Pocket gallery in Chinatown aspires to be like a kitchen table for sharing stories
Credit to Author: Joanne Lee-Young| Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:17:17 +0000
It’s being called a pocket gallery, but a small, new space in Chinatown aspires to act like a kitchen table, the kind where everyone goes to hang out, talk and share stories.
Researchers and organizers from the Museum of Vancouver and the University of B.C., as well as others such as civic historian John Atkin and Catherine Clement, who helmed the highly-acclaimedexhibit about Vancouver photographer Yucho Chow, are working on a vision for this and they see it as the beginning of what will eventually be the Chinese Canadian Museum of B.C.
They also see the space eventually becoming more of an interactive, immersive and constantly-evolving place, inspired by the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side or the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, according to UBC history professor Henry Yu.
The Tenement Museum is known for its research and real-life stories about immigrants, migrants and refugees who came from European countries, Puerto Rico and later, China, and who all lived in two specific old buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s.
The Wing Luke is known for a similar way of highlighting the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans. It has an oral history lab, where people can visit with a family member, friend or colleague, talk about memories and record these conversations for themselves and also an archive.
The museum effort in Vancouver has some funding from both the province and the City of Vancouver and is part of a plan to seek UNESCO World Heritage designation for Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Tyler Mark at the Chinese Canadian Museum of B.C.
Currently, UBC grad Tyler Mark is greeting visitors to the space, which recently opened at the Chinese Cultural Centre in Chinatown and will be related to a joint MOV and UBC exhibit to be launched next Spring called “A Seat at the Table: Chinese Immigration and British Columbia.”
Mark has been tasked with thinking about how to engage people and discover stories, but since “it’s less about curated pieces, we are trying to see what naturally comes up rather than to gather, curate it and put it on display.”
This has yielded some unexpected contributions. One woman who worked in some 19 Chinese restaurants, both in Chinatown and across Metro Vancouver, sent a friend to the pocket gallery, carrying a stack of her old letters, for example. The woman lives in Surrey and wasn’t able to come in herself.
There is a paper art and light installation by a Montreal-based group called Mere Phantoms, which took features from Vancouver Chinatown storefronts and mixed them with those of buildings in the southern Chinese city of Kaiping. It’s a statement about how building styles were influenced and re-influenced through generations of people moving back and forth across the Pacific.
On a wall, there is the story of the Huynh family, who own the popular, Chinatown restaurant Phnom Penh on East Georgia. It’s known for its long line ups and Cambodian-style, fried chicken wings with lime and fish sauce.
“It’s a Chinese-Canadian museum, but also about the stories of a family who fled the Khmer Rouge and came to Chinatown, and it really gives the sense of how Chinatown has evolved in the last 60 to 60 years,” said Mark.
Denise Fong, a UBC PhD candidate who helped put together the pocket gallery, agrees it’s about more than just seeking stories of the far past, it’s also about more recent history and even the present.
Many themes, such as belonging and family separation or language learning and family businesses, that are associated with the early days of bachelors living on their own in Chinatown have something in common to the experiences of newer immigrants and international students, she said.
The Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, a non-profit organization that has successfully raised funds to revitalize and support affordable housing at 58 West Hastings and the May Wah Hotel on Pender Street, has plans to open its own Chinatown Storytelling Centre.