Postponed: MAPC Tour of Chinatown and Little Italy
In light of the extremely cold temperatures forecast for Saturday morning, we all agreed it would be best to postpone our Chinatown Walking Tour and Lunch scheduled for this Saturday, February 4th.
We will have a new date for you next week. Thank you all for your enthusiasm in signing up and your thoughtfulness in agreeing it would be best to postpone. Keep posted for the new date, and if you do venture out Saturday, bundle up! See you Sunday in worship and for our Annual Meeting!
Special guests Alvin Tsang and Siyan Wong will join us at Hop Lee - please find their bios below.
A tour through two important ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, comparing the racial injustice placed on each community in the 19th century and how each community emerged from it. Just some of the stops include Church of the Most Precious Blood, the first Italian American Church in New York; the Mulberry Street tenements ; the site of the founding of the fraternal order of the Sons of Italy; Confucius Plaza, created in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act; Chatham Square, and its memorial to Asian Americans who died in defense of democracy; and the residence of Dr Sun-Yat-Sen, Father of Chinese Democracy.
After the tour, as many as can, please gather at Hop Lee for conversation and a delicious Chinese meal! We welcome you all to join in!
Key Points:
The tour including guide gratuity is $25 per person.
The meeting point will be in front of the Church of the Most Precious Blood, near the corner of Baxter and Canal Streets. The closest subway is the 6 train to Canal Street. The tour will be approximately 90 minutes. We will end in front of Hop Lee.
Please plan to join in and bring cash for our meal at Hop Lee!
The map on the right shows the tour route.
Special guests Alvin Tsang and Siyan Wong will join us at Hop Lee - please find their bios below.
Alvin Tsang is a filmmaker and artist based in New York City. His work explores the more personal human experience to inform on bigger issues of migration, community and humanity. His recent documentary, When Home is Elsewhere (WIP), is sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts and is supported by Queens Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. Tsang’s award-winning documentary, Reunification (2015), about memories of migration and Tsang’s once intact family, was lauded for “explor[ing] the past with a Proustian sensitivity” (The Boston Globe), its “clear-eyed honesty” (Meredith Monk), and being “the film that’s come closest to feeling like a truly distinct Asian-American [film] language [in 2015]” (Salon). Tsang was an editing assistant for That’s My Face (2001), a Berlinale’s Ecumenical Prize winner by Thomas Allen Harris that explores the mythical African “face” found in Brazil, East Africa and the United States. Tsang served as a co-producer and post-supervisor for Ermena Vinluan’s award-winning documentary, Tea & Justice (2007), about the very first Asian American female NYPD officers on the force. His own shorts include Fish (2010) and Preservation (2011). He is currently collaborating with artist Siyan Wong on her Five Cents a Can Art Exhibitions (2019- ) by creating a “gold mountain” and several other conceptual installations out of 5,000+ gold soda cans in order to shed light on the people (mainly immigrants and elderly) who must collect cans and bottles for a living in our land of plenty.
Web: linktr.ee/alvinwtsan
FB/IG: @alvinwtsang
Siyan Wong is a New York City based artist whose subjects are the working poor, the homeless, women and the elderly. Her art practice is to explore her subject’s experiences by creating a series of paintings and then to promote conversations about those experiences by exhibiting them together in one space. The issues Wong explores reflect who she is. Working since she was 13 and a child of Chinese immigrant workers, Wong paid for her own education to become a workers rights lawyer. Her work experiences as a labor law lawyer and her contacts with everyday working people continue to inform her artistic vision. Each of her projects makes visible the people who would otherwise be invisible and made disposable. Her projects honor the human spirit to live a better life while questioning our current societal values. Since 2018, Wong has shown her paintings at the New York Artists Equity Gallery, the New York Arts Center, the National Arts Club and has spoken at a solo workshop about her art and paintings at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MOCA). She has also been a speaker about art and social justice at the Asia Society, and other higher education institutions. Wong collaborates with Alvin Tsang by producing films that explore issues of community, migration, and the human spirit to live a better life. Currently, they are collaborating on When Home is Elsewhere (WiP) and People’s Land (WiP).
Web: www.siyanwong.com
FB/Instagram: @artistsiyanwong
