Endurance Streets: Resilience and Response in Boston’s Chinese Community is on display in special windows throughout Chinatown at 2 Boylston St. (China Trade Center) and 116 Harrison Ave. (Tufts University Health Sciences Building). The exhibition compiled over 30 panels with photographs and accompanying texts presenting scenes from Chinatown’s past and present with a focus on the people living and working in the neighborhood and the issues they have faced over the years… It is a collaboration between Tuft University’s Tisch College and the Chinese Historical Society of New England (CHSNE), curated by Diane O’Donoghue. A primary source of the photos was the archives of Tunney F. Lee, which were recently bequeathed to CHSNE. Lee, a professor of Urban Planning and former Chinatown resident, was a passionate documentor of Chinatown’s development. He took many of the photos himself and called the collection Chinatown’s “Endurance Streets”.
Chinatown has gone through many changes since the beginning when the Chinese began to settle in the area in the 1870s. The first to arrive were men retreating from anti-Chinese sentiment in the west. Unable to enter other businesses, many started laundries. The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented them from bringing their families to this country, so these men had to live alone and send money home to China. They led lonely and difficult lives, but they persevered.
Recently , the pandemic and the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes in this country presented Chinatown with two enormous challenges. Because of Covid, fewer and fewer people came into Chinatown and businesses suffered. In addition to this economic hardship, violent acts of racism threatened the personal security of the people living and working in Chinatown. Responding to this, several local organizations initiated a variety of cultural projects to reinvigorate the neighborhood. Installations, performances, and projects with public participation have involved residents and brought back visitors n the last few years and continue to do so.
O’Donoghue was struck by the force of these initiatives and approached CHSNE and Tisch College to work together to memorialize Chinatown’s history. As reflected in the name, Endurance Streets is intended to be a celebration of Chinatown’s resilience, past and present.
The exhibition takes a personal perspective. Different aspects of the residents’ lives over the years are presented, including work at laundries, restaurants and garment factories, and people enjoying their free time on the stoops of the row houses. The effects of the loss of land to two major traffic arteries and rising property prices are also addressed, for example in the panel on Lily Xie’s project “Seeking Sanctuary in a Threatened Place”, in which participants created an origami map of their ideal Chinatown that include a market, a library, affordable housing, … and a “free food store”.
It was important to the organizers that the panels would be easily accessible; hence the bilingual text and the placement of the panels on street-level windows which can be viewed at any time and at no cost. O’Donoghue stresses that passersby can simply glance at the photographs while moving on or stop to examine each panel.
Altogether, the panels of the Endurance Streets convey a vivid expression of the atmosphere on the streets of Chinatown throughout its history. An old black and white photograph of a young Chinese laundryman wearing a traditional Chinese tunic, but sporting a western straw hat and leaning jauntily against a shelf while he looks confidently into the camera brings together the themes of east meets west, tradition vs. modernity, and past vs future that all recent arrivals to any country have felt. There is a scene of anonymous female garment workers sewing in a large crowded room, but also a closeup from 1974 of Lan Yin Wong at her table smiling while she sewed. There’s another photograph of many women standing proudly outside with protest signs in the face of widespread garment factory closures. Their demonstration ultimately gained them access to retraining in other fields and thus opened new professional paths for them.
The garment industry has left Chinatown, but both the garment workers and the laundrymen are remembered in the artwork created by contemporary artists. In 2020 the artist Yu-Wen Wu created “Lantern Stories”, a project “to illuminate Chinatown’s history” by projecting historical and contemporary images onto traditional Chinese lantern forms. One lantern was decorated with photographs of the garment workers. In 2022 Wen-ti Tsen began work on four life-size bronze statues representing people who have performed essential labor in Chinatown. The statues include a garment worker and a laundryman. Photographs of the clay models and the lanterns are included in the exhibition.
Endurance Streets also highlights an aspect of Chinatown that few people recognize: its diversity. Chinatown consists of babies as well as grandparents, laundrymen, garment workers, restaurant workers, artists, urban planners, school children and college students and is home not only to immigrants from China, but also, for example, from Malaysia and other Asian countries. Little known facts about the area include that Chinatown once housed a significant population of Syrian immigrants in addition to Chinese and that one of Malcolm X’s first jobs was in the neighborhood.
In the spirit of diversity and inclusion, the original Endurance Streets exhibition was recently expanded to include the work of five currently unhoused artists from St. Francis House’s expressive art studio, which is located at the edge of Chinatown. Several motifs, such as the painting of a woman walking in front of the majestic golden dome of the Massachusetts State House pulling a tiny box containing her possessions, point to the transient nature of the lives of people with no permanent housing. This is something that many immigrants can also understand. As the panel states, “Works of art can make other lives become more visible, and in doing so create a sense of understanding across differences.”
After opening in September 2022, Endurance Streets is now over a year old and has been extended into 2024. O’Donoghue reports that tours of the exhibition are in high demand, especially for groups from Boston colleges and urban planners. The local schools, too, have shown an increased interest with an entire fourth grade visiting the exhibition last year. For those who can’t physically attend, the panels can be viewed digitally on the websites of both organizers:
