A photographer traveled across North America’s Chinatowns. Here’s what he saw

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — In Morris Lum’s photographic archive of Chinatowns, change is the only constant.

Wall murals are painted then covered up. Restaurant menus adapt to diners’ evolving palates. Colorful shopfronts fade and are replaced, as family businesses fall victim to rising rents or the disinterest of aging owners’ children and grandchildren.

“That’s the life cycle of a Chinatown,” said Lum, who has spent more than a decade documenting commerce, community and architecture in Asian enclaves across the US and Canada.

To date, the photographer has visited over 20 Chinatowns, from Chicago to Winnipeg. His new book paints a varied portrait through courtyards, alleyways and community buildings, whether clan associations or methodist churches, that have offered refuge and camaraderie to generations of Asian diasporas.

But it is the eye-catching, bilingual facades of restaurants and businesses — gift shops, bakeries, insurers, reflexologists, florists, grocers, travel agencies and acupuncturists — that bring the work to life.

In a video interview from his home in Toronto, Lum said he “really just wanted to keep a record” of Chinatowns. But his archive serves more than posterity. Often returning to the same sites over several years, he captures real-time visual evidence of shifting migration patterns and demographic trends.

In one image, a shiny new “K-Beauty” business in Philadelphia stands on what was once the site of a poké bowl and tea bar, a testament to the meteoric rise of South Korean cosmetics. Others show newer storefronts adorned with simplified Chinese characters, not traditional ones, as arrivals from mainland China come to significantly outnumber those from Taiwan or Hong Kong, the source of earlier waves of migration to the US.

Elsewhere, shops and restaurants lie dormant or blanketed in graffiti. Several more of the businesses have closed their doors since Lum photographed them. Among them are New York City’s New Golden Fung Wong Bakery, which shuttered in 2024 after more than 60 years in Manhattan, and Vancouver’s Ho Sun Hing Printers, closed in 2014 after more than a century in operation.

The circumstances vary. Ho Sun Hing, for instance, reportedly struggled to adapt to digital printing. And closures do not necessarily reflect lack of demand (New Golden Fung Wong was replaced by another bakery). There is, nonetheless, an overriding theme in Lum’s photos: gentrification.

Given their historic links to trade, Chinatowns often occupied downtown locations close to busy ports or densely populated urban centers. These areas have, in many cities, become prohibitively expensive. For family-run businesses, this means higher rents and costlier overheads, as well as the exodus of communities that traditionally patronized them. Then, there are the multitude of other financial pressures facing mom-and-pop stores everywhere, like competition from major chains.

“Just the other day, a big sign went up saying a McDonald’s is coming in,” Lum said of a property in Toronto’s Chinatown that was refurbished following a fire, before lying vacant amid the city’s stringent Covid-19 lockdown. “That really speaks to the changing dynamic of Chinatowns.”

The pandemic looms large in the recent history of Chinatowns. In her introduction to Lum’s book, author and academic Lily Cho wrote that the outburst of anti-Asian sentiment, stemming from the epicenter of the virus’ outbreak in Wuhan, China, showed how the neighborhoods “have served as a place of both refuge and violence.” For many of the businesses Lum documented, mask mandates and takeout-only dining were not only commercially devastating but anathema to what he called the “easiness of Chinatown” whereby “you just walk in and know people.”

“The hustle and bustle I remember from when I was a kid was completely gone,” he added.

‘Almost like Disneyland’

Lum’s interest in Chinatowns traces back to his upbringing. Born in Trinidad and Tobago — to a Chinese Trinidadian father and Macanese mother raised in Hong Kong — he immigrated to Canada as a child in the late 1980s. His family settled in Mississauga, a west Toronto suburb that, although increasingly multicultural, was predominantly White at the time.

On the weekends, Lum’s parents would drive him and his sister into the city’s Chinatown. They ate at banquet-style restaurants and shopped for Asian groceries, which were, then, unavailable in their local neighborhood. But the lure of Chinese-owned businesses was not just practical. It was emotional, too: “My parents really craved that sense of familiarity that wasn’t really present in suburbs,” Lum recalled.

The photographer experiences a similar sense of comfort when entering Chinatowns for the first time — even in cities he’s never visited before. “There’s this vernacular in most Chinatowns that, once you come across a restaurant or business that has both languages, you feel like, ‘Oh, this is a place that I feel familiar with.’”

Yet he is similarly fascinated by what makes each Chinatown unique. Some sprawl out behind elaborate ceremonial gates, while others quietly integrate with the urban fabric; some are significantly pedestrianized, while others center on major intersections. The oldest date to the mid-19th century, while newer enclaves only cropped up in recent decades or, like Toronto’s, relocated from elsewhere in the post-World War II era.

Each neighborhood’s identity is, Lum said, informed by its location and history. And this is reflected in the diverse architecture found in his photographs. For every lantern-strewn brick tenement playing into the popular imagination of what Chinatowns looks like (as propagated by movies like “Big Trouble in Little China” and “Rumble in the Bronx”), Lum also captures something more prosaic: a nondescript early-‘90s tower block fronted by a circular moon gate, or Chinese-owned stores jostling for space in a converted Victorian house.

The photographer’s favorite Chinatown is, nonetheless, the archetypal one — San Francisco’s, which although largely rebuilt following the 1906 earthquake was founded during the California Gold Rush in the late 1840s.

“The density, the way the streets are built and just the amount of people — you can see the layers of the different architecture that have been placed on top of it,” Lum said. “It was the first Chinatown I visited in the US and, compared to Canada, it felt almost like Disneyland.”

Hope for the future

Lum still works in analog film, not digital. Upon arriving at a new Chinatown, he begins by wandering the streets, a simple 35-millimeter point-and-shoot camera in hand. He keeps note of which addresses he’ll return to with his tripod and large-format equipment.

His approach requires long exposure times, so Lum usually shoots early in the morning before shops and restaurants open. Similarly, his interior images contain only indirect signs of life (or the “reminiscence of something that has just happened,” as Lum put it), empty chairs around abandoned mahjong games for instance, or an ancestral altar recently replenished with flowers.

But his wider Chinatown archive is, by no means, people-free. Not featured in his book are portraits and casual shots of friends, shoppers, business owners and community members. Lum always tries to connect with contacts from artistic, photographic and diasporic communities, or local historians and architects, before arriving.

It is in these interactions that he, ultimately, finds optimism about the future of North America’s Chinatowns. And, despite the specter of gentrification, his book is littered with success stories. There’s San Francisco’s Li Po Cocktails, the cult favorite dive bar famed for its trademarked Chinese mai tai. There’s The Lingnan, which opened in 1947 and is now Edmonton’s second-oldest restaurant. There are businesses like the Yuen Hop Noodle Company, in Oakland, that have not only endured the decades but overcome a reliance on footfall to become major distributors and wholesalers.

“A lot of younger people are interested in opening up shops or being in Chinatown, because it brings this sense of familiarity to them, this sense of home,” Lum added. “But also, there’s this desire to want to build something.”

“Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai” will be published by DelMonico Books on October 28, 2025.

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