In Morris Lum’s photographic archive of Chinatowns, change is the one fixed.
Wall murals are painted then coated up. Restaurant menus adapt to diners’ evolving palates. Colorful shopfronts fade and are changed, as household companies fall sufferer to rising rents or the disinterest of aging owners’ youngsters and grandchildren.
“That’s the life cycle of a Chinatown,” mentioned Lum, who has spent greater than a decade documenting commerce, neighborhood and structure in Asian enclaves across the US and Canada.
To date, the photographer has visited over 20 Chinatowns, from Chicago to Winnipeg. His new book paints a various portrait by means of courtyards, alleyways and neighborhood buildings, whether or not clan associations or methodist church buildings, which have provided refuge and camaraderie to generations of Asian diasporas.
But it’s the eye-catching, bilingual facades of eating places and companies — reward retailers, bakeries, insurers, reflexologists, florists, grocers, journey businesses and acupuncturists — that deliver the work to life.
In a video interview from his residence in Toronto, Lum mentioned he “really just wanted to keep a record” of Chinatowns. But his archive serves greater than posterity. Often returning to the identical websites over a number of years, he captures real-time visible proof of shifting migration patterns and demographic traits.
In one picture, a shiny new “K-Beauty” enterprise in Philadelphia stands on what was as soon as the location of a poké bowl and tea bar, a testomony to the meteoric rise of South Korean cosmetics. Others present newer storefronts adorned with simplified Chinese characters, not conventional ones, as arrivals from mainland China come to considerably outnumber these from Taiwan or Hong Kong, the supply of earlier waves of migration to the US.
Elsewhere, retailers and eating places lie dormant or blanketed in graffiti. Several extra of the companies have closed their doorways since Lum photographed them. Among them are New York City’s New Golden Fung Wong Bakery, which shuttered in 2024 after greater than 60 years in Manhattan, and Vancouver’s Ho Sun Hing Printers, closed in 2014 after greater than a century in operation.
The circumstances fluctuate. Ho Sun Hing, for example, reportedly struggled to adapt to digital printing. And closures don’t essentially replicate lack of demand (New Golden Fung Wong was changed by one other bakery). There is, nonetheless, an overriding theme in Lum’s pictures: gentrification.
Given their historic hyperlinks to commerce, Chinatowns typically occupied downtown areas near busy ports or densely populated city facilities. These areas have, in lots of cities, turn out to be prohibitively costly. For family-run companies, this implies increased rents and costlier overheads, in addition to the exodus of communities that historically patronized them. Then, there are the multitude of different monetary pressures going through mom-and-pop shops in every single place, like competitors from main chains.
“Just the other day, a big sign went up saying a McDonald’s is coming in,” Lum mentioned of a property in Toronto’s Chinatown that was refurbished following a fireplace, earlier than mendacity vacant amid town’s stringent Covid-19 lockdown. “That really speaks to the changing dynamic of Chinatowns.”
The pandemic looms massive within the current historical past of Chinatowns. In her introduction to Lum’s e-book, writer and tutorial Lily Cho wrote that the outburst of anti-Asian sentiment, stemming from the epicenter of the virus’ outbreak in Wuhan, China, confirmed how the neighborhoods “have served as a place of both refuge and violence.” For lots of the companies Lum documented, masks mandates and takeout-only eating weren’t solely commercially devastating however anathema to what he referred to as the “easiness of Chinatown” whereby “you just walk in and know people.”
“The hustle and bustle I remember from when I was a kid was completely gone,” he added.
‘Almost like Disneyland’
Lum’s curiosity in Chinatowns traces again to his upbringing. Born in Trinidad and Tobago — to a Chinese Trinidadian father and Macanese mom raised in Hong Kong — he immigrated to Canada as a baby within the late Nineteen Eighties. His household settled in Mississauga, a west Toronto suburb that, though more and more multicultural, was predominantly White on the time.
On the weekends, Lum’s dad and mom would drive him and his sister into town’s Chinatown. They ate at banquet-style eating places and shopped for Asian groceries, which had been, then, unavailable of their native neighborhood. But the lure of Chinese-owned companies was not simply sensible. It was emotional, too: “My parents really craved that sense of familiarity that wasn’t really present in suburbs,” Lum recalled.
The photographer experiences the same sense of consolation when getting into Chinatowns for the primary time — even in cities he’s by no means visited earlier than. “There’s this vernacular in most Chinatowns that, once you come across a restaurant or business that has both languages, you feel like, ‘Oh, this is a place that I feel familiar with.’”
Yet he is equally fascinated by what makes every Chinatown distinctive. Some sprawl out behind elaborate ceremonial gates, whereas others quietly combine with the city cloth; some are considerably pedestrianized, whereas others heart on main intersections. The oldest date to the mid-Nineteenth century, whereas newer enclaves solely cropped up in current many years or, like Toronto’s, relocated from elsewhere within the post-World War II period.
Each neighborhood’s id is, Lum mentioned, knowledgeable by its location and historical past. And that is mirrored within the numerous structure present in his images. For each lantern-strewn brick tenement enjoying into the favored creativeness of what Chinatowns seems to be like (as propagated by motion pictures like “Big Trouble in Little China” and “Rumble in the Bronx”), Lum additionally captures one thing extra prosaic: a nondescript early-‘90s tower block fronted by a round moon gate, or Chinese-owned shops jostling for area in a transformed Victorian home.
The photographer’s favourite Chinatown is, nonetheless, the archetypal one — San Francisco’s, which though largely rebuilt following the 1906 earthquake was based throughout the California Gold Rush within the late 1840s.
“The density, the way the streets are built and just the amount of people — you can see the layers of the different architecture that have been placed on top of it,” Lum mentioned. “It was the first Chinatown I visited in the US and, compared to Canada, it felt almost like Disneyland.”
Lum nonetheless works in analog movie, not digital. Upon arriving at a brand new Chinatown, he begins by wandering the streets, a easy 35-millimeter point-and-shoot digital camera in hand. He retains word of which addresses he’ll return to along with his tripod and large-format gear.
His strategy requires lengthy publicity instances, so Lum normally shoots early within the morning earlier than retailers and eating places open. Similarly, his inside photographs comprise solely oblique indicators of life (or the “reminiscence of something that has just happened,” as Lum put it), empty chairs round deserted mahjong video games for example, or an ancestral altar lately replenished with flowers.
But his wider Chinatown archive is, under no circumstances, people-free. Not featured in his e-book are portraits and informal pictures of pals, consumers, enterprise homeowners and neighborhood members. Lum all the time tries to attach with contacts from creative, photographic and diasporic communities, or native historians and designers, earlier than arriving.
It is in these interactions that he, finally, finds optimism about the way forward for North America’s Chinatowns. And, regardless of the specter of gentrification, his e-book is plagued by success tales. There’s San Francisco’s Li Po Cocktails, the cult favourite dive bar famed for its trademarked Chinese mai tai. There’s The Lingnan, which opened in 1947 and is now Edmonton’s second-oldest restaurant. There are companies just like the Yuen Hop Noodle Company, in Oakland, that haven’t solely endured the many years however overcome a reliance on footfall to turn out to be main distributors and wholesalers.
“A lot of younger people are interested in opening up shops or being in Chinatown, because it brings this sense of familiarity to them, this sense of home,” Lum added. “But also, there’s this desire to want to build something.”
“Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai” can be revealed by DelMonico Books on October 28, 2025.