The New Blood in Chinatown

This vase is a recreation of the New York Times article published on the day of my birth, written by Jane H. Lii about the funeral of Wu Quin-Rong, an 11-year-old girl who was murdered on her way to school and found in the East River. The article dives into the shifting dynamics in Chinatown and the ethnic tension between the Taishanese & Fujianese. My paternal grandfather was living in Chinatown at the time of my birth and this gave me a slight insight into what his life was like 8100 miles away from Taishan and his entire family. I don’t have any memories of him because he passed away the night my parents and I arrived in the U.S. in 2005. I make this in memorial of the 18th anniversary of his death two weeks ago and hope he knows that I think about him often