Chinatown Stories: Volume 2, “Aunties, Elders, and Ancestors.” is a 2019 follow-up to Chinatown Stories: Volume 1 This publication features the works of 14 local writers and artists.
Following the success of its first publication in 2017 which raised an auspicious $8,888 through a Kickstarter campaign, local nonprofit organization, Chinatown Today, set out to continue its goal, to produce a grassroots magazine series, taking a snapshot of our evolving yet everstill Vancouver Chinatown, sharing and archiving its stories both past and present. However, unlike Volume 1, Chinatown Stories Volume 2 “Aunties, Ancestors and Elders”, to cast a wider, more diverse, more intergenerational, net. Vice-President Kimberley Wong notes, “…something we really wanted to do with this volume was to tell the underrepresented stories in Chinatown, ones that don’t traditionally come up in conversation when speaking about Chinatown”.
Uncovering stories uncommonly told meant finding new ways to reach out, build trust and bridge relationships. With the help of two incredible summer staff, Editor Y Vy Truong and Community Outreach Coordinator Kathy Thai, Chinatown Today set up post at various community events such as Pride in Chinatown, Chinatown House Craft Fair, had an open drop-in for folks to come in and make a contribution and collaborated with Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice. All these efforts proved fruitful, the team received 41 submissions ranging in different media such as photography, poetry, essays, and illustrations and 81 postcards submissions from our community art project Letters to Our Ancestors. Kathy Thai recalls, “One grandmother spoke apprehensively, saying she’s lived in Chinatown and used Cantonese for so long that her Vietnamese may not be good. Later, while drawing lanterns on her card, she suddenly burst out singing in Vietnamese. I was completely taken aback because it was the same children’s song my mum used to sing to me when we carried our lanterns to Trout Lake.”
publisher: Chinatown Today
