The Hard-Won Beauty of Staying Put

If you plug “Wing on Wo” into Google Maps, the dot on your screen floats across New York toward Lower Manhattan, ultimately resting above a “gift shop” at 26 Mott Street in the heart of Chinatown. The storefront’s high Google rating (4.9 out of 5 stars) feels appropriate given its charms: a vast and varied inventory of porcelain objects, friendly shopkeepers who greet visitors as they enter, the earthiness of loose-leaf tea steeping in a back kitchen. But linger there long enough, and you’ll see that the label “gift shop” belies the enormous civic and cultural wealth store owner Mei Lum is building for residents out of Chinatown’s longest-running store.  

Indeed, Wing on Wo now also acts as home to the W.O.W. Project—a recently incorporated arts-centered nonprofit with a growing staff that Lum started when she chose to start running the store in 2016. ​

Dedicated to collaborative art making with a social purpose, the W.O.W. Project’s programming might be categorized as social practice art. But to understand how the organization’s work fits into a rapidly changing Chinatown neighborhood, it’s perhaps best to start with what’s happening outside the store. 

On an unseasonably warm Saturday last December, W.O.W. Project staff and a couple dozen local residents gathered at the doorstep of Wing on Wo for an event in the winter Public Program Series. From there, they walked around the corner and sat on the grass at Thomas Paine Park to reflect on what the landscape might have looked like centuries ago. Lum invited memory worker and storyholder​ ​Kale Mays to guide the group through a process of remembering and grieving the once-rich freshwater network now hidden beneath the surrounding buildings. Among these buildings, they observed, was the 900-bed Manhattan Detention Complex down the street referred to more commonly as “the Tombs.”  

In Lum’s view, the edifice of the Tombs has loomed especially large in Chinatown ever since it was designated by city officials as the site of an eventual 45-story “mega-jail” to house a portion of inmates from the city’s soon-to-close Rikers Island. The plan to transform the Tombs could produce a structure as tall as the Statue of Liberty—making it taller than any other carceral facility in the world and (borrowing an architectural historian’s recent account) “grossly out of scale” with the surrounding area. 

Activists within the W.O.W. Project community​ ​are concerned that this new mega-jail would perpetuate the kind of mass incarceration that efforts to close Rikers Island have fought against in the first place. ​​​​​​​​​​​​And local businesses (another focus of the W.O.W. Project's programming) and residents alike​ ​fear that the project could do real damage to the neighborhood, in terms of both how well nearby buildings will endure its construction and how readily people will reside in, or visit, Chinatown with a jail looming over the streets. 

The gathering in the park might not have been capable of directly reversing the city’s plans to build on the site. But it did leave the residents with a greater awareness of where they sat and how the area has changed. 

To be sure, a new mega-jail is just one of the transformations Chinatown faces. According to the New York University Furman Center, between 2000 and 2021, the percentage of Asian residents in the Lower East Side/Chinatown declined from 34.8 to 28.1, while the percentage of white residents increased from 28.1 to 32.6. Meanwhile, corporate developments like the recently constructed One Manhattan Square—the all-time second-largest condo project in New York at the time of its construction, built on the site of a former grocery store—list one-bedroom apartments for up to $6,831 per month, which many argue have an inflating effect on prices in the area. In this way, gentrification and displacement loom large, like the mega-jail. 

A mess of urban forces is what Lum inherited when she decided to run the storefront eight years ago. At the time, Lum’s grandmother Nancy Seid, who had taken ownership of the business back in 1964, was carefully considering selling the building (the value of which the family indicates was close to $10 million at the time). It would have been more than enough for Lum to keep the store alive, rather than sell it to a developer and perpetuate the neighborhood’s loss of locally owned businesses.

But on top of the upheaval she was feeling around her and conversations she was having in the community, the stories passed down from family members about the storefront demanded bigger thinking about its future.  

As the family’s accounts go, Wing on Wo has evolved through many overlapping iterations since it opened over a century ago: a general store, a credit union, an informal post office. Throughout, people from the local community have viewed it as a safe and welcoming gathering space—so much so that her dad refers to the storefront as the “family living room.” A history lesson was there to observe: the store is about more than just money. 

When the shop became hers, Lum decided that the tall order of resisting local problems like gentrification should be less an isolated and solitary act of holding on, and more the start of an ongoing and collective effort to strengthen the Chinatown community—always rooted in, and inspired by, the shop’s inventory and backstory. 

Straightaway, a focus on artistry felt natural in a place where handmade porcelain lines the walls. Lum reflected, “I was noticing folks assemble in the shop—seeing them look around and be prompted by the things that were on display—realizing that we were in conversation with the materiality of the space.” “Objects that hold history and memory” have a way of inviting people into a full range of conversations, from the political, to the educational, to the personal and playful. Like an “old friend,” each piece holds a story ready to be told.   

The W.O.W. Project established an organizational identity through a still-active residency program in which local artists create artwork with dedicated social purposes out of the basement of 26 Mott Street, and then showcase the work in the shop’s street-facing displays. For Di Wang, the newly appointed deputy director of the W.O.W. Project, opportunities like artist residencies and youth cohort leadership pipelines represent a fundamentally new way of thinking about Chinatown. As a new immigrant from China, Wang shared, “Before I knew about the W.O.W. Project, I thought, ‘oh, the way I can have a connection with Chinatown is to make money elsewhere and then purchase things here.’” As a part of the staff, she’s now helping demonstrate how opportunities to shape the community—beyond economic exchange—can flourish from within. 

With support from a 2022 Mellon grant, today the W.O.W. Project has built its internal capacity to distribute the many professional hats Lum has worn over the years. (They include “building manager,” “business owner,” and “executive director.”) W.O.W.’s new operational capacity means that any given week is packed to the brim with activities like political education sessions, leadership development programs for youth, and small business–focused Lunar New Year celebrations. People might come for the art, but they often stay when they learn more about issues popping up in the neighborhood—and sense how much action there is to take. 

Amid the organization’s ongoing response to plans for the mega-jail, Di Wang described feeling buoyed by the young leaders around her. “I had a way of talking about [the jail] as if it’s already there,” Wang said. But when listening to Serena Yang (an alumnae of the W.O.W. Project’s Resist, Recycle, Regenerate youth program), Wang took to heart a message of hope. “Her words reminded me: as long as the new jail is not built, it’s not there.” It’s that “courage to not give up, to not take it as inevitable” that keeps Wang going. 

Needless to say, the W.O.W. community is proud that an increasingly shared willingness to stay put is serving as a defense against unwanted forces of change. But they also admit that it’s creating the possibility for a welcome transformation. Lum wondered, “If Chinatown today is less of a landing pad to gain social services or a job, what is its purpose? Is it preservation? Is it holding cultural identity?”  

It’s a totally open question—and lots of people have ideas.

That’s a beautiful thing.