools and grocery stores, with real Chinese food, not Chop Suey. If you look at NYC Chinatown, you have to say, what is going to make it relevant in the next decade? I can’t help but think that it is the culture and the arts. With the Chinese folk dance company, I’ve traveled to 26 states. There are small dance and language schools; nothing on the scale that you have here in New York City; not the concentration of talent, interest and support for the arts.

Real estate in lower Manhattan is obscenely expensive. At the end of October, we are going to see a doubling of our rent. It is going be a real struggle for us. We’ve looked around, and you know what, even though our rent is doubling to $8,000 a month, it’s still cheaper than anything we can get in the Chinatown neighborhood.

People say, “Why don’t you move to Long Island City? Why don’t you move to Flushing? It’s cheaper there.” If I go to Flushing, I will lose my audience from New Jersey. I will lose them from other places. I have families that come in by ferry and subway from Staten Island to Chinatown to take classes. It’s a whole family day. They go to the museum. They go to eat and things like that. They all converge here. We can’t have that critical mass if we were elsewhere.

Thomas Tam: You gave us a good presentation of the problems that art centers face and also some of the opportunities.

Robert Lee: As soon as September 11th hit, foundations started to give us funding, because we belong to groups that are in lower Manhattan. We knew then that the disaster was going to affect the stock market; the stock market was going to affect the foundations; it would be the second year, not the first year after September 11, that funding would be very difficult.

We took a chance and brought on an assistant to help us fund raise immediately. Unfortunately, that did not help and this became a very hard year.

About a year after September 11, people began to talk about helping the arts community. We got speeches from the governor, the mayor, and our city councilman Alan Gerson to help create what might be the first major arts building complex in Chinatown . It’s ironic that this is at a time when it’s difficult for us to survive, but this is what’s happening.

Thomas Tam: What is the situation in terms of not enough space for the development of arts and culture? You want to comment on that maybe?

Charles Lai: We are all in the same boat. Bob and Amy have been in the community for twenty or thirty years. Every year, the city and the state get into a budget dance…

W henever there is a budgetary consideration, arts and culture are the first to be on the chopping block. It is through people like Alan and the City Council that these programs are supported. But the dance continues. The administration would cut the funding. Council members would put that money back on the budget, with a bit less. Then, it comes off sounding like a victory for the people of the city and the state. In fact, our overall art budget, on a continuous basis, is on a decline.

Amy Chin: On a brighter side, a major increase was just passed for the National Endowment for the Arts in the House.

[Clapping]

Charles Lai: Slowly, and through a lot of work from all kinds of people, we begin to find the value of arts and culture today. The other part of it is just that, in terms of space, each week more than 200 people flow through her office studio. When Bob had a program, people were running up and down the stairs. At our own programs, we are limited by our small space. Fortunately for us, we have a local businessman that thinks in a very creative way; he offers a partnership with us so that our exhibits are in his café. We make attempts to work with local churches; we have a little piece of our work in front of the church. These are the kind of things that we must do; it’s extremely tight and very difficult.

Thomas Tam: On the one hand, you say it’s extremely tight, on the other hand, you seem to have a lot of community interest in it. You also have councilman Alan Gerson very involved with arts funding, so what kind of problems do you have now? It seems like you’re doing okay.

Amy Chin: These things happened by sheer will for a lot of us here. We are used to doing so much with so little. Unfortunately, people say, “You guys do great work. What are you talking about? What are you complaining about?”

Charles Lai: It has taken us 20 or 30 years to get to where we are. These Asian American organizations, even though they have been around for a long time, are still very fragile.

Amy Chin: The main issue is that nobody has funded the underpinnings, because it’s not a sexy thing to fund. They’ll fund the exhibit and they’ll put their names on it. What we’re talking about is the infrastructure. How do you fund the spaces? How do you fund the core staff that run these things? Those are the things that needs funding. For our Chinese New Year’s show, we get 3,000 people to show up one year; we can’t do it in Chinatown because there is no space. We had to do it at New York University and Emigrant Savings Bank. They sponsored that event, but there’s still the rest of the year to worry about. Our program could all be bigger if we had investments in capacity and infrastructure. Those are the things for which we are having a lot of difficulty getting funded.

Charles Lai: I recently heard of a conversation among foundations across the country; apparently, there is talk that funding of ethnic organizations is no longer valid. This development would be very dangerous for the kind of diversity and the kind of country we want to build. We would have to make it on our own bootstraps; disadvantaged communities would not be given support and recognition.

Alan Gerson: First of all, the reason that the arts in Chinatown are doing well is because of all of you on this panel. The commitment of the people in the artistic field, whose creativity transcends the particular work of art, leads us to find new ways of exhibiting and producing various art forms. Take Chinatown as a case study, we have magnificent cultural expressions and artistic developments taking place everyday.

The argument I have made to the funders as we seek funding for a state of the art facility is: if we’re doing as well as we are doing now with the dilapidated, overcrowded, and in many cases, unsafe facilities where people produce magnificent results, imagine the showcase we would have, the expanded potentials which could be reached, and the greater number of people who could benefit if we can work in a state of the art facility. The facility will begin to approach the magnificence of the underlying art.

Historically, there is a terrible failure on the part of policy makers to recognize the arts and cultural sector as a critical component in the fabric of the city of New York, along with our business sectors.

It is always an afterthought. For example, before SoHo became SoHo , it was a dilapidated neighborhood that was in transition. No one was available to fill in the spaces. “Send in the artists; let them deal with the old manufacturing lofts.” When things pick up, the artists have to go; that’s just the way it is. Take a look at our public school system. When there are budget cuts, arts education was one of the first things to go.

The good news is that there is growing recognition that this historic attitude has to change. In the context of lower Manhattan ‘s redevelopment, there was an early recognition that cultural facilities need to be an important component, that culture and arts are a) good for the economy and have been demonstrated numerous times; b) valuable in themselves.

We’re seeing more and more policy makers responding to proposals to put aside adequate space and to put in place the necessary infrastructure for arts and culture.

We came up with a proposal to fund a state-of-the-art facility in Chinatown that will provide space to various arts organizations and institutions. We had to pull some teeth but we got funding from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for a study grant. The good news is that we’re gaining some momentum.

Thomas Tam: We are very much in support of the development of arts and culture in Chinatown . We believe that the issues of alienation and identity within Asian American community can be addressed through cultural and artistic expressions. Among the panelists here, we have Charlie who works with Chinese American historical aspects; we have Amy who works with culture from China; we have Bob who works with contemporary Asian American art. We have a whole range of perspectives represented here.

As we look forward to the next five years or perhaps the next 25 years, what is going to happen?

Charles Lai: We hope that these promises will be fulfilled and that major funding will come. We are talking about millions of dollars to make an arts complex, an arts building. They’re not going to give us 100% of the money.

We need to see our community come out to raise funds to match what we hope to get. Can we do a national campaign and raise millions of dollars to match funding that might come from the city, state and corporations? If we can get through that hurdle, then we will see the arts really become the anchor that Alan talks about, the anchor for the economy of the community. Are the arts really going to make our community prosper? We would have to convince a lot of business people in Chinatown that this is the case. Our cultural assets from Asia are being exploited uptown. It brings tons of people and money and it is an anchor for institutions and businesses uptown. How come we do not have the foresight to realize that the arts can do that for our community downtown? Once we can convince our community and business leaders that this is the case, if we can operate on such a scale, and the arts building will actually happen, we can have a major exhibition coming from other parts of Asia, not just China, but Japan, India, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia. All of these places are dying to exhibit in New York City. We can put on those shows, and people will come to Chinatown. They’ll see how we integrate Asian American culture and Asian American activism. It’s something that links what Asian Americans are doing in the arts to what is happening to Asians. People will see a different presence of Asian American culture.

Thomas Tam: Amy, Your China folkdance focused on China. How is that going to affect people’s perception of Chinese Americans?

Amy Chin: There are multiple levels to it. I was at a school in the Bronx yesterday. We were doing an educational program for a largely African American and Hispanic population. During the first part of the presentation, there was this kid in the corner who said, “Hey Ching Chong Charlie” to me. I singled out the kid and said, “You know, if you’ve said that to a Chinese person in China who doesn’t speak any English, you would sound stupid to them.”

The arts is really an entry way and we launched into a language lesson with the kids. “What’s a good thing to say to somebody who speaks Chinese when you first meet him?” So we learn how to say things like “How are you?” and things like that. At the end of the program, they saw the dance and learned a little bit of the language. Somehow, now they have a connection from the South Bronx to this culture that’s half way across the world. When the kid goes to the Chinese takeout restaurant next time, he’ll probably say “NI HOW” instead of “Ching Chong Charlie.”

Alan Gerson : How old were those kids? I’m curious because of their reactions.

Amy Chin: They were mostly third graders in that group so they were nine and ten years old. What’s interesting about our student body is that they come from everywhere. We have American born Chinese; we have immigrant kids whose parents work in the restaurants; we have middle class kids whose parents work in white collar jobs; and then we have this expanding group of Chinese kids who have been adopted by non-Chinese families. Even their friends who are not Chinese would come to our center to learn traditional art and dance.

Art is a way of communicating across all of these myriad economic, geographic, and cultural barriers. That provides for a cross-pollination of cultures, which is going to bring forth a new art in our next generation. It provides the authentic materials that contemporary Asian American artists want to draw upon. 20 years ago, when I went to see some contemporary Asian American performance, I would cringe because the artists were using stereotypes that were communicated to them through mass media, not knowing its authenticity. I remember reading an essay that Maxine Hong Kinston wrote, and she said: “I started writing and I started doing all this investigation because I had to find out what was real and what wasn’t.” Whether it was contemporary or traditional, it’s very important in the formation of our identities.

Thomas Tam: Charlie, in terms of Chinese American identity, I am intrigued by the exhibitions you put together such as the reunion of people who graduated from P.S. 23, fifty years ago. It’s amazing. This is really what the collective memory of being Chinese American is all about, isn’t it?

Charles Lai: We are staring through the ages and asking who we are as a people; how we have carved out a piece of land and survived, paving the necessary steps for those who follow. The reunion involved many old timers that have been around. The history that Chinese were not welcomed in this country, yet they were well utilized in the building of the railroads has not been well recorded.

To this day, you talked about how kids, nine or ten years old, are saying things that are extremely offensive. How many years has it been since Martin Luther King Jr. talked about a world where people can see and respect each other as who they are? Yet, often times, we find people of color to be the most narrow in the interpretation as to who belongs and who does not belong. That’s a real set of issues.

I’m not directly answering the question as to what is the quest for identity. When I was younger, I thought that in order to be a “true” Asian American, I would need to come back and work in Chinatown. For those who have created that piece of space we called Chinatown, they had to go through a lot. They had to survive in a land during a time when there was no other Chinese. The families were few, yet they made it possible for teeming communities to be established, not just in the Lower East Side, but in the Metropolitan New York Area.

We had to figure out a way where the arts can educate others who are in the school system. The United States is made up of immigrants; we cannot forget that. This historical amnesia must stop. We must pay due respect to this thing that we are talking about: “diversity.” We need to make it much more substantive.

Thomas Tam: As an enlightened political leader who understands the contributions of art and culture, what kind of advice do you have for people as we go forward in the next 20 years?

Alan Gerson: Usually, it’s the other way around; the panelists are the ones that give me the advice and tell me what to do. I appreciate your description of me as someone who is always seeking to be enlightened in this never-ending quest in life. Two pieces of advice: One is for the folks in the art world and that includes the world of historians and archivists; you all have to keep on doing what you do best, whether it is traditional or contemporary; through museums or productions, you must tell the story, develop the art, push the barriers, and go over the cutting edge. We need you to do that because we all benefit from that, on multiple levels.

The other thing that artists need to do is to get involved with the political process. Democracy responds to people and organizations which exercise the democratic rights, and that is to tell people like myself that the community needs the art sector to be recognized. You can demand that we provide the infrastructure. That’s an important word because it communicates what needs to be done, at the same time, it accurately limits what needs to be done.

You want the government to facilitate arts and culture; you never want the government to control, censor, or oversee arts and culture. Whenever you talk about government funds, there is always that balance to remember. I always make that point not to direct art or artists but to facilitate. It’s an important point; that’s why the word “infrastructure” is crucial. You have to get involved with the political process and lobby; the broad community will rally behind the arts and the art community. You need to take the lead.

In Chinatown, I am hopeful that we will produce this magnificent cultural center which you referred in the program as a Chinatown Lincoln Center. We’re not out to replicate anything, Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. We will develop our own unique great institution. The reference to Lincoln Center means that this will take on a level of cultural as well as economic significance, which these centers have, but it will be Chinatown’s unique facility.

Government and public policy need to focus on the artist and on art production. Our cultural policy too often focused on the end product, funding existing great institutions such as the Carnegie Hall and the Apollo. All of the great institutions deserve that and they do great work, but we’ve lost sight of an infrastructure which allows artists to do their art whether it is rehearsing, introducing dance, doing calligraphy, or martial arts. This center will showcase productions so that we can all appreciate the work of the artists, but it also will be a place where art can be developed and worked on. That’s one of our commitments. We see, too often, that the places where artists do their work are disappearing. The affordable lofts, or the kind of nook and cranny theaters of the East Village , where many artists got their start, are driven away as so-called development proceeds. The market place is pricing out the artists.

The next phase of our arts policy has to recognize that we have to set aside affordable space for arts organizations. We need a policy that focus on the development of arts community zonings. We use zoning in our city to protect a variety of uses and activities, which needs shelter against short-term market fluctuations. We need to include the arts in that.

Charles Lai : We all have been hustling to find the necessary resources. Bob is right when he said we are in a very fragile state. At this time, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has not supported any community organization to do art and culture work. The only thing they have supported is Chinatown Marketing & Tourism Initiative, for trying to market Chinatown to visitors.

Alan Gerson: Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was designed in response to September 11th but it has taken a much broader mission in terms of redevelopment beyond the immediate rescue and recovery. It was set up as a quasi-independent agency that is controlled by the mayor and governor but outside the normal check and balance of government.

Aware that they would have to do at least something for Chinatown, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, the mayor’s liaison to the LMDC, asked me, “What is the one big thing, in addition to the little things, that would most benefit and revitalize the community?” I met and talked with people like Bob, Amy, Charles, Professor Sung and other people. We came back and said, “The creation of a cultural center which would be a home to various arts and cultural organizations.” We all see it as an interlinked complex in proximity to one another. In recognition to what this community demands, we got funding for this study, which was very unusual because LMDC typically does not fund studies at all.

The next phase is long term funding for other activities and organizations. This July or August, LMDC is going to distribute $1.1 billion in community development grants. We are submitting our list of requests which will include a significant portion to arts organizations, including the museums and other organizations. We hope that their funding of the study was not an end but a beginning. We’re going to keep at them to do that.

Dawn An: I work as a tutor in Queens College for seven years. Two or three years ago, we had a show on Chinese artists in New York . It was very successful and a lot of people came. When you talk about Chinatown, you should think about other communities like Flushing, Queens, especially the Flushing Library. When you talk about arts you should also include writers as well. Maybe you can have a space where you have multiple purposes, like the Asian American Research Institute. My father has been in New York for 18 years. Whenever he goes to Chinatown , he just does grocery shopping. He never goes to any of these arts and cultural places. That’s why I took him to the Museum of Chinese in the Americas , because I wanted him to see an exhibit on Chinatown .

Amy Chin: That’s a really good point. There are all these riches and they are hidden in plain sight. For someone who just arrives in the city, or who has been in the City for decades or generations, he really has to go and find us. All of us are in second floor loft spaces; none of us are visible, even though we have programs that reach beyond the community. If you are seeking these activities, there is no central repository to locate them either. If we had some kind of connectiveness, in addition to world-class space and higher visibility, through cross pollination, we would grow and blossom.

Robert Lee: Maybe we need to do a lot more in other Chinese American communities in the city of New York . We tried. We are physically located in Chinatown but we have put together exhibits in Flushing, and in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park .

At the end of day, we have to say: “Give us some money so that we can move forward.” We are in a second floor of a dilapidated old school building. It’s city property. The scaffolding has been up for ten years. We hope by September that scaffolding would go down. Maybe then, your father or others like your father would be able to find us.

Charles Lai: Your father’s reaction is typical of the Asian American community because we harbor a great deal of pride in our tradition, we want to see a building to represent our traditions.

On the other hand, we don’t have a practice of making it happen. We don’t contribute to create a facility that we can feel proud to enter and bring our friends. As a result, they might not come to Chinatown and visit the institutions that are struggling. They don’t know.

I have had people come upstairs to my facility. They have been living next door for 30 years. Someone brought them in, and they say, “I didn’t even know you were here.” The government doesn’t give us money to advertise. They only give us money to put the work up. The arts is the only voice that we have to address the American public. We are struggling and our community needs to support us.

I can give you an example where wealthy people in the Korean community wanted to facilitate the cultural presence of Korean Americans in the US. Looking around, they decided not to give money to any of the institutions in Chinatown; instead, they found an uptown institution that had a nice building with some recognition, and gave a major contribution so that they can collect the art work of young Korean Americans in the US.

That’s an attitude that we struggle against. We have this pride and we want to see an institution to represent us, yet we are not supporting the growth of our own institutions because we think that they are not good enough to represent us. That’s a contradiction that people have to wake up to. If we want to be strong as Asian Americans, we have to pull together and make our voices heard.

Edward Ma: Many Chinese Americans are looking for their identity and your three agencies are looking for money. How can Chinatown professional artists and community leaders work together to design a strategy to get more membership, more money, and more development?

Alan Gerson: We need to come together as a community and be willing to set aside differences that are not as important as our common objectives.

When I went to the deputy mayor, and told him that we wanted a cultural center, he said, “Well, we’ll support that if you can get all the different range of factions of the community to unite and come together.” He didn’t want to get in the middle of a political struggle between different factions, organizations and associations.

With CREATE, we did come together. On the board of CREATE, there is a cross-section of the cultural, civic and political community working together, including two of my former political opponents who once ran against me. Now we’re working very well together.

We don’t need universal agreement but there needs to be a degree of cooperation and unity. That’s number one. Number two is old fashioned politics. Get everyone registered to vote and get the votes. That does make a difference in terms of the influence that we have.

Third part is taking initiative. Don’t wait for the government to come up with the programs and the plans. We should develop them and demand it of the government.

Seize the initiative is an important part of the equation.

Amy Chin: When we first convened, it was clear that there were diverse needs; from individual artists to contemporary arts organizations, from performing and visual arts to literary organizations. For one facility to accommodate all those needs, it had to be examined very carefully. When you talk about cultural development space, usually you’re talking about abandoned buildings or old manufacturing spaces that are now in disuse.

In Chinatown , you are talking about a densely populated living community so the dynamics is very different.

One of the first processes is to interview and do an in-depth analysis of groups that wish to anchor within the facility. Part of the broader view of the center is that while it is primarily for the Asian American cultural community, it will also be a resource for artists of all stripes. That would bring other kinds of art audiences to Chinatown, furthering the economic impact of the center.

There is no promise that it will fulfill everybody’s needs 100%; I don’t think it will fulfill my needs 100%.

Hopefully, through this feasibility study, it will define the site that will meet most of the needs of the community, the cultural groups, and the individual artists as well. At least, we’ll have something that was never there before. In the words of Virginia Woolf, “It’s a world of our own.”

Female Audience: Councilman Gerson mentioned that arts organizations have to battle the government for funding, change the public’s attitude towards art, and publicize the importance of arts and education in the community. I’m wondering what initiatives are we taking to enhance the perception of Chinatown as a cultural place? I’m directing a summer theater program in Chinatown. What can we do to help the community, especially in the arts?

Alan Gerson: I think young people should need to make their presence felt through their activities, in this case, theater. Do it and let it be known to the community at large and the government officials. Don’t be bashful about sending invitations out to community leaders and political leaders. Don’t keep it a secret.

Another thing is to make contacts with and reach out to organizations and ask them how you can be involved.

The last thing is to get people involved with the political process. You have to be 18 to vote but you can get involved at a younger age.

Robert Lee: We’re on the list of Alan Gerson’s office. When he has a press conference on the steps of City Hall, he can call and you can be there in front of all the cameras and we can have a real show of force for the initiatives that he has taken. You and your friends can be there to help do that.

As young people, you want to think about not only the community, but your own future and direction, and place yourself in an organization where you’re going to really get involved.

Charlie has a program seeking young people to do oral history. Amy has an awful lot of performances where you can help.

Alan Gerson: One very important thing is to let people know how relevant theater or other forms of art and culture is to young people, in their education and development. Writing letters to principals or the Mayor to let them know that you, as young people, want arts education as part of your schooling is very important.

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