A laundryman, a cook, a garment worker, and a grandmother with a child — these figures might seem ordinary and unrecognizable to many. Yet, the figures and the community they represent are the foundation of Boston Chinatown and its community.
And now, artist Wen-ti Tsen is working on making these characters into four life-size bronze statues. The work-in-progress project, Chinatown Worker Statues, is created by the 85-year-old artist who intended to “commemorate and pay tribute” to Chinatown workers who have been underrepresented throughout history.
The first group of Chinese people immigrated to Boston in the 1870s. As a result of The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. society at that time experienced a rise of anti-immigration sentiment, leaving Chinese people being excluded from most jobs on the market, forcing them to go into the laundry business instead.
As a longtime Boston resident, Tsen has personally witnessed the struggle and hardship of laundrymen and Chinatown workers.
“When you look at all the places in Chinatown, it’s the same thing,” said Tsen in a short documentary, Art, Community, and Boston Chinatown. “It’s the hard work, and that they were never quite paid for their work.”
At first, Tsen didn’t quite understand the struggle of the Asian American community. As an immigrant who grew up in China, Tsen went through a very different journey than those who are raised in the country. It wasn’t until he interviewed community members for his mural back in the 80s’ that he started to see what Chinatown and its people were fighting against and why they were doing it. On some level, the community’s plight echoed Tsen’s personal struggle in his identity: to pretend not to be a Chinese immigrant and to speak English as fluently as possible.
Tsen said that he got a lot of satisfaction from doing the mural, and he wants to create a more permanent representation of the workers in Chinatown. In his opinion, using bronze statues is one of the methods to achieve this goal.
“In society, we have a lot of bronze statues from generals [and] politicians on very high pedestals,” said Tsen. “We need to create the kind of equality in these representations, and I want to give the kind of regard from the society to pay tribute to these working people.”
The Chinatown Worker Statues project is currently being funded with the Public Art for Spatial Justice grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) of $10,000. According to Tsen, although this grant only covers about 2.5% of the $400,000 estimated full-budget, it is sufficient to allow for the making of four fully modeled, 40% life-size sculptures in clay that are ready for 3D digital enlargements.
Tsen said that the next step would be to fundraise, and the process will not be easy. “Celebrating working people does not move many wealthy contributors,” said Tsen. “People who support the ideas usually do not have much money to spare.”
In Tsen’s opinion, a lot of work needs to be done in the community after installation. He hopes that his art could not only help the community to connect, but also “to convince people that some art can be quite important for people, and for kids growing up, with the sense of being culturally and historically affirmed.”
Ideally, the bronze statues will be installed at prominent locations in Boston Chinatown to maximize its intent: “a countervailing corrective to the prevalent lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in place-making public art in Boston.”
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
