Sunday was our Chinatown day. Swim class at the Y and Lo Mein from Chinatown Cafe. We had to forego our Moh Goon time because we wanted to catch the East Meets West Kite and Cultural Festival at Pope John Paul II Park in Dorchester. Coming into Chinatown there were a ton of colorful flags along Oak Terrace. I figured it was a festival, or something to do with Falun Gung. When I lived in Chinatown, I would have walked right passed it and slowly maybe asked around. As a tourist or weekend Chinatown guy I would walk by and not even ask. But since I now consider myself some sort of Blogger Journalist I decided to investigate. I saw similar flags in the Chinese Progressive Associations window. So after picking up the Shrimp Lo mein and Fu yu dao jai ngau yuk fahn fermented bean curd sauce over string beans and beef slices on rice (I ordered just like that because believe it or not I didn't know how to say Ha Lo mein in Chinese until yesterday) I made it a point to investigate for a few minutes.
It turns out the flags are about this.
http://cpaboston.org/en/event/rvisions2015
It's a protest or movement to draw attention to the fact that Chinatown is disappearing especially in the area of affordable housing. In other words low income Chinese people cannot afford to live in Chinatown.
In other words it is against Gentrification. The G word.
Where have I heard that word before recently? JP. Oh yeah, I guess in that neighborhood I am the gentrifier. The boogey man who has come to steal your neighborhood away.
Now when I grew up in Section 8 housing in the South End (right outside Chinatown) we heard this word for a bit and a lot of people were against colleges like Suffolk moving in and taking over and all that. The Roxbury where I went to middle school, the building across the street from Ruggles, that whole area is unn recognizable. When I started at Nativity the whole area was distinctly black and I stuck out. Then the police station was built and Northeastern moved in. I biked by their the other day and I did not see one black person. Okay I think I saw one or two, but the area was yuppified.
Am I against this?
The area looks nicer. It's safer too.
Back to Chinatown.
You would assume that I am against Chinatown disappearing since I grew up there.
Well I am.
But I also think rich people moving in can benefit the community as well.
Also in everything I've read about busing or other community activism, or the protests I went to as a child,
I have always admired the CPA and what they accomplished and fought for.
But I have kept my distance from teens to young adulthood.
In fact yesterday was the first day I went in there, Why?
Well a lot of Chinese Americans will keep their distance too, Chinese Americans who are against seeing Chinatown disappear. Because when you get to far to the left and too activist the lingo can sound a lot like something familiar, a memory of pushes for social justice that ended in some pretty bad situations, namely, the Cultural Revolution. And a lot of Chinese Americans are here in America because of those types of movements.
A lot of times after hearing CPA you will hear in the same sentence, "Gong Chanh dong ge see serng." Communist Ideology. My white side would have hopped right in with the CPA from the get go. It's actually my traditional Chinese influences, that cautioned me to work with them when it benefited the community, but to keep a distance for political reasons.
But visiting yesterday I realized that now that I am no longer living in Chinatown, as an outsider, I should be working more with the CPA somehow and take MORE of an interest in the Chinatown master plan. Chinese Americans who are successful and do not agree with everything the CPA says, should still not be a stranger to the CPA. There is that perception of the CPA and I'm sure there is the perception within the CPA of other groups, gentrifiers, or Chinese Americans who seem not to care, or non Chinese people who just come to Chinatown for food, Kung Fu, or Teet Da. Or non Chinese people who are rich but still have kids in the school system. Guess what? all of these people don't really want to see Chinatown disappear altogether.
And had I not taken an active interest in finding out what those flags were about I would have no idea. In other words. even though the Visions and art installments are to bring attention to gentrification and the affordable housing crisis and there were a lot of the same people who showed up to support, that doesn't mean that it was effective as it could have been.
How many people walked by the flags and just kept walking?
Not just "outsiders." How many people who are represented in that mural,
and who know where that building was and even were inside of it for part of their life would have kept walking when they saw those flags?
(Look forward to part Two where I will tel the story of the East Meets West Kite Festival. )
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