We recently met two college students, Janette Lu and Nicole Choi, who worked together in creating the zine “Stop Lower East Side & Chinatown Displacement”. It is striking in its visual design and successfully illustrates the importance of the community-led Chinatown Working Group Rezoning Plan. It’s always great to see artists use their talents to help amplify important issue, so we decided to interview them to get the backstory of how this super great zine came to be :)

AAD: We had heard from a friend who teaches at Princeton that she had students who were making a zine about displacement issues, so it was a wonderful surprise to find your zine at the 85 Bowery celebration. Curious how you came to become interested in Chinatown/LES displacement.

JL: During the beginning of 2018, I began seeing posts about the 83-85 Bowery eviction and ongoing displacement in Chinatown that a friend from school, Rebecca Ngu, was sharing on Facebook and Twitter. As the months progress and the events in Chinatown escalated, I saw Rebecca and her sister Sarah reporting on the Bowery tenants’ hunger strike in May. I also came across Zishun Ning’s videos on Vimeo about the ongoing displacement and mobilizing efforts of Chinatown Staff and Worker’s Association (CSWA).

My interest in the momentum in Chinatown was also piqued through my classes at school too. During my freshman year, I had a visual arts professor who had made an experimental documentary about shift-beds in Chinatown. 

NC: Going to school in California for the past couple of years (prior to that, growing up in Hong Kong) means I haven’t always been familiar with the ongoing displacement in Chinatown/LES, but I have been exposed to the similar gentrification of Chinatown in LA, much of the rest of LA, and neighborhoods across Hong Kong. At Pomona, I’ve been lucky enough to study institutional issues including gentrification, and have developed a sociopolitical responsibility into my practice as an artist. When Janette and I met and she asked me to help design the zine, I was more than interested in participating in the discussion of land and displacement; especially within the contemporary context of settler-colonialism and the important nuances when engaging with those conflicts.