AILIN
CAO
FELLOW
Meet UnMapping Fellow Ailin Cao. Ailin is a civic technologist currently working for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services who is passionate about social equity and reducing poverty. Ailin has worked on the city’s workforce development board and served as the Youth Program Manager at the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. She participated in neighborhood planning and community organizing around the Vine Street Expressway—learning about Philadelphia Chinatown’s history of struggle against commercial developments that disregarded the community. Her project is a documentary that looks at the proposed Sixers arena project through several lenses: historic, economic, humanistic, and civic. Through this documentary, Ailin hopes to cover the neighborhood planning process to help the public better understand their rights in shaping their communities and homes.
INSPIRING
AILIN
“Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place, and Struggle… by Kathryn Wilson [is] the only book on Philadelphia Chinatown I can find.”
“The History of Chinatown Mural at 10th and Winter… is a genius way to document the history of Philadelphia Chinatown, and any neighborhood.”
AILIN CAO BY DEJAH MCINTOSH
Ailin Cao, proud UnMapping fellow and documentarian, sat down with Writers Room Co-op, Ben Barsky, to discuss her latest project progress.
sitting down
with ailin
Based on what I know from the UnMapping Meetings, you have been documenting Chinatown and the Sixers Stadium progress... what has the project looked like?
I am working on this documentary. When I proposed it, it was supposed to examine the Sixers Stadium Project in relation to Chinatown in four dimensions. I wanted to look at the history of Chinatown to understand why the conflict is occurring, the economic impact of the stadium and how that is going to be evaluated. Then more personal stories about people who live in Chinatown and who understand that context. And finally, a civics perspective: to understand if you had feelings about development in your neighborhood, how can you learn from what Chinatown has been doing to be able to make difference... So, I think I am still staying pretty true to that goal [laugh]... I’ve been recording the activist events surrounding this development. I think I have followed around eight to ten of the events since last October.
That is so dope! As you continue to attend more events and your project expands to potentially creating a guideline for successful protest and advocacy, I was wondering if you’ve been encountering any roadblocks or challenges?
The major roadblock is that there is so much information but at the same time not enough [laugh]. So there’s the Chinatown Coalition against the stadium... [and they] have been putting on events at breakneck speed – there is one every week! Some more than once a week. There is so much of that to follow, but there is also not a lot of information about what are the steps that the Sixers need to do to get the stadium built. There is a general idea that they are going to need zoning bills approved, [be] introduced in City Council... and they just recently had the project introduced in a civic design group where neighborhood readers were able to criticize it. They can then change their project based on the feedback, but they don’t need to. But they have also mentioned how there’s going to be so many different steps: water department, sanitation... a lot of boxes to check, but it is unclear what that looks like, which is really hard when you’re trying to share information with people to help them understand...
“You won’t know how to stop something if you don’t know what the process is. There is a lot of information but not enough in certain areas.”
—ailin cao
That’s really interesting because as we discussed earlier in the Fellow meeting, Chinatown has a reoccurring history of being a place to be bulldozed... and I was wondering through that lens, how has getting your voice heard been different and/or similar?
Because there is such a history, it is sometimes misunderstood by the rest of the city as just Chinatown being difficult again. They’re just being ‘nimbys’ and don’t want anything at all in their neighborhood, which is a false way of seeing things... If you keep putting undesirable projects that are not the kind of things you would want in your nice suburban neighborhood— like most people would not want a casino in their backyard—of course people are going to protest... but it is because Chinatown is constantly being chosen for these undesirable things at a higher rate than other communities, that Chinatown has then been in their reaction falsely branded as a bunch of nimbys... when the whole concept of a nimby is that you own a backyard and you want your property values to go up and you don’t want things to destroy your property values whereas Chinatown has the opposite problem where the neighborhood uniquely serves a low income community and they are worried about the opposite... they are worried about gentrification coming in and how it will affect the local people with limited language skills because they recently immigrated and this is the one place they know where they can talk to people and find the help they need. Yes, there has been push back, but it has been from a bad understanding of why.
That’s so heavy. With your documentary, do you hope to highlight this misunderstanding and showcase the real story?
Yes, that is the history component. My whole goal is to be as fact-based as possible which is one way of approaching this. I hope to get more demographic information to help people better understand this neighborhood and its surrounding areas and why it uniquely needs to be taken care of and taken into consideration and you cannot casually build stuff in it the way you can in the much larger and wealthier Center City district.
Large and broad question, but as you are deeply involved, I was wondering what would it take as a society to stop targeting Chinatown with all these construction projects?
I love the question though because it is such a broad scale... like what could society do better? I don’t know [laugh], this is purely based on opinion right now as I haven’t researched opposing perspectives which is important... from my perspective, sometimes Chinese-American history is not valued as much as other kinds of American history... so Chinatown feels to many as less historical and more of a tourist destination. That’s the shift that is needed... the ability to really appreciate Chinatown as a marker of American history and an important part of American history so we would take more care to preserve it... rather than a tourist destination where we worry about the facade and what it looks like and not about how authentic it is and the things that make it real. That’s the biggest shift needed, having Americans appreciate history of cultures that aren’t mainstream America.
That’s super interesting, and I see how your documentary will capture that! I’m Asian American as well and I feel like you don’t see us as often in American history even though we were definitely there. I remember the only thing I really learned about us was that many came over during the Gold Rush period and that’s about it.
Were you able to talk to any Chinatown families that have generational ties to the area?
Most recently I talked to Lauren Lowe, so thanks for making that connection, and that was really cool because previous to speaking to her, I worked at PCPC – a nonprofit serving the Chinatown Community - and there would be a lot of kids coming in, not all lived there, but came for the service hub. A lot of the perspective focused on first-generation and second-generation youth, but Lauren has an even longer history, and it was really cool.
Her dad was on the bulldozer and they have different ideas about activism even though they have the same perspective of the stadium and that’s really cool because what she said that really resonated with me was that there are so many different kinds of people that come to Chinatown and rely on Chinatown and that they are not one cohesive group that clearly and easily communicates with each other... they speak different languages and there is no way to communicate sometimes, but there are just so many different kinds of Chinatown residents and the fact they can form a coalition is a really cool phenomenon.
Yea, speaking of coalitions, I was wondering what organizations you have been working with?
When I first started doing research, I attended a teach-in hosted by NAICs (No Arena in Chinatown) and have mostly been working with their organizers, Deborah Kodish and Claire Wan... Claire organizes the City Council Watch sessions, and they send the information. But it is really cool how so many community members are involved and if not fully directly. I’ve gotten leads from PhillyCam’s Laura, because she works with Deborah.... AAU (Asian Americans United) have also been leading and organizing these events. APIPA (Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance) will sometimes come by and ring doorbells, it’s just amazing all these volunteers form a coalition from about 200 groups...
I’m really not surprised the project has been delayed when you have so many passionate people working on it.
Agreed! My final question is related to your experience with UnMapping, I was wondering how it has been being a part of the UnMapping cohort and how has UnMapping contributed or aided in your project development?
Val has brought together a really unique slice of people in that I was amazed that there were people that have the same driving goal and ambitions... [while also share] in the same ways of achieving them. She has really dug into this very niche group that is perfectly suited to help each other. I was like, wow, how did you do that? So whenever I go to meetings, I am always amazed about people’s ideas and how similar they are to the way I would have gone about it. Also, because we are all working on the same basic concept of educating people on people that aren’t often heard about... we have different resources to share with each other towards the same end goal which is really cool. I don’t know how Val picked such a unified group, but she did, which is really cool! I also really appreciate the opportunity as well because I know definitely without the UnMapping group I probably would not be working on this project as much as I am because I would not have the resources or support, so I really appreciate the opportunity.
Yay, I love that because when I came in as the co-op it was so cool to meet such a group with such a niche drive who are willing to come together and be like “this is what we need to do to get going” and it’s been really cool to see firsthand.
Lastly, do you have any final thoughts or anything to share about the end goal?
The end goal is to help educate people and I’m going to do my best to process all the information and deliver it in a way that helps empower people to make a difference in their neighborhoods. You know, I went in saying “I don’t really like this stadium, but I have no idea how the process works or what I can do about it. Will wearing a t-shirt and attending a protest do anything?” and it’s really heartwarming because over the past 5 months I’ve been working on this, it really does do something... it actually is effective in a way that makes having billions of dollars almost comically not enough. Because we are often told that there are all these billionaires controlling the government and there is nothing we can do, but it turns out the billionaires can hire so many people to ring on your doorbell to try and get you to sign stuff, but if you are passionate you can accomplish so much more. So they are spending four billion dollars to date, but we haven’t had nowhere near that much money dedicated to our project because of our grass roots activism, but we’ve been really effective and I think that should be really inspiring.
Ailin shared some resources for people who would like to get involved or even just learn a little more about the fight to save Chinatown
NAICs does monthly teach-ins and posts on Instagram
AAU has a wonderful newsletter with lots of information
PIPA has amazing background information