How do key issues of the Boston Chinatown community (such as housing, healing, LGBTQ justice) connect to challenges of the past and in API communities around the globe today? What can we learn from intergenerational community history in the area of resilience, organizing, collective wisdom and power?

These are questions that the exhibit Homeward Bound: Global Intimacies in Converging Chinatowns seeks to answer.

Queer Chinese American scholars, organizers, and artists Mei Lum, Diane Wong, and Huiying B. Chan curated the Homeward Bound exhibition to center narratives of home, community, and intergenerational resilience. Homeward Bound will be the first exhibit of its kind in Boston.

Lum, Wong, and Chan’s work draws from four years of ethnographic research and oral history interviews with the Chinese diaspora that spans nine countries and 13 cities, including: New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle, Lima, Havana, Johannesburg, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Sydney. Each of these communities have overcome extraordinary struggles due to the lasting impacts of war, violence, and dispossession.

Using photographs, oral histories, and multimedia archives, they curated this exhibition to highlight stories of migration, displacement, and everyday resilience in Chinatowns around the world. Through a public exhibit and a series of public workshops that highlight historic and contemporary movements focused on housing, mental health, and LGBTQ justice, the Pao Arts Center seeks to bring this project to Boston Chinatown, a neighborhood with a rich history of intergenerational community engagement.

Special thanks to Mass Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the grant awarded to us for this exhibit.