Boston Chinatown community leaders addressed resilience among Chinese immigrants through difficult times in a webinar hosted by Tufts University faculty on Dec 4. The webinar, titled Voices from Chinatown: Resilience in the Time of COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Racism, also proposed suggestions for Chinatown to build a harmonious relationship as a host neighborhood with Tufts University.
Like other Chinatowns in the U.S, the Boston Chinatown has had a long history of trauma — from the urban renewal projects displacing families and businesses with highway construction and institutional expansion starting from the 1950s to ongoing gentrification expelling low-income residents to this year’s pandemic and the wave of anti-Asian racism. However, on this webinar, speakers focused on how the community has survived as a fighter, rather than a victim, and ways it can continue flourishing.
“For my 10 years of working in Chinatown, the narrative that I want to paint, which is what I teach my students, is that Chinatown is a resilient community,” said Carolyn L. Rubin, assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “We have always struggled, and we have always resisted.” Rubin served as the moderator of the webinar.
We still see ongoing displacement in Boston Chinatown, said Jeena Hah, Program Manager at Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC). She mentioned how a dim-sum restaurant where “everybody knows someone who got married there” is slated to be taken over by an office complex.
“How can we continue to push back on this narrative that we don’t belong if you are too immigrant or too poor in Chinatown?” Hah asked.
For those who cannot afford to live in Chinatown, they still come back to Chinatown to receive services such as family services, adult education, medical services, said Panelist Yoyo Yau, Director of Programs at Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC). She challenged the audience to think of Chinatown as a community beyond geographic locations.
Furthermore, Yau expressed BCNC’s need for support from Tufts University. BCNC could utilize knowledge, material, and people resources from the school to serve those in need among multiple programs better, she said.
Panelist Chu Huang, Co-Chair of Boston Chinatown Resident Association (CRA), echoed this concern and advocated for more meaningful connections between the community and the institution.
“There’s a lot of amazing community nonprofits, resources in Chinatown, a lot of great uniqueness and character to it,” she said. “But I also hope that there will be individual connections, community connections that are very enriching and meaningful, that can reach towards longer-term impact for good, and it’s really important that we develop trust-building in these relationships.”
For those in Tufts University who make decisions concerning Chinatown, “I really do hope that our most vulnerable residents are kept in mind,” Huang said. She encouraged people to confront the discomfort in having constructive and productive conversations. “We must be brave. We must be bold to work together in reaching where we want to be together,” she said.
Rubin forwarded the concept of “dirty pain” and “clean pain” coined by Resmaa Menakem in his 2017 book. “Clean pain is what you experience when you have no idea what to do when you’re scared or worried about what might happen, and when you step forward into the unknown with honesty and vulnerability,” she said.
There is no roadmap for Tufts University or Chinatown in building collaboration and relationships, but “that speaks to the courage, the creativity, the compassion, the community, all of that — that you guys [have] as community experts, as organic intellectuals,” Rubin said.
There are people in Tufts University who would like to share resources, and when they have conversations with Chinatown, they need to look to Chinatown members as experts on subject matters, Rubin later told Sampan.
“We need to work in a true collective spirit, and we need to all lean into our growing edge. All of us have a growing edge,” she said on the webinar.
To read this article in Chinese (Traditional), please click here.
