“ON OUR OWN TERMS”:
A Conversation about Reclaiming Community Agency with Vida Kuang

What might it look like for a marginalized community to regain its agency? What is the power of art in uplifting the oppressed? What is the role of anger in demanding progress? When it comes to considering these issues and imagining new futures, the unique conditions under which San Francisco Chinatown has developed make the neighborhood an interesting case study. 

Packed in between Nob Hill and the Financial District, the 20-square block San Francisco Chinatown is the unofficial capital of Chinese America. Delineated by Broadway and Bush streets to the north and south, and Kearny and Powell to the east and west, the vibrant and crowded neighborhood draws in crowds with its promises of mouth-watering dim sum and bright baubles. But today, Chinatown still lives under a dark cloud of systemic oppression. In the 170 years since its establishment, the district has continually suffered from economic marginalization, racial discrimination, and repeated threats of displacement, and lacks the resources and infrastructure to meet the needs of its dense population. Faced with this biting adversity, however, Chinatown has, and continues to prove is resilience and resourcefulness. Organizations like the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and the Chinatown Community Development Center have been established to support community advocacy and affordable housing, but their efforts are also supplemented by driven individuals whose hard work helps sustain the spirit of Chinatown.

Vida Kuang—who we first met in the September 2020 panel Chinatown Futures—dedicates her practice to helping empower and uplift the communities of Chinatown through art. Born and raised in Chinatown, Vida has seen all the beauty and talent that the neighborhood has to offer but she has also seen the many injustices faced by its inhabitants and the difficult conditions under which many live. Working closely with multigenerational members of her community, Vida Kuang explores the power of storytelling in inspiring movement toward economic justice, self-determination, and cultural prosperity. Together, we talked about the potential for community agency, the nostalgia of pineapple buns, and the importance of staying angry.

[Emily Chung] Vida, you work in several different mediums: which do you feel most comfortable working with and which interest you the most? 

[Vida Kuang] I am mostly a visual artist, and I think the mediums I’m most drawn to are murals and audio storytelling. Murals because of how public they are: I, for one, am all about accessibility when it comes to art, and who gets to see it without having to enter into an institution to have access to visual art. It’s important to me that murals be a reflection of the community that lives in the area. I get people’s input because ultimately the residents who live there are the ones who have to be watching and looking at it everyday, they’re the ones walking past it. I just like how collaborative murals are in nature; when I was doing my piece on Sun Sing Theater I had a lot of people just come up to me and interact, talking about what they remembered of the theater, and because I’m bilingual I have that ability to directly communicate with members of the neighborhood, also because I grew up there. 

So that, and also audio storytelling. I think it is a form of documenting history, and it’s one thing that I’ve always been drawn to because of how wide a range of emotions and breadth it captures from a person’s voice. Those are the two mediums I’m drawn towards. 

[EC] You have such a strong connection to your community and it’s really obvious in the work that you do that you’re drawing from the things around you. When you’re creating these pieces, especially things like audio art, how do you balance your vision and your voice, and the elements that you gather from the community?

[VK] That’s a good question. Number one I just want to break down what a “community” is, because I think when people say the word “community” it’s almost like this monolithic thing, you know? Oftentimes it’s code for describing communities of color or people with less access, or people who experience class oppression. When I say community, it’s got to have real faces. It can’t be just, “the community.” I’ve been to schools where they have gentrified communities of color, and specifically large black communities, and they will often say “community” as a monolith...I want to push back on that because a community has to have faces to it, not just one face but multiple faces, and it has to have complexity and depth to it, without being romanticized or glamourized. What I mean by that is that a lot of times people are kind of problematic, they don’t have the language when talking about groups like the Chinatown community. I’m talking about people that are renters and people who are workers of Chinatown, because Chinatown has always been a working class Chinese community and I think what I’m trying to balance is really to allow people to have ownership and agency.

I do truly believe that every person can be an artist. Art in itself has become so elitist and has been taken away from people because of colonization, because of oppression, and we have to own it. For Chinatown specifically, we’ve had such a history of parachute artists coming in. And what I mean by that is people who are coming into Chinatown with expectations or a kind of orientalist mindset—very racist ones if we get straight down to it. From 1906, after the earthquake, there are white architects designing elements of Chinatown that are still here today: a white man’s version of what Chinese people are like. And I'm not saying that there aren't Chinese people who put input in there, but something I really wanted to stress in the Chinatown Futures panel is that what our ancestors did back then served our community well, otherwise Chinatown would have been displaced. They really wanted to get rid of us. 

But now, what does a Chinatown artistic identity mean? It has to come from the people who are already in Chinatown and who have the artistic voice to really describe our experiences, the people who live and work in Chinatown. It has to be that, and not a “parachute artist” who is commissioned and not from the community. But if that does happen—if you’re an artist that isn’t from the community—it’s about how you hold on to that humility and always center on the folks who live and work in Chinatown. You make sure to check in with those people and make sure that they have a say and ownership in the project, that the project doesn’t just belong to the artist. 

A huge part of my job is to make sure that I am supporting the growth of other Chinatown artists and to support and foster artistic voices in Chinatown. That’s always been something that’s important to me; it can be very lonely to be the one artist who actually lives there and was raised there, and I don’t want to be tokenized. I want to actively work to make sure that we have more artists because there are some: if you walk to Portsmouth Square there are grandmothers weaving baskets out of plastic recyclables, there are people who have been playing on the street corners—those are artists as well, and how do we make sure that they also have equal access to resources that should be for artists like grant funding and things like that? There isn’t really that much of that kind of organizing. 

[EC] What are some ways that you engage in that support and fostering of an artistic community growing out of Chinatown?

[VK] I worked with the Chinese for Affirmative Action on a 7 month-long project involving a lot of Chinese parents, specifically mothers, in Chinatown. A lot of them have been active in the community: they are either SRO organizers, outreach workers, or they have a lot of say in representing that working-class chinese parent voice. I was very lucky to have had the chance to work with them, and many of these folks I had prior relationships with—I’ve known them in the community and we’ve maybe been in meetings together, or we’ve worked on other projects together. Over that seven month long process I worked with another co-artist, their name is MLin. MLin’s expertise is with audio, and I’m more about how you craft a story. We’ve been trying to pair that with photography as well.

So we took six months to find those stories in the San Francisco Chinatown community. We turned to them and said,  “well we know all of you have stories, and very important stories to tell,” but oftentimes our community members felt like what happened to them was just life, they might know it’s significant in a way but they don’t always realize at first how important their stories can be. But we’ve been trying to frame them within a conversation, considering what’s been happening under the current administration, for example. We deal with issues like family separation and the immigrant experience, discussing what that has been like as immigrants themselves and parents of young children. We talk about housing rights in the city too—a lot of them are or have been tenants of SROs (Single Room Occupancies) which are very prevalent in San Francisco—and the experience of being parents and having to wait in a communal line for a bathroom, or a shower, or to cook something your children, how that can interrupt your sleep cycle and everything in your life. 

Although it’s normalized for them, it’s definitely the types of stories that people who are housing organizers and who work on housing policies need to hear. And, importantly, how do you also hear them in a way that’s not just here is my testimony for a board of supervisors meeting in five minutes, but really in a way that has them coming in as artists and having an artistic point of view, having agency and power. So many of these stories about immigration and housing when they’re used for news are framed from a point of powerlessness and helplessness, it’s from this place of look at this poor person right here. That’s always something that I’ve always been very frustrated with. I’ve had my own stories twisted like that, being a person who grew up living in an SRO. Bringing in your artistic vision lets you decide what it is about your story that is truly compelling. It gives you true ownership over it and lets you craft it however you want, pointing to a problem from whichever angle you want. I think that’s a very powerful thing, to be able to present your own story without having someone else write it for you. Because a lot of them are monolingual Chinese immigrants, they’ve often had their stories translated or framed by a journalist, but for this one, it’s all from their own voices and they edited their own audio story. I sat with them, and explained, “here, you can listen to your own story and make notes on what parts you wanted to edit out, what parts you want to emphasize,” and then MLin and I would sit there together and edit it. 

We exhibited their stories at 41 Ross, an art space in Chinatown. It was up for a whole month and we had a lot of people from Chinatown come and visit. It was very powerful for people to see their stories, especially these very vulnerable stories, shown like that. We also had an anti-displacement coalition come and see the space, and have a meeting there as well. It was a very powerful experience, a lot of the artists told me they found it very powerful. A lot of them brought their children in as well, so their children got to see their parents make art, and that in itself I’m sure will be an experience they won’t forget. So that’s an example of me working with emerging artists in a community, I’m a member of this community too.

[EC] How do you see the responsibility of community based artists in general?

[VK] Something that was a very dominant theme last year was the idea of transactions. At least what I’ve been seeing as a working artist, is that there's a grant, and you apply for it or a community non-profit applies for it and they look for artists, and you come in and work with the community, “get” peoples stories and then you create a piece for that. That’s the typical form of these things. I often think about how intimate it becomes when any person, not just an artist, is working with communities because it's much more about relationship-building than something transactional: I come in and you give me your story and I give you this moment of hope that maybe your story has some power and can shed some light on an issue. It can still be an issue for someone outside your community who doesn’t know you exist, and it’s not so much of that but relationship building. Even after our 6-7 month long workshop had ended, when I was working with mothers and a father at CAA I’m still seeing them a year later! I’ll be painting a mural and they will come by and cook for me and I’m so grateful that they are here for me. During this period I was helping some of them translate unemployment documents and applying for UI, and we also just hang out with each other! Once a month we go for a walk in the park and we talk and they invite me to things too, so it’s really about building that friendship and that trust even after a project has ended, after working on something together. And that’s how the transactional nature of some of these institutions and non-profits—to go beyond that and taking the extra step as an artist to make sure that you’re still involved (if people still want you involved). You keep reaching out and checking in, saying, “how are you doing?” When the pandemic happened, asking, “hey are you taking care of yourself?” I feel very lucky about the kind of relationships I’ve been able to build, people trust me and I feel very blessed about that. 

[EC] You’ve mentioned several times the term “agency” and I’m wondering what that means to you in terms of San Francisco Chinatown. What do you envision when you talk about Chinatown regaining its agency?

[VK] I think a couple things. Power, for one. The agency to choose how your story is going to be shown to the world. And also economic agency, being able to have options and choices made by the community. Something I mentioned in Chinatown Futures is that a lot of our community’s economy is based on tourism, and that’s not sustainable. A lot of our restaurants and gift shops, their main clientele are tourists, outsiders. Chinatown has changed so much since the [1906] earthquake, with that mentality [of catering to the tourist]. Gordon Chin talked about Look Tin Eli who was one of the main people involved in turning Chinatown into a world class destination. I remember in college, when I first learned about all this, I couldn’t help but think it feels like pandering. It’s only because it was one of the only options available to them in 1906, when they were rebuilding the community from the ground up under the threat of displacement. That’s kind of how Chinatown has operated for the majority of the past century; Chinatown used to be a huge center for performing arts, it was an urban city with burlesque and nightclubs, and there isn’t really that much of that anymore. In the 50s and 60s it became this very Americana-Chinese place with soda fountains and movie theaters, things like that. In the 80s and 90s though there was this new wave of immigration, and many of those immigrants are monolingual. Being monolingual in the US, it can be very difficult to have access to certain opportunities. 

Agency for me is, knowing about all this history, and having the resources we have, how do we dictate our future on our own terms? Not from a place of scarcity, which is what our ancestors had to do—which is an important thing to think about because resources were scarce and they were thinking from a place of, “if we don’t do this, all our businesses will be lost”, “If we don’t do, Chinatown will shut down”, “if we don’t do this, we’ll lose our income and resources”—and rather thinking from a place of abundance: “If we do this, we’ll be creating more opportunities for our future generations.” For example, thinking of small businesses in Chinatown today, there are a handful of second or third generation, American-born Chinese who want to take over their families’ business. How do we support those businesses and those who are thinking several generations ahead? How can we create economic sustainability? Not putting all or most of our eggs into tourism, and instead putting them in other things. Our food and our culture are being created on our terms without having to think, “what’s the next hot thing that someone coming in will want?” We have to have a discussion of what our terms should look like, who are we prioritizing? Are we prioritizing the business class and landowners, are we prioritizing the tenants and low wage workings, are we prioritizing children of SROs? Who are we actually thinking about when we’re thinking about our futures? I think that’s what agency really means, to not have to think from a place of scarcity, and to be thinking about generations to come. 

[EC] As a third generation Chinese-American myself, I feel pretty far removed from my Chinese and SF Chinatown origins, but I’m so curious about them. I’ve seen the rise of this movement—I don’t know that “reclaiming” is the right word because I don’t know that I can claim any ownership to this culture—but there’s been this shift in my generation, it seems, back to these family values and traditions which it feels we’ve lost when our parents and grandparents worked so hard to assimilate. 

[VK] Well, you mentioned ownership: I would argue that you have a lot of ownership over it because it’s in your ancestry and your past generational knowledge, and a lot of it was probably taken away or dismissed because of racism and rules of assimilation. And at the time, for these first and second generations, they might have felt that assimilation was their only option. But now, the more generations go on, the more privilege we have to have other opportunities and options. The conditions that we live in are now different, so that being said, I think that kind of reclaiming of ownership is something you have to make the most of and explore. You can enter into a new relationship with this culture. 

I’ve talked to a lot of older people who talk about Chinatown in a very nostalgic way; I was working on this exhibition with CCDC called “Chinatown Sweets and Pastries” which aimed to highlight and lift up the craft of pastry making and desserts in Chinatown. I was doing a lot of audio recording of peoples’ experiences and they would talk about eating this particular egg tart or pineapple bun and still coming back for it every now and then, but mostly they’ve left. They’ve left because they have more class mobility now, having more access to education or higher paying jobs, and so they move away. Especially people whose parents were low-wage workers and who, growing up, have had more opportunities because they speak English. Chinatown becomes a stepping stone. They move away, and return only to experience these pockets of nostalgia. To me, as someone who is still living in Chinatown, it’s so sad and disappointing because we need people to invest in Chinatown. We need people who grew up in Chinatown and understand what it’s like and who can have a role in community development. For example, what do we do with SROs? What do we do about the lack of childcare and public health centers? How do we make sure people have access to elder care? Being able to return to your community and invest in it, a community which has some of the highest poverty rates in the Bay Area, what can you do? What can investing in your community look like? I want people to be just as excited in community development as they are in pineapple buns! Don’t just come back from the pastries, be a pillar in your community! And I know that racism has had a huge role in this, making people want to dissociate with growing up in Chinatown, but I really think that for our community to flourish, we need the input and imagination of people who grew up here and who can understand all the structural barriers that are still oppressing so many people. 

[EC] You started mentioning this a little bit, and so I’d like to dig into it. Where do you see hope around you? What are some moments of hope that you’ve experienced in the work that you do?

[VK] Well, when Padma first reached out to me and introduced me to the concept of After Hope, I was immediately drawn in. It was towards the end of the summer, and I was thinking a lot about the uprising from the protest after George Floyd’s murder. The movement for Black Lives Matter as it is has been around since 2013, and this sort of organizing, and activism, and rage, happened in Ferguson, happened with Oscar Grand, and with so many others who have lost their lives to police brutality, but this rage itself has been around for over 400 years. 

And when the [George Floyd] uprising happened, people and businesses started having things like “I stand with #BLM” posters and messages. I think earlier on it was mostly small business hanging #BLM posters, being more aware and cautious. And then this year it started being big corporations like Gap and Target—it was new in that I feel like BLM has made it into mainstream consciousness, and especially white people’s consciousness. I think when it first started in 2015, a lot of people didn’t understand it and were victim blaming, thinking of them as one-off incidents rather than a systemic thing. And then, two or three weeks after George Floyd’s murder—I’m really mostly talking about mainstream media and what we see everyday—there were all these messages of hope as you were scrolling through instagram and you would see on the explore page things like black and white children holding hands, messages of “hope”. I think that’s actually a disservice and more harmful. 

We need rage, and we need rage to stay. We need people to be outraged—and I’m not saying that anger and rage are sustainable, because a lot of the time it’s not. But in this case, what the news cycle and social media are trying to do, like showing pictures of cops kneeling on the ground and trying to point out their show of solidarity, what it does is give a false idea of hope. It suppresses rage and anger, especially that of black people, and I think that becomes so harmful. This cycle of how we respond to Black deaths and police brutality is just another form of silencing, when the news media puts in these messages of “hope”, it does so much more harm than good. It’s harder for the news outlets to just shut up for a moment and let the people on the front lines speak. We saw that with the whole #blackouttuesday and people co-opt these messages. 

There’s a really important revolutionary thinker named Grace Lee Boggs who talks about how living in a capitalist system there’s always a co-opting. Like Starbucks saying, “We stand with Black Lives Matter,” and they might not actually really care; they just see it as a marketing tool, and that’s what capitalism does. Capitalists see these things and think, “Okay how can we use these things.” And so when that happens, the role of the artist is to always be just as innovative, because capitalism will always try to one-up people. The question is, as an artist, how do you also come from a place of truthfulness and be creative? Grace Lee Boggs talks about this too: how we always have to keep being creative and innovative because our language will always be co-opted, our ways of being will always be taken and watered down. We have to keep being sharper, and clearer, and reframing certain things. That’s something I’ve always taken to heart as an artist, the words of Grace Lee Boggs and the role of the artist in seeing these sorts of things. For instance when “hope” becomes more harmful than it is good, what do you do as an artist in response to that? The artist is going to have to keep innovating and checking, “How are we responding to these messages?” 

I’m curious—what about you for the role of hope in this period?

[EC] Well, I think you’ve touched on something really important that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around too, which is the role of anger and letting that fuel action rather than choking it. I read something about social media, the idea of demonstrative action and performative activism. [You do] so much posting and reposting, and it’ll be the same video being reshared again and again, and you feel like you’ve done your good deed for the day. You wipe your hands on your pants and you think, “Okay, I’m done, I did my part.” It’s just so easy to not involve yourself with anything of substance. I think it’s so important to stay angry because that’s what fuels action.

I do also think though, that we are angry because we have hope. Without hope, anger would be despair, it would be giving up. Because what it shows when we’re out in the streets, angry, is that we think things should be better, that we believe they can be better. And I think that knowing there’s potential for change, that’s really what hope means to me. But something that I think is really interesting about this project, After Hope, is that it implies these stages of hope: there’s the “before”, and the “during”, as well as an “after.” I think that anger is a symptom of hope building. It’s one of these initial stages of hope and what “after hope” implies to me is that once you’ve had that realization where you know that it’s time for things to change, it’s time for us to do something about it, and to make it our problem even if we might not a part of the Black community, it becomes our responsibility to be a part of this movement and to support it in any way we can. From that comes the “after hope”: How do we effect change? How do we sustain that effort? Because I think that the most important aspect of “after hope” is sustaining your efforts so that you get to the result that you want. 

[VK] Yes, I totally resonate with everything you’re saying. I love how you framed it where you’re seeing hope in stages and that it’s not a one-off kind of moment, and sustaining that is part of that. The anger sustains it, the trust building sustains it, the community building and all these things sustain it. On the role of activism: I’ve been seeing, since the Trump administration started, how many people have started calling themselves “activists”. To me activism is people chaining people to each other in a protest, for example, and the nitty gritty things like you have to have an emergency contact person to bail you out, having to take the risk of being brutalized by the police and taken away by force. Those are direct actions that people in my community who I would call “activists” take. Back in 2014, there was a group of people that locked themselves to BART. I would call them activists, they’re laying their life and safety on the line which is totally different from someone who’s just tweeting something, it’s a totally different kind of interaction. And I’m not trying to disregard people on twitter, but a lot of people can have a larger role, I want to encourage people to try more roles beyond social media. Not everyone might have the ability to be locked up for 14 hours, but there are many ways beyond that. And you know, you can contribute money, but that doesn’t have to be the only way either. Everytime we have these protests, especially when it’s around Black lives being lost, being killed, people just put a lot of money into things like the ACLU and NAACP without really knowing what it’s going towards. I think the words “activism” or “activist” are used as a form of branding, it has become sort of “hot” to use those words. But I’m not trying to dismiss it as much as I want to push people to be active.

You have values and beliefs, and you can act on that. It’s not necessarily just something like arguing with family, it can be getting involved with people who are already working on that change. Something I saw a lot of in 2016 was people starting up groups here and there, but a lot of this work has existed for a long time within communities of color. Within Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, Arab communities, these forms of activism have always been around. A lot of people just starting to get involved are asking around, “why doesn’t this thing exist?” But maybe they just haven’t done their research. I think part of activism is taking the time to understand an issue and dive deeper. You can find the right people and then think, “Okay, how can I support and build on this? How can I bring my world views and experiences and help this kind of work evolve and continue?”

To learn more about about Vida Kuang, visit: https://vidakuang.wordpress.com/