More than a month after its initial installation, crowds of Chinatown natives and tourists alike are still gathering in Chin Park on The Greenway to see “Lantern Stories.” The public art project by artist Yu-Wen Wu captures the culture, immigration history, and continued resilience of Boston’s Chinatown community in each of its 31 UV-printed colorful lanterns.
The concepts for the lanterns’ featured images were conceived in a collaborative, dynamic process. Wu spoke to local residents, community organizers, and businesses about their own family immigration stories, current issues facing Chinatown, and hopes for Chinatown’s future in community listening sessions. With this storytelling template in place, the lanterns themselves are grounded in a collective but often forgotten history.
Wu explained the specific inspiration behind individual lanterns to more than 100 attendees of The Greenway’s live virtual event “Lighting the Way: Exploring ‘Lantern Stories’ in Boston’s Chinatown” on October 29. “One lantern, in particular, examines the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act,” she said. “Such systemic acts of racism, coupled with personal and daily struggles with xenophobia, drove Chinese Americans to build their own ethnic enclaves or Chinatowns across the country.”
Wu’s work also explored the themes of encroachment and displacement, specifically through the lens of Chinatown’s response to them through protest. Wu highlighted a two-tier lantern that spoke directly to the community’s historical activism. The bottom tier memorializes the demolition of the 700 Hudson Street homes, which displaced 2,700 Chinese and other immigrant families, while the top tier depicts peaceful protests to halt the expansion of the Combat Zone, the City’s official red-light district in the 1960s and 70s, into Chinatown.
Additionally, some lanterns touch on Chinese entrepreneurship, featuring scenes from the laundry industry, restaurants, and apothecaries that sold herbal and medicinal ingredients. These older scenes of a more traditional Chinatown’s herbal shops and storefronts reminded Vivien Li, an attendee of Thursday’s virtual event, of the Chinatown of her childhood in New York. “The fact that we can all identify, and she sort of captures that. I think that’s why it’s such a brilliant installation, in the sense that it doesn’t matter what part of the country you come from, particularly if you’re Asian, it just captures those feelings,” Li said.
Indeed, Wu explained that she did not draw inspiration from only Boston’s Chinatown, but rather from a broader historical context, drawing from archival photographs. She noted that neighborhood natives have identified family members within the images. “Amy Chin Guen said of the image of Toy Len Goon, ‘Oh, that’s my mother-in-law!’ who was voted American Mother of the Year in 1952. And Stephanie Fan told me, ‘That is my brother at ten years old,’ and ‘She was my teacher,’ ‘He was my neighbor’… It was amazing! I selected these images based on what the photo represented historically, not knowing these families personally,” Wu said.
As for the lanterns’ incorporation of current events, Wu said, “At the time that I was starting to make decisions, it wasn’t parallel to when COVID started,” as she received the commission in June 2019. “When the murder of George Floyd happened in May and Black Lives Matter movement escalated, it became evident that this project needed to have deeper discussions on historic and current inequities, and systemic racism.”
These decisions culminated in the creation of an Asian American activism and Black Lives Matter lantern. The words “Fight the Virus, Not the People” across it speaks to diverting anti-Asian sentiments surrounding the virus’s spread. Through the Black Lives Matter lantern,
Wu wanted to communicate that “from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the present day, the Asian-American community stands in solidarity with their Black sisters and brothers.”
Wu also shared a community reaction to this particular lantern from a non-Asian resident, who told Wu that “she sometimes feels outside this community… but when she saw the lantern for Black Lives Matter and Asians for Black Lives, she felt touched and thought there is acceptance.” Wu added that she was grateful to hear that story because it indicated the lanterns’ topics could extend in a conversation beyond Chinatown itself.
Li found that compared to the day when the lanterns are viewed by predominantly locals, many non-Asian tourists visited them at night. “I would say, you know, there was maybe a third Chinese? Maybe 40% Chinese, but a lot of visitors, a lot of the younger people as well, so they must have read about it.”
In addition to transcending regional and neighborhood-specific stories, the lanterns seem to go beyond generations. When Li brought her family to experience the lanterns, she said each of the two generations had different takeaways. “My daughter was amazed that there was a Black Lives Matter lantern because that’s so contemporary. That’s so timely.” On the other hand, Li recalled her brother and sister in law admired the older lanterns, reminding them of traditional Chinatown.
“Lantern Stories” will be displayed over the public gathering space in front of the Chinatown Gate until November 15. The Greenway Conservancy and Wu discussed the possibility of reinstalling this artwork in 2021 or relocating it to a different space, contingent on future funding.
To read this article in Chinese (Traditional), please click here.
Editor’s Note: A correction to the article was made on November 7. The “Lantern Stories” installation will be up until November 18.
