The Unchanging Yet Always Changing Chinatown: Morris Lum’s Tong Yan Gaai

As you walk through Chinatown, it hits you. Neon signs in both English and Chinese, the savory smell of roasted duck, aunties chatting in Cantonese outside the market. For Asian Americans, Chinatown isn’t just a neighborhood. It’s a living, breathing archive of resilience, culture, and ultimately survival. Photographer Morris Lum captures these fleeting moments in his stunning, decade-long project, Tong Yan Gaai (Cantonese for “Chinatown”).

Lum’s work, recently spotlighted by CNN, is a love letter to Chinatowns across North America, but it is not romanticized. Restaurants swapping menus to keep up with the times, mom and pop shops closing as rents spike, murals that appear one year and are gone the next, a neighborhood in constant transformation.

But here’s the thing. Lum gets it. He’s Chinese Trinidadian Canadian, but his project stretches across U.S. cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, which are the beating hearts of Asian America. On his site, he explains:

“Over the last ten years I’ve been searching for the clusters of Chinatown communities that have been built across Canada and the United States for the purpose of settlement and growth. My aim is to focus and direct attention towards the functionality of the Chinatown and to explore the generational context of how ‘Chinese’ identity is expressed in these structural enclaves.”

Chinatowns weren’t created just for good food or tourism. They were survival zones, at one point literally the only places that Chinese immigrants were allowed to live and out of which came hubs of culture, family, and community. They were safe spaces in cities that otherwise didn’t want them. For many Asian Americans, Chinatown was the first home their families could claim.

Today Chinatowns are up against a new wave of threats. Gentrification and redevelopment, rising rents, and the slow erasure of immigrant businesses are changing the streets. Lum’s photos are a wakeup call, warning us to pay attention now because these neighborhoods are disappearing right in front of us. Lum isn’t just photographing buildings. He’s capturing memory. He’s telling the Asian American story of making space where once there was none, of adapting without erasing, of holding on even as the city pushes you out. That story isn’t just history; it’s happening right now.

So, the next time you find yourself in Chinatown, look a little closer. That mural on the wall, that fading shop sign, that restaurant menu that now serves bubble tea alongside chow fun. They’re not just details to forget in passing. They’re history in real time.

Photos by Morris Lum