 I'm Di Gao. I'm Senior Director of Research and Development at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Welcome to the keynote plenary conversation on saving Chinatowns. Over the past year, I've been leading efforts at the National Trust to find ways that we can support historic Chinatowns through preservation as Chinatowns across the country continue to find themselves in a fight for their survival. Chinatowns have been bastions of community resilience for over 170 years. But today, many of them find themselves facing a multitude of existential threats. And in the wake of these challenges, we wanted to explore what activism and preservation looks like in Chinatowns today. And I am honored to be joined by award-winning cookbook author, culinary historian and fierce activist for Chinatowns across the country, Grace Young. Among her many accolades, Grace is a three-time James Beard Foundation Award winner and a six-time International Association for Culinary Professionals Award winner, including the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. She has authored numerous cookbooks and devoted much of her career to preserving the traditional iron walk, an endangered culinary tool that's traditionally used in Chinese cooking. Her family has donated cookware to the Smithsonian Museum as significant artifacts for Chinese American culinary history. Grace has been named the Poet Laureate of the Walk by Food Historian Betty Fussell and recently dubbed the Accidental Voice for Chinatown by Grub Street for her advocacy for Chinatowns and AAPI small businesses across the country. And just this year, Grace received the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the James Beard Foundation and received the Julia Child Award at the Smithsonian. She's partnered with many nonprofits to raise money and elevate the profile of Chinatown's legacy businesses and her activism has been widely chronicled. Before I interview Grace, she asked me to share a video to open up our conversation. This video is called Chinatown is in the Heart produced by the Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco, along with avocados and coconuts productions. Please take a look. Chinatown, it holds us together. That means the responsibility to look after your parents as much as you look after your children. It's consideration for what went on before you as well as what will come after you. My father and my grandfather's generation built the railroads and the laundries and decked the gold mines. Everybody's aspiration was going to go mountain and get rich. I'm no exception, I guess. A lot of the Chinese first came over as part of the gold rush. They saw that coming to San Francisco, you know, there was a chance to earn money and to get educated. There's a big part of me that's the Chinese American background that I have. Growing up there, Chinatown provided my parents with everything they needed to be successful and to raise a family. I've watched San Francisco change and Chinatown is definitely different, but I think it still serves that purpose for helping immigrants adjust to American society. People here in America think Chinatown is very poor. As a kid, when people would go, like, oh, where do you live? I didn't want to say I lived in Chinatown. And it wasn't up until high school that I became proud because I learned the history of what our community did to stay where we are today through hard fought fights. It made me realize that I want to also do the same. I want to also advocate for my own community. Everybody that's come through Chinatown had a dream or has a dream. Maybe it's because that's what I've seen my entire life is watching my dad's generation, my grandparents' generation just working really hard to have a better future for their next generations. It's an integrated living community where people want to live. It's not a museum. The importance of Chinatown is really to serve the immigrant population and to be there for the people who want to use it. We all love Chinatown so much that we would fight to make sure we keep Chinatown and make sure Chinatown survives. Thank you so much to the CCDC and the production team for letting us show that powerful video. Grace, thank you for fighting for Chinatown and thank you so much for being with us today. It's my pleasure. It's a great honor to be here with you. This year's conference theme for our National Preservation Conference is From Vision to Action. And like many of us, I think you saw that Chinatowns were struggling and were in need but you took action. Could you share your personal journey about what caused you to act? Absolutely. I'm a Chinese cookbook author so generally I'm in Chinatown two or three times a week to shop, to eat and in January of 2020, I was stunned to see that Chinatown suddenly emptied out and that is because of xenophobia and misinformation. Chinatown in New York City and across the country, Chinatowns were shunned. And it was so painful to see that so many restaurants and shops lost 40, 60 and even 80% of their business. On March 15th of 2020, I went to Chinatown with videographer Dan On to interview restaurant and shop owners. And it was my idea that if New Yorkers could hear the personal stories of all the hardships that they had gone through in January and February and the start of March, that we could rally, support and bring business into Chinatown. And the director of poster house museum, Julia Knight had contacted me saying that she wanted to help Chinatown. And when I told her this idea, she said, if you do these videos, we will post them on the poster house website. So that's how we ended up in Chinatown on Sunday, March 15th, unbeknownst to us that evening after we did the interviews, Mayor de Blasio put New York City in lockdown. So as we went into Chinatown to do these interviews, we were not prepared for what we discovered. And that is that 70% of Chinatown restaurant owners had decided to close the following day because business was so bad. And I think, Dee, you have one of the videos that we can share with the audience. This was an interview that we did at Hopkey, one of the oldest restaurants in Chinatown. And it's very short, this interview, but it's very powerful and moving because you see the tears in the eyes of the owner telling us that he has no choice but to close the following day. Let's take a look. Hello, my name is Peter Lee. I'm the owner and manager of Hopkey restaurant here in New York City, 21 March Street. My father and his partners opened up the restaurant back here in 1968. We're a Chinese cuisine restaurant famous for our crabs and snails for our season. Coronavirus, the crisis started here in January. It's gotten really slow in January, but as time progressed through February and now coming in March, business has dipped down even worse. And I can say that I'm down pretty much from 50 to 70%. And in a given day, how many customers do you have? Well, at a given day, I would probably have about 40 to 50 covers per day at least. But now I've been getting, I'll be fortunate to have 20 covers a day. And you're a restaurant employee, how long have some of this been working here? Most of my employees have been working for me for like 10, 15, 20 years, a lot of years. They're pretty much basically a family. And now you've decided that tomorrow you'll close? Yes. There's no, I'm not happy about closing tomorrow. The situation is, I know a lot of people with no choice but to close up. So hopefully everything will be well. So, generally when you go into Hapke, there's a line out the door. That day when we arrived at Hapke, there was only one table that was occupied. And as you saw, Peter brought us into the kitchen. And I've been in many, many Chinese restaurant kitchens in my life. They're always the noisiest place in the world. And that kitchen was silent because there were no orders. And I will always remember the looks on the faces of the dishwashers, the cooks, the waiters. Nobody knew what was about to happen. But I think all of us do that we were in trouble. And the faces of all those workers still haunts me today. And many of the employees at Hapke had been with Peter for 10, 20, 30 years. And I think doing these interviews and the video on Sunday, March 15th, right before Chinatown shut down on one of Chinatown's darkest days profoundly affected me. And it inspired all the work that I ended up doing in the last two and a half years. I realized that so many of those workers had no voice and that they had no way of getting their story out to the public. And so after we did these videos, and they're called coronavirus Chinatown stories, and you can see more of the videos on the poster house website, Mayor de Blasio put us into lockdown. And then in the latter part of March, April, May, I made many walks into Chinatown with my husband. And it was stunning because Chinatown looked like a Hollywood movie set of Chinatown. It was completely empty. Normally there's bumper to bumper traffic going down Mott Street. There were no cars, no pedestrians. At that point, New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic. We had 700 to 800 deaths a day. And for the first time in my life, I saw the real possibility of losing Chinatown. It was just chilling and devastating to see Chinatown emptied out like that. And by the time we reopened in June, there were legacy businesses that did not reopen. And there was a little life in Chinatown, but nowhere's near what Chinatown normally feels like. In 2019, New York City had 66.5 million tourists. And historic Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, and Boston are dependent on tourism. In 2020, I would venture to guess that there were no tourists whatsoever. And not only did we lose the tourists, but we lost in Manhattan, lower Manhattan workers in San Francisco and Boston. They are adjacent to the financial district. All of those workers suddenly disappeared. So Chinatown was really struggling to survive. Locals were afraid to come out for fear of catching COVID. And I realized that even though I had never been an activist, that I had to do everything in my power. I reached out to every contact that I knew and drew on every skill that I had because I'm a cookbook author. I had some contacts with the media. And so I reached out to the local NPR station to do an interview to raise public awareness that Chinatown needed our support. I wrote articles for different magazines like Food and Wine. Media reached out to me like BBC or today.com. I ended up raising money with a local grassroots organization called Welcome to Chinatown. I raised over $40,000 to save legacy businesses in Chinatown because when we reopened, we lost so many legacy businesses, I was afraid there would be more hemorrhaging. And those restaurants fed people in the community that were dealing with food insecurity, who were on low income or seniors. I raised money to provide personal security alarms for seniors and workers in Chinatown. I started an Instagram campaign with the James Beard Foundation in 2020 to save Chinese restaurants. In 2021, it shifted to supporting AAPI, Asian American Pacific Islander, mom and pop businesses across the country. So I just tried to do everything in my power to try and lift Chinatown up. It sounds like you really drew on every connection and every tool you had access to and really leveraged your position. I want to back up a little bit for this audience and ask you what you love about Chinatown and what makes it so unique and why it's important to America that Chinatowns are saved. Well, Chinatown is a vibrant living community where every restaurant and store is one of a kind. And often I feel when I go to Chinatown it transports me to another world and there are moments I feel like I also take a little trip back in time. And when I think about Chinatown I think about some of my favorite places I love to eat in Manhattan's Chinatown at Hop Lee, which is different than the video that you just saw of Hop Quay. But Hop Lee reminds me of the kinds of restaurants my father used to take me to. I would describe it as Cantonese soul food. When you go there in the daytime I love it when I see that all the Chinatown poster workers have a table of their own. It's all about community and I call it sort of the cheers of Chinatown. It's a very special feeling being there. In San Francisco's Chinatown I'm very, very fond of the walk shop. Tane Chan opened the store over 50 years ago and when you go into this store it's mind-blowing, it's packed to the gills. It's a very tiny shop but with all of these treasures and then carry the old-fashioned traditional cast iron Cantonese style walk. And Tane Chan is in her 80s now and during the pandemic never missed a day of work. She went into that shop every single day. She reduced hours but she is a national treasure. Here in Manhattan's Chinatown we just had the Mid-Autumn Festival and there's a little Malaysian bakery called Kuei Cafe and I posted on Instagram they sold mooncakes for one day and they are works of art. They are so gorgeous and even more delicious to eat. So there are all these little specialty things that you can find in Chinatown and only in Chinatown. I love the fact that I love the people of Chinatown, their work ethic whether you're in a restaurant or a store most people work 7 days a week, 10, 12, 14 hours and during the pandemic they showed even more grit and determination and dignity showing up when there was no business or during times when there was the threat of anti-Asian hate crimes Chinatown is a place to celebrate history and tradition and culture and fabulous food and I love that Chinatown is the story of America. For me it represents one of the things that makes this country great and it's about diversity and inclusiveness. Wow, thank you so much for that vivid picture of what's at stake and all that Chinatowns across the country have to offer. When we talk about saving Chinatowns I think that can mean a lot of different things to different people and there's kind of a philosophical question in the preservation field as well about what it means to preserve something. So I wanted to ask you when you talk about saving Chinatowns what aspects of Chinatown do you talk about preserving or saving? Well, I am always focused on the businesses I know that there are so many different areas of Chinatown that are in need of health but I feel as though if you don't save the businesses and having witnessed seeing the loss of the old businesses I think that just opens the door to gentrification and redevelopment. And right now in Chinatown in the last months there's a new pizza shop there's coffee shops, bubble tea, ice cream Korean fried chicken and I wish them all well but to me they are not Chinatown and if more of that happens as Chinatown becomes gentrified it moves Chinatown. I think one of the things that is so important about Chinatown are the mom and pop businesses. In Manhattan's Chinatown 98% of the businesses are mom and pop in San Francisco's Chinatown there are 1,000 family owned businesses and I don't know the stats for all the other Chinatowns in America but they're all mom and pop and I think that there was a time when mom and pop businesses were the backbone of America and it's what made this country so special and when you go to Chinatown everything is done the old fashioned way it's about people to people connections it's about sometimes cash only businesses but during the pandemic all of us heard about the fact that online business has skyrocketed and Amazon is making more money than they ever made and I think to myself that people I understand that during the pandemic we needed to do online business because it was safer and it was more convenient but the idea of scrolling, clicking and then the next day the box arrives versus going to Chinatown and supporting a little mom and pop business I have never shopped at Thresh-de-Ract or ordered groceries at Whole Foods and had it delivered to me I love the experience of going to Chinatown and going to one store to buy something you know to buy my fish and another store to buy my produce one of the stores that I love to buy my produce is 88 Natural on Mulberry Street and it's run by a husband and wife who get there early in the morning to set up and work all day and roughly around three or four in the afternoon their daughters arrive from school and sometimes if you peek into a back room you can see them doing their homework or they're eating a snack and then when things get busy they pop out and they help their mom and dad at the cash register or they're prepping vegetables and then at the end of a long day they all go home together and you want them to succeed I want to support that business rather than Amazon to make sure that they make it and every single one of those stores and businesses in Chinatown have a story that it's similar to that and so I think when we are supporting mom and pop our lives are richer the experience of going to buy your groceries or eating in a restaurant where the waiter knows what you want even before you open your mouth because you've come in so many times and they know what you like is what makes our lives a fuller experience and so I think that it's really important right now to have this consciousness that when we're saving Chinatowns we're actually saving small town USA the way America used to be You really highlight an important point it's not just the businesses these businesses are family institutions they're cultural anchors and they serve such important roles for the community What do you say to people who kind of feel that the pandemic is over and things have relatively returned back to normal Are there other issues you started talking about gentrification displacement continued fallout from the pandemic Are there other issues that you want to elevate and let people know about that Chinatowns are still are still struggling with at this point in time So everyone suffered during the pandemic but Chinatowns suffered more as I mentioned that at the start of the pandemic in January and February businesses went down 40, 60, 80% and that for historic Chinatowns like San Francisco, New York and Boston that are dependent on tourism there were no tourists in 2020 So so many of the Chinatown businesses have dealt with mounting debt There are certainly landlords that were lenient and negotiated a lower rent but I've heard enough stories about the landlords who were tough who were hounding their tenants for the rent even when we were in lockdown and they knew that their tenants were not taking in any income at all So the hardships that they have endured and not only the mounting debt but no other businesses in America had to deal with anti-Asian hate crimes and that's been a huge impact on Chinatown's survival Right now in New York's Chinatown, San Francisco all Chinatowns across the country Chinatowns used to be open late into the night In the old days in Manhattan's Chinatown there were restaurants that were open until 4am but pre-pandemic many restaurants were open until at least 1am Nowadays, many of the restaurants are closed at 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening because there's simply no business and that is because locals are afraid to come out at night During the daytime and this past summer when the weather was warm when you're in New York's Chinatown it actually feels a little pre-pandemic there's a vitality to it but in the old days after work lots of Chinese Americans Asian Americans would swing by Chinatown on their way home from work and pick up groceries or have a meal and nowadays because of safety issues they go directly home so there are the smaller markets in Manhattan's Chinatown that are closing at 4.30 or 5 o'clock There are a few restaurants that are open until 10 o'clock but I think 10 o'clock is now the cutoff point but most restaurants are closed by 8 and in the spring of this year in New York City there was a small study that was done and it revealed that 75% of Asian seniors are afraid to leave their homes so this really impacts the business in Chinatown without people feeling comfortable and safe it limits how much they're going to make and they cannot survive if there's not dinner business so it's really critical that everyone else come into Chinatown everyone, all businesses in America right now are dealing with supply chain issues and inflation but in Chinatown the impact of inflation is even more dramatic one restaurant owner told me pre-pandemic the cost of cooking oil was $26 and now it's more than doubled it's $59 the price of all foods have gone up but on top of that the energy bills have gone up by 100% so pre-pandemic they were paying $4 to $5,000 and he said now he's paying nearly $10,000 when you think about Chinatown most people expect inexpensive meals so there is a restaurant in Chinatown that pre-pandemic was selling lunch at $5.95 when you think about how they could make money for a lunch for $5.95 when you take into account the cost of their food labor, rent electricity, gas, water, garbage insurance I'm sure I'm missing something real estate taxes what could the profit be so the Chinatown business model has always been reliant on selling volume they set a very very low price but they're hoping they're going to sell 200 lunches, 300 lunches and that's the way they squeak by so when you have these rising prices because of inflation or energy costs are going up it's so hard for these businesses that restaurant that had the $5.95 lunch now has a $7.50 lunch and the owner says to me he's not making money he also gives away the rice it's complimentary and a bowl of soup and he does it just to keep the doors open and hoping that the clients also come back for dinner but their mindset is they want that inexpensive meal so there are a lot of challenges for Chinatown right now and I think that it's just and as I mentioned before we had the summer weather where there were more people out and about and now as we enter the winter months I'm really worried because when it's really cold in New York you don't even want to cross the street to get some orange juice so that means that there's also going to be a greater decline in business for Chinatown too and for Chinatown it's all across the country right it sounds like Chinatown is no stranger to crisis but this is so much more sustained and long term to be suffering this lower level of foot traffic and lower level of business that's really pushing things to the brink there's actually one more issue too I'll say it again there's actually one other issue that's very important and that is right now in New York City they are talking about congestion pricing so coming into New York will be charged a surcharge to enter the city and they haven't determined what that price is going to be but I know that many businesses in Chinatown are very worried about this because it means that Chinese Americans Asian Americans or Americans in general who want to come into the city to visit Chinatown might not do it if it's going to be $23 might not come into Chinatown just to have their kids get a haircut and to have a lunch of deemsum because everyone has to tighten their belts right now so there are multiple challenges facing Chinatown even though the pandemic is over when we talk about preservation I think a lot of people think that that focuses on the buildings so I think this conversation is really interesting around the lifeblood and cultural assets of Chinatowns being the legacy businesses and I came across some words that you used in an article to describe kind of your journey before that really struck me where you said you realized you have always been a preservationist and your life's work has come into sharp focus and I wanted to hear in your words what does being a preservationist mean to you? My work as a Chinese cookbook author has always been about preserving recipes that are at risk of being lost I've always been fascinated with getting recipes from the older cooks because I think that there is so much wisdom in the old ways and I've been so focused on the traditions of wok cooking but as the pandemic unfolded I said I shifted my focus to saving Chinatowns and at first it did not sink into me but I realized that I was of course trying to save one of the great centers for Chinese cuisine and culture but in fact I am preserving a piece of the American story and Chinese food has such a long history in America which dates back to the mid 1800's and there is this wonderful author Jennifer A. Lee who wrote a book called Fortune Cookie Chronicles and in the book she talks about the fact that we think of apple pie as being the quintessential American food but when was the last time you had apple pie and when was the last time you had apple pie and for most people they of course eat Chinese food more than they have apple pie and if you google what is the most popular ethnic food in America it's Chinese food that comes up and I think most people don't even think of it this way but Chinese cuisine Chinese food in America is an important part of the American culinary culinary landscape and so I've always thought about the fact that I'm preserving the traditions of Chinese culture but in fact now I realize that I'm preserving a piece of American history when I fight to save Chinatowns and Chinese mom and pop businesses in Chinatown or Malaysian, Vietnamese there's a vast array of different Asian cuisines that you will find in Chinatown and all of them are part of the American story that is so beautifully said thank you for that one conversation we had earlier as we were preparing for this session you had brought up a common understanding of preservation that you yourself held before we started talking which is that I think that preservation is focuses on the distant past or the quote-unquote long dead past and it's not really relevant to people today and I wonder what could show communities like Chinatown that preservation is a tool for good well I think that without preservation there will be the loss of Chinatown as a way of life all those stores that I feel are so unique and special from the herb shops to you can find artisan tofu in Chinatown bakeries there is so much richness in Chinatown and here in Manhattan's Chinatown you only have to look at little Italy to understand what the ramifications are if we don't save Chinatown little Italy is just it's a tourist, it's like Disneyland the restaurants are geared for tourists there's only two remaining markets it used to be a vital community and it's all been stripped away and one of the things that came up during the pandemic was in April of 2020 I read a CNN report that 59% of independently owned Chinese restaurants in America had ceased their credit card and debit card transactions implying that they had permanently closed and in the same news piece it said that PF Chang's which is the largest chain of Chinese restaurants in this country had received PPP loans and their sales had doubled and at that time I thought to myself oh my god are we going to lose all the little mom and pop restaurants that have so much character and make Chinese food so interesting in this country and we are going to be left with the equivalent of the Olive Garden of Chinese food and now as I see Chinatown struggling there there is a PF Chang's that opened in the financial district in 2020 there is another one opening up about a mile or so from Chinatown and I think there is another one like two miles away so if we do not take action and actively preserve and support Chinatown I fear that we will be left with just big chain restaurant Chinese food restaurants yes it seems like so many Chinatowns are battling for their soul right now with commercial development and so much development pressure that is really changing and they are also facing issues around razor thin margins inequities and access to incentives and other sources of public support because of issues like language barriers and lack of translation and things like that so thank you for sharing with us some of those challenges I want to end on a question about how people can act to save Chinatowns if people walked away from the session today with one to do item what would you say people can do to support their local Chinatowns and help and help their survival I think it is really important to make an active effort to support your local Chinatown frequently and not just to eat in the restaurants but to shop in the markets and the stores and when I go to Chinatown I ask my friends or my neighbors if there is anything I can pick up for them some takeout some produce do you want the mangoes, the baby bok choy some fresh ginger I am happy to do that for you because every little bit counts and to actively do less online shopping and to go into Chinatown and experience how wonderful it is to shop from these little mom and pops and you can find everything in Chinatown it is not just Asian ingredients you can find milk, yogurt you can buy paper towels there is tons of pharmacies drug prescriptions filled in Chinatown in New York's Chinatown there are a ton of eyeglass stores Chinatown is infinite in what it has to offer and so I urge people to support their local Chinatown and if you don't have a local Chinatown support your local AAPI mom and pop businesses because they have all been suffering during the pandemic or remind your friends and relatives who live in cities that do have Chinatowns that they need to show up that is fantastic and an absolute last question what is next for you Grace and are there any exciting campaigns or projects in the pipeline that you would like to share I am partnering with the James Beard Foundation on a national social media campaign called hashtag support Chinatowns and we are launching that November the 15th of this year and we are reaching out to famous chefs and celebrities and we want them to share their Chinatown story so many of us have a special love for Chinatown and tips for things that we love to eat or do in Chinatown so we want to gather up those stories and memories as a tribute to Chinatown and to raise public awareness that we can't take Chinatown for granted and the idea is to have this outpouring of love and support for Chinatown and that it's a way to recognize that Chinatowns are an important part of American life so I hope all of you will do a post about why you love Chinatown and memory and hashtag save Chinatowns and in this way support Chinatown as best you can Thank you so much Grace I'm really excited about this continued partnership to protect Chinatowns for future generations and I want to thank the audience today for tuning in I also want everyone to know in terms of next steps for the National Trust we are planning a series of convenings on Chinatowns over the next several months so if you are viewing this you are already part of the National Trust community and network so we will be in touch soon for those interested on ways to be involved in future discussions and roundtables to join partners from around the country who are passionate about securing a thriving future for American Chinatowns and other AAPI communities I will end on one of my favorite quotes from Grace even though I can't possibly say it any better than she has said it during this session but Chinatowns and the businesses within them are links to our past and when we lose our past we lose a part of ourselves and that's why this work is so important Thank you all again and please enjoy the rest of the conference