Mei Lum, a 2020 Rubinger Fellow, talks with LISC about fighting gentrification—and facing a pandemic and its social and economic fallout—from a historic Chinatown storefront that has been in her family for generations.
For Mei Lum, the building at 26 Mott Street in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown is a place of deep belonging. It is a home base for her family, the location of their historic business, and a touchstone of Chinatown’s resiliency in the face of all kinds of challenges—most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic whose economic and social pain is sharpened here by toxic talk of a “Chinese virus.”
The red-painted storefront houses Wing on Wo & Co., the business Lum’s great-grandfather, Walter Eng, started in 1890. In those days Chinatown covered just a few blocks. The bluntly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship. Wing on Wo & Co. was a general store but also a refuge and community hub, a place to find familiar foods, share stories, post mail.
In 1964 Lum’s grandmother, Nancy Seid, took over Wing on Wo, working with her husband Shuck and sister Betty Eng to make the shop a purveyor of carefully curated Chinese porcelain.
By 2015, that generation was ready to retire and the family considered closing Wing on Wo and selling their building, now worth millions. The neighborhood was changing. Longtime residents faced the threat of cultural erasure and displacement in a wave of new luxury condos and trendy watering holes that serve primarily affluent people from other parts of the city.
Mei Lum, with her family, decided to push back by staying put. Rather than go to graduate school in international development, she committed herself to running the business, working alongside her grandmother and other relatives, while also making the storefront a place for neighborhood conversations, art-making, collective storytelling, activism, and intergenerational learning—an energetic nonprofit she calls The W.O.W. Project.
In mid-March, we sat down with Lum in the back office of Wing on Wo to learn about W.O.W. and her Rubinger initiative—the Staying Put Project—which will bring W.O.W. together with a handful of other minority-led groups around the city that combine small business with culturally specific activism.
In mid-April, we followed up to find out how Lum is supporting personal and community resiliency amid the crisis of COVID-19.
Q: Tell us about your personal roots in Chinatown.
A: I was born and raised here. My mother’s family has been here for five generations, and my dad’s for two and a half. My connection to Chinatown has always been through the lens of the shop. Growing up, I’d come here to spend time with my grandparents, with my extended family. It’s always been my grandmother cooking in this kitchen for as long as I remember; I would come after school and have an afternoon snack. And my grandfather—all these awards on the walls are his; he has been a very central community figure in the neighborhood for a long time. He taught me Chinese in this office. Now we have family dinners here every day. On weekends my cousins are here and we hang out, celebrate birthdays, holidays.
Selling the building might have financed a good life elsewhere. How did your family get on the same page about not selling?
It was tough to arrive there. At that time my grandmother was getting older; she’d been carrying this business over 50 years and also administering the building. It’s a five-story walk-up, you have rent-controlled apartments and it’s not like there’s profit being made; and you have to run it all yourself. With my grandfather aging she was also taking care of him. So it just became way too much. But no one was really interested in stepping up to steward the business.
I met this doctoral student at the time, Diane Wong, who is now a professor at NYU, and she let me join in on interviews she was doing around the neighborhood for her dissertation on resistance to gentrification in American Chinatowns. Meeting Diane was really pivotal for me in bringing my personal family moment into a larger community context. I started thinking about how selling could impact other folks in my neighborhood, on my block.
But it was really personal for my family. Currently we all live within a four-block radius of the shop, so we're basically living a small-town kind of life in a big city. My family was thinking about letting go of the building, but we were still going to stay here. We weren’t going to turn our backs on what we’ve sustained here. And that was never about money for us.
Did you set about updating the business or its marketing to attract attention?
I had never seen myself as a small business owner in any part of my future. I didn’t have a plan to come in and do XYZ. It just organically grew from seeing that there was a need to tell our story, and telling our story led to thinking about how to share that through different channels like creating a website, starting an Instagram account and a Facebook page. On Twitter. And also, in the process, I asked my family members, specifically my grandmother, my dad, and my mom, about their experience growing up here and their connection to this place.
With its focus on dialogue, culture, and art, how does the W.O.W Project fight gentrification, which can seem like such a huge, impersonal force?
I really, truly believe that arts and activism can be a form of education, a way that people become aware of these issues, activated, and able to name the players that are orchestrating this whole ecosystem of displacement.
We're not directly trying to influence policy. Our storefront doesn't carry any of the political or bureaucratic baggage that other spaces in our community have, for example a community center run by a nonprofit, or a community room that's in a government building. People walk into those spaces and understand the perspective that the organization has, so folks don't necessarily feel like they can freely express how they feel and think.
The storefront is literally a space for exchange; it's a space for conversation. We want to challenge people to think about how they can contribute to a neighborhood beyond purely economic development, how we can be a site for politicization or storytelling or cultural production. Our resistance is in being here, and also in creating a third space for our community to work these issues out.
Your work lifts up tradition, but it also looks like a youth movement, with young interns and artists and activists taking an active part?
That is central to our resistance and really important for the future of our neighborhood. We need to build up the next generation to have a sense of belonging to our neighborhood, young people who are interested in rooting themselves here in a way that feels good for them—they shouldn’t feel like they have to stay. That’s been essential for me. We also need women and queer people who are interested in doing that here, specifically, because Chinatown has been very much patriarchal, built on patriarchal systems.
Have you found some other groups to partner with for your Rubinger project?
Yes, and I’m really excited that they all exist in very different spaces—they're not all arts and cultural groups. There’s a food coop based in Bed Stuy, all black-centered and black-run; they’re trying to root themselves in the neighborhood to provide healthy affordable food. There’s a community bookstore that’s located in Washington Heights, bilingual Spanish-English, very much run as a collective. There’s also a healing space in Brooklyn, people-of-color-centered. In Jackson Heights [Queens] there’s a Bengali food business that employs stay-at-home mothers to make all the food and uses the business as a way to educate recent Bengali immigrants in life skills that they might need.
How are you feeling and what are you seeing in Chinatown these days?
What’s so devastating about all of this is that our neighborhood has gone dark; there’s no visible life to our community. I don’t think we’ve ever seen this, even during 9-11 or [Superstorm] Sandy. There’s also a sense of fear because of all the anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes. It’s a very complex mix of emotions right now, it’s just wanting to survive and stay safe with your loved ones, but also wanting to overcome that and feel that we can outwardly say that we’re an Asian community that’s resilient.
I finally have come out of the disabling feeling that I felt in the first couple of weeks, channeling my energy into trying to be innovative with business ideas, engaging our audience on social media, and making sure that we still have revenue coming in despite our storefront physically being closed.
I started something called Rugs for Resilience, which was an auction of hand-tufted rugs that I made in the basement of the shop based on different porcelain patterns that are in the shop. Thirty percent of profits went to small businesses in the neighborhood, and the bidder could choose the business. It was a way for us to get revenue but also to share the love.
What do you hear from local small businesspeople? Are they finding resources to help them survive?
Chinatown was hit a lot earlier than other neighborhoods in New York due to the xenophobic sentiment. It started in January with the decline of business and that has accelerated since the stay-at-home order.
We were actually one of the first neighborhoods to start small business funds locally. Asian Americans For Equality has an emergency relief fund and folks have been applying to that. LISC has started a fund in collaboration with Verizon and that’s been floating around. We’re all crowdsourcing and finding grant and loan opportunities. There’s also a grassroots initiative, Welcome to Chinatown, and they’ve raised over $30,000 to order food from Chinatown restaurants and deliver it to frontline workers.
Your activism has been rooted in this “third space” you speak about, a place for people to physically gather. What are your thoughts about that in this time of forced isolation? Where does that activism go?
It was really tough for me to figure out, given how Chinatown is in need of essential services now. What is the importance of what we’re doing if community members can’t even get food or don’t have money?
So we had a team meeting about a week ago and we talked about how we can show up for our community. We came up with a crowdsourced project called Love Letters to Chinatown. People can write a letter or a poem, it could be an illustration or a doodle. I’m going to be physically posting them once a week around the neighborhood. Right now there are just closure signs: “Due to COVID-19, we are closed until further notice.” We want these love letters to remind people that we’re resilient, that there are things to celebrate and look forward to when our neighborhood is buzzing with energy again.
They come from all corners of the country, and all share a deep commitment to helping their communities thrive. Meet the 2020 Fellows.