This project is centred around Chinese immigrant communities in New York, including Manhattan Chinatown, Flushing, and Brooklyn Chinatown. These communities initially serves as a refuge and support network for many Chinese immigrants who mostly have illegally crossed the United States border. Due to language barriers and undocumented status, they rely on it for essential needs, including shopping, education, healthcare, employment, and recreation.

 

However, today, this community not only serves the undocumented immigrants who reside there, but also attracts a broader population of Chinese individuals who come to New York for study, work, or tourism. As a Chinese student studying abroad and a visitor myself, my first encounter with this area was motivated by the need to find a trustworthy phone repair shop. Therefore, these Chinese communities should not be regarded merely as a settlement of undocumented migrants, but rather as a complex and dynamic utopia shaped by the diverse diasporic experiences of a specific ethnic community.

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I spent over a month in New York conducting in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across several Chinese neighborhoods. Using audio recordings, photography, and video, I documented a range of everyday scenes, informal conversations and interviews, and the ways people inhabit and move through urban space. From this body of material, I selected several scenes to be re-created on this website. 

 

This site serves as an archive of my fieldwork—a collection of images, videos, and texts that continues to grow alongside the research itself. I hope the website offers users an immersive experience, allowing them to wander, as I did, through the streets of Chinatown, and to catch glimpses of residents’ lives through street signs, mundane objects, and fleeting moments.

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Many of the visual materials on this site have been made interactive or “movable” in order to emphasise their materiality.  I hope this feature gives users a tactile sense of the environment, just as the way these signs or flyers might flutter in the wind in the physical world.

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April 2025

​Yamin Tang