Jian Wei | Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation

The primary objective of my internship at PCDC is to assist in the creation of the upcoming Chinatown history exhibit. The preliminary exhibit design comprises three components: a Chinatown timeline contextualized within national and global history, an annotated streetscape comparison based on street view photographs from PCDC’s internal archive, and a personal history section highlighting notable Chinese American individuals in Greater Philadelphia.

I am responsible for the textual content for all three sections. Therefore, I spent most of my time building historical narratives based on my existing knowledge, as well as new research over the summer. For the timeline and building research, I spent most of my effort incorporating secondary sources to compile a list of major events in Chinatown and provide detailed descriptions for some of them. Working with my supervisor and colleague, I refined the event selection and description, as well as object selection, to better fit the event space.

Beyond planning and writing for the exhibit, I am also assisting PCDC with collecting oral history interviews with long-time community members. From structuring the interview and talking to the interviewee, to calibrating the recording equipment, I help to record the life experience of figures like Cecilia Moy Yep, founder of PCDC, David Choi, son of the owners of Hong Kee Grocery Store, and Martine Louie, brother of the current owner of Tuck Hing Chinese Grocery Store. In addition to oral history interviews that aimed to capture more fine-grained experiences through one-on-one interviews, I also helped to plan community outreach events that tried to raise awareness of the project while capturing a larger set of voices from those who participated in the events. The two major events were the June 22^nd exhibit tabling at the Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church and the July 12^th exhibit open house at Crane Community Center. We were able to collect emergent stories, accept material and object donations, and connect with community members who are eager to share.

Finally, I was tasked with creating a finding aid for PCDC’s internal archive. Being an organization with close to sixty years of history, PCDC has an enormous backlog of files and documents. This amounts to about 4 different storage locations filled with binders, drawers, boxes, and loose files. More importantly, many of these locations are physically inaccessible as they were blocked behind random items and supplies accumulated over the past two decades. Therefore, I spent time and energy removing the materials preventing access to the files. In addition to that, to address the quantity of documents in the archive, I petitioned for two high-school interns that PCDC received as part of the WorkReady program to help in digitizing photographs and cataloging existing documents. This process then involves training them in using software like Adobe Bridge and providing them with the necessary information on how to create a finding aid.

Through this experience, I was able to form a more detailed grasp of Chinatown’s history through working on the timeline and building research. More importantly, I was able to build relationships with many community members through interviews and outreach events. These relationships open up further opportunities for more in-depth conversation during my thesis research process. Finally, access to PCDC’s internal archive also gave me a series of valuable primary sources.