How 'Love, Chinatown' Won the Heart of Cynthia Yee

When Cynthia Yee got word that a young and rising film director wanted to meet her for a planned short documentary about Chinatown, she was hesitant.

Yee, a longtime educator, activist and writer, said she was protective of the neighborhood where she was raised and where she taught. So, she said, she was nervous about the possibility of some outsider misrepresenting Chinatown.

“I was wary,” Yee, age 76, told the Sampan. “I was expecting … a Harvey Weinstein” she joked, in reference to the disgraced Hollywood movie honcho.

Who she got, however, turned out to be a pleasant surprise, filmmaker Lukas Dong.

“He discovered my blog, and, he said, ‘The writing is so beautiful, the story is so beautiful. This woman definitely has a story to tell,’ and he wanted to meet me, ostensibly, to give him a tour of Chinatown.”

After finally being won over by Dong, she gave him what she says was a “10 hour” tour of the neighborhood and a lunch of congee -– a type of rice porridge -– and had him meet dozens of neighborhood workers, residents and activists. And after even more persuading by Dong, Yee finally agreed to sign off on the deal. Yee and current Chinatown resident and university student, Gwen Liu, would take part in the short, unscripted film – which would be titled, “Love, Chinatown.” The documentary is screening at the Boston Asian American Film Festival on Oct. 17 and 18.

But, Yee said, it was hard to overcome her skepticism. When asked about why, Yee goes into the history of the neighborhood that shaped her childhood – the destruction of homes to make way for highway construction, the invasion of greedy developers, and the city’s zoning measures that put in an “adult entertainment district” – a.k.a. the Combat Zone – that in reality invited crime and crude visitors. Her own family’s home on Hudson Street was torn down to make way for a highway – a project she calls a “failure.” Her family had to move into the Combat Zone on Knapp Street.

“The highway went through my house,” she said, of her first family home.

The story doesn’t start there, however, she said, as Yee goes back even further to the very history of Chinese immigration in the the U.S. and the Chinese Exclusion policies formed in the late 1800s that harmed the ancestors of so many here today.

“We’re all survivors of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” she said, noting that for many decades the U.S. government did not want women immigrants from China who could start families with the workers who came here. “The women were not really welcome to America. The government did not want the Chinese to develop roots here. They just wanted them for cheap labor.”

In fact, she now sees many parallels to the anti-immigration rhetoric of today, calling it, “the same old shit.”

“In Chinatown, we don’t trust outsiders,” she said. “It’s because of our history of exclusion and oppression. So why should we trust them? We don’t trust white people. And it’s not racial, it’s historical.”

Growing up in the neighborhood, she said, she did not feel like a minority because she was among her peers — mostly other families who had connections to China. But then people started messing with the neighborhood and there were problems.

Cynthia Yee in a scene in 'Love, Chinatown.' Courtesy photo.

“So, what you know from the history of growing up in Chinatown is: Which white people come to Chinatown? It’s the equivalent of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, and the health inspectors to the Chinatown restaurants. So, you don’t tell them everything.”

The exception, however, were the nuns — the Maryknoll Sisters. “They were wonderful, wonderful,” said Yee. “They are responsible for a lot of the leadership development.”

So, it was a slow process, but Yee would come to trust and find inspiration in Dong’s work. She also ended up forming a closer bond to her “co-star” Liu, who, though separated by decades in age, would hit it off and form a friendship.

“I lived at No. 7 and she lived at No. 9 – 50 years later,” said Yee of herself and Liu. They also share the same birthday; Yee is Taishanese American and Liu is Taiwanese American.

“‘Love, Chinatown’ is about community; it’s about these incredible characters, Cynthia Yee and Gwen Liu, who met coincidentally in a Tai Chi class … and they realized that they both grew up in Chinatown, not only in Chinatown, but on the same street,” said Dong, when interviewed by Boston Neighborhood Network public access news recently. “The film follows these two as they have this connection.”

Liu told the Sampan she moved to Knapp Street with her family when she was two and performed with the Kwong Kow Chinese School and taught swim lessons at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center.

“On those Saturdays after swim class, my brother and I would wander Chinatown for lunch and often bump into our adorable little swim students coming from some other community class they had that day… I imagine that’s how Cynthia feels, being recognized every time she walks down the streets of Chinatown, and now I suddenly recognize everyone.”

Dong’s production crew, Breakwater Studios, was hired by a real estate developer, Oxford Properties, to create a film about the neighborhood, as it was building around the neighborhood. Breakwater also employed filmmaker and photographer Sam Davis for the work.

“Lukas Dong captured the warm respect, the affection and friendship between two Chinatown girls,” wrote Yee in her blog, Hudson Street Chronicles, last year, before the completion of the work.

Yee has yet to see the final film, she said. But in the trailer, she is seen with Liu and alone in conversation with the camera, saying, “Boston’s Chinatown … it’s got a long history,” and, after she tells about the highway that ran through her childhood home, says: “The injustices were so obvious. But, Chinatown made enough noise and change started happening.”

In the end, Yee said she’s glad she trusted Dong and the crew on the project.

“The grace of trusting the narrative to evolve, allowing space for the surprise moments that do happen, can lend poignancy, beauty, and a deeper truth to a film,” she wrote in her blog. “I learned this from working with our gifted director...”

— DongDong Yang contributed to this report.