“Lost Chinatowns” at MAH, Santa Cruz, CA (May 5, 2019)

It was an honor to perform Lost Chinatowns (solo) at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Lost Chinatowns: Destruction at the Galleria, the site of Santa Cruz’s last Chinatown. This special performance of Lost Chinatowns was accompanied by a talk and site-specific walking tour by Chinese American elder, George Ow, Jr., who grew up in Santa Cruz’s last Chinatown, and culminated with an offering at the San Lorenzo River. I was incredibly moved to have multiple generations of the Ow family, including George Ow, Jr. and his brother David Lee Ow, who grew up in Chinatown as boys, present for the event.

Lost Chinatowns is a solo dance-theater work by Cynthia Ling Lee that explores the invisibilized histories of Santa Cruz’s Chinatowns from 1860-1955. Santa Cruz, now known for being the ultra-liberal “leftmost” city of the US, was once a center for virulently xenophobic anti-Chinese racism in California. “Lost Chinatowns” brings these forgotten histories to life while making connections between the historical othering of Asian bodies and current racialized xenophobia in the era of Trump.