Opinion: Chinatown Library Only Possible After Hard ‘Fight’

Sept.18 was an exceptionally joyful day for a quiet stretch of Hudson Street in the heart of residential Chinatown. Joined by mayor Michelle Wu and the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), city officials and community partners put their shovels down at the parking lot on Parcel R1, which will soon become home to 110 affordable housing units, and more importantly, Boston Public Library’s permanent Chinatown branch.

This is long overdue: The Tyler Street reading room was demolished in 1956 to make way for the Central Artery construction. Chinatown had not had its own BPL branch after that until decades later. In 2018, the Chinatown branch returned, this time at the China Trade Center Building on Washington Street. But this home was only a temporary one, and it only happened after almost two decades of sustained community advocacy.

Graphic by Mingjia Chen

“You need to fight very hard, have patience, and you cannot stop,” says Baolian Kuang, a staff member at the Chinese Progressive Association. In 2001, the Chinese Progressive Association was leading the effort to bring the library back when its Chinese Youth Initiative participants learned about this gap.

“Why is there no library?” The high school students asked, “What can we do to advocate for it?”

For that summer, they launched a survey with 331 Boston residents about the need for a new Chinatown branch. Their inquiry has brought different parts of this community together under the same cause to form the Friends of Chinatown Library.

It took more than a single action, however, to bring the library back to Chinatown.

“We had to do something different each year to push the city,” Kuang notes, “to do political education with our residents and amplify their voices through different media.”

Through each campaign, the vision for Chinatown library’s return became more concrete. In addition to sending signatures, post cards and petitions, a pop-up storefront library was set up between 2009 and 2010, while Friends of Chinatown Library ran the Chinatown Lantern Reading room at Oak Terrace from 2012 to 2013. Each experiment demonstrated how energizing Chinatown can be when its youth and elders have a place to read and socialize.

The high level of community involvement led former mayor Marty Walsh to pledge for the return of a Chinatown library. The interim location finally opened in 2018, while studies and community work continued for the permanent location. Beyond the community, Chinatown’s library story has also invited institutions to imagine the space: both Northeastern University and MIT ran architecture design studios where students were tasked to re-design it as a way to learn.

Cristina Parreño Alonso, who taught the class at MIT, says that “there are a lot of things that a library teaches, and it is important for students to think through a project that will be built in the future.”

Students highlighted the community’s desire to combine the library’s core program with other neighborhood needs, and imagined various creative solutions. It was an opportunity for them to work with a real issue at their front door.

The library proposal in reality shared the same ethos, but better: combining affordable housing with the library. Vivian Wu Wong, who directs the Friends of Chinatown Library Board, explains that having affordable housing with the library “is going to make a huge difference to retain the residential neighborhood feeling where people can live here.”

Chinatown is increasingly being perceived as a commercial district, but it’s also the home to many residents who need the institutions that make a community thrive.

For Wu Wong, having a permanent library branch will help “make Chinatown much more like a community and a neighborhood, because every Boston neighborhood has a library.” The function it plays in the community goes beyond offering books and services. It is also an important third place where residents of all ages can meet for free.

Sebastian Luu, who has lived in Chinatown as a young adult, notices the lack of such social spaces from his experience: “People in Chinatown do not have any good locations to hang out, you only get a couple of spots, especially if you are a kid.”

Kuang, who had lived in Chinatown before, feels hopeful about how the new location would address this: “it’s like a community center, and kids from Josiah Quincy School can come here to work after school instead of walking a long distance to somewhere else.”

No longer nested within a commercial building, the new branch library can provide so much more amenities, both ones that are specific to the library experience, and ones that help anchor the neighborhood. As a frequent user of the temporary branch, Luu suggests, “right now, all the shelves are connected because space is limited. I hope that the new library can have a more substantial collection divided by sections.”

The design also promises a community space, which has been frequently asked for by different organizations to host events. Wu Wong already sees how it might be used: “it’s gonna be big enough so that we can have events there. You know, New Year’s celebrations, or just weekend activities, or Tai Chi classes.” As the Chinatown branch solidifies future programming, Friends of Chinatown Library will help with publicizing library services, and to supplement events, hosting activities or bringing in speakers.

Now that construction is underway, the future of Chinatown’s branch library is still firmly rooted in community involvement and advocacy. Libraries are vital pieces of social infrastructure that provide people with the resources to exchange ideas, be together, and collectively imagine what kind of neighborhood they want to live in. While some residents were concerned about preserving existing trees at the construction site, others envision more green space in the future. This is exactly what the community advocates are working on right now: to create a park right next to the library.

“I know there is a lot of support in the community for a new park, but we have not been able to engage the leadership that owns the land,” said Wu Wong, “and if we have a park here, it would probably be Chinatown’s biggest park.”

Mingjia Chen is a graduate student at MIT School of Architecture and Planning.