Project Name: Exploring the Queerness of “Chinatown”
It is a multimedia archive project, aiming to uncover heritage, culture, video documentation, visual symbols, people and more of the British Chinese and even British Asian LGBTQ+ community in London’s Chinatown, to examine the changes in interaction and visual representation within the community over the decades, with a focus on cross cultural exchange and cross-cultural queer romances, to reshape the mainstream cultural landscape, and engage with a wider audience via using various media formats.
Supported by DSMN, School of Media, Birmingham City University.
Date: March 2022
“The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and.... Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. ”--- Crenshaw, K.
Coincidentally, London's Chinatown and soho are also one street apart, where there is a physical intersectional crossroads.On one side is Chinatown, which represents the Chinese community to some extent, and on the other side is Soho, an area full of gay bars and lgbt-friendly shops.
As a Chinese queer, I stand at this intersection. We are marginal and often invisible on both sides. That's why I want to start this project to uncover and present the memories of queer people in Chinatown.
So, where are the queer footprints? I wander around.
Long Yang Club London (LYC London), one of the best known gay Asian networks in the UK.
LYC London is a gay multi-cultural sports and social club for British Asians and Westerners and was founded in the mid 1980’s. The activities they have held are discos, dinner nights and house parties, weekly Sunday night karaoke, annual Mr and Miss LYC London competiton,etc.
They published their own magazines to document their own stories. As the cover of the magazine shows, an Asian gay and a Westerner gay man hug each other tightly and wear nothing at all. This indicates that the network is a place that promotes the interaction between Westerners and Asian gay community.
Everything did not go very well.
LYC wrote for LGBTQ+ History Month in February 2020,"As well as homophobia, racism was endemic, even in the gay scene where BAME people were generalised into insulting stereotypes, and racist discrimination & abuse was common. BAME people were often not even allowed into gay venues.”
At the end of 2021, LYC London announced the closure due to the 2-year pandemic with restrictions.
During the 1980s and 2000s, they held events in different bars, restaurants or entertainment venues in London's Chinatown, Soho, Piccadilly circus and Covert garden.The closure means that all the stories are hard to discovere. I realize the fact that I might need to start from the very beginning and it is a long long journey.
My team and I compares the HIV pandemic in the 1980s when LYC London established and Clause 28 was published to the COVID-19 pandemic. People used HIV to stigmatise the gay community in the past, and now use COVID virus to stigmatise the Asian community. History is now.
Chinatown Arts Space
Chinatown Arts Space was initiated in 2003 (now the name is Chinese Arts Now) by a group of British East Asian (BEA) artists to champion the development of East Asian performing and visual arts in London.
They developed an app called “Augmented Chinatown 2.0” , A live, immersive audio tour through Chinatown with augmented reality visuals and miniature dramas behind the facades. Happy to find out that the app highlighted Ku Bar, the only gay bar in Chinatown through a short play.
Although Ku Bar is located in the heart of Chinatown, it is still western gay scene and more things have to be done to be the intersectional centre of (British) Chinese and Westerner LGBTQ+ community.
Play performance, "From Shore to Shore", British Chinese Stories in the stage.
Most of the production team were associated with Chinatown Arts Space, which indicates the importance of sustainable community network.
They interviewed people from Chinese community in the UK. The interviewees were “young and old, newly-arrived and British-born, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka speakers. Based on their lived experience, the production team completed the script of “From Shore to Shore” and performed live across the UK in 2019.
Review of From Shore to Shore
From Shore to Shore is a play script written by Mary Cooper and NW Sun, directed by David KS Tse in the early 2010s. The team interviewed the people from Chinese communities in the North of England and then based on the conversation, they wrote the scripts to reflect the real life stories of the Chinese community. As the video of the play is not available to the public and has not been performed for the time being, I make my review based on the script and the trailer, hoping to bring some thoughts to the present.
The script tells the story of the three main characters, Cheung Wing (CW), born in 1934 and lost from her mother during the Japanese war in his childhood. Mei Lan, born in Leeds in 1975 but who was sent back to Hong Kong to be raised in order to make ends meet. The youngest is Yi Di, born in 1980, who lives with her husband in England while her parents live in China. There is no LGBTQ+ figures or content in the design of these three main characters, nor is there any LGBTQ+ seen presented throughout the script. This may, of course, be due to the fact that the stories were not collected during the pre-community interviews.
It is worth noting, however, that in the three stories available, I can see the creators’ keen gender perspective and humanistic concern. This is particularly evident in Yi Di.
Yi Di, “I was born in 1980 in Northern China just as the one-child policy was brought in. The midwife swore that I would be a son. When my father heard the truth he refused to come to my mother’s bedside.” In Chinese society, sons are more precious than daughters, and girls are considered objects to be married off, rather than people to stay at home to pass on the family name and inherit the family business. This is why Yi Di studied hard from an early age in the hope of gaining her parents' love, and this has influenced the way she communicates and attitudes with her parents as an adult. In many of her conversations with her parents, it was clear that Yi Di was in a state of fear and low self-esteem, even though she was already financially independent. “Ever since, I have been trying to bring pride to my father. Every Sunday at 2pm, no matter what I am doing or where I am, I skype my parents. If I am five minutes late, they think I am dead or in prison. Every week I know there is one question on their minds: when are you bringing Sammy to see his grandfather?” In a patriarchal society, Yi Di struggles to work and live as a daily rebellion, yet has to maintain an inseparable and complex relationship with her family of origin.
Cheung Wing, on the contrary, longs to find a home. In the trailer, an old man wanders around Chinatown on crutches, asking passers-by over and over again, "Have you seen my mother?” Some long to distance themselves from their families of origin, others long to find them. Behind these personal stories are traces of the times and the influence of traditional culture. The creators have distilled these stories with a humanistic touch and placed them on these three main characters, not giving a single or simply moving narrative, but allowing you to see the complex, diverse and difficult lives through these three stories.
Protest against LGBTQ+ Hate Crime 2019
Protesters called for unity of LGBTQ and all people against all hate crimes, saying we should all be able to walk the streets without fear.
On the placards, they also emphasised anti-racism and passing through Chinatown specifically to show support for the Chinese community.I was actually there, but I felt a bit ashamed that there were no Chinese at the protest. I hope that in the future more Asians will be involved in Pride activism with British queer activists.
Next plan: A theatre review of Moonwalking in Chinatown (Soho Theatre, Ozzie Yue) from a queer lens
Creator: Qiuyan Chen. Contact Email: queerchinauk@gmail.com