restoring the 千絲萬縷 mural in Chinatown
a super long summary post
In 2016, my friend Debbie (aka wushu queen of my heart), who was a staff member at Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC, but not AC/DC) reached out to me to see if I might be interested in working with a group of youth in Chinatown to paint a mural on a sad abandoned building (15-25 Harrison Ave) in Phillips Square.
A little background on the building: Not only was it the site of an immigration raid in 1903, 15-25 Harrison was once See Sun Market AND also SRO housing. The landlord evicted all the tenants in 2012, and they all had to sleep on the floor of CCBA or the JQES gym. Finally, this building is? was? slated to become a hotel, prompting residents to protest in 2017.
I was honestly …hesitant, because I had some imposter syndrome about large scale painting.
In the end, though, I agreed, and Chinatown resident Yvonne Ng worked with me to create this piece of public art. It was my first foray into real community art-making in Chinatown, and I loved the process. Youth leaders (and their very incredible youth worker, Jeena) organized all the logistics and community outreach and taught me a masterclass in creative placekeeping by example. All I did was show up and paint. I don’t think I’m even in the 2017 video about the mural.
The mural lived a blissful few years (minus the time that someone tagged the sign, and the time that a travel company plastered posters on the mural) until the pandemic hit in 2020.
During the pandemic, bigger pieces of graffiti appeared on the mural. The city responded by painting giant black rectangles over it. After that, it was over; the mural was repeatedly tagged (along with a lot of other storefronts, public art, fences, and walls in Chinatown). Last year, Yvonne and I took Enrique’s entire second grade class on a tour of Chinatown, and she was so sad about the deterioration of the mural, she didn’t even want to stop to show the kids.
We had three goals in the restoration:
Remove the pieces of spray paint and the big black rectangles painted by the city.
Do something about the yellowing and flaking coat on the mural.
Repair the cracks and warping in the wood.
Uninstalling the panels was kind of a shitshow. We forgot to bring a ladder, forgot our drill bits, and the boards didn’t fit in my car.
graffiti removal
I had scheduled ONE day to remove spray paint and the city’s black paint. I feel silly now. That process ended up taking an entire week. Friends (Josh, Laura, former GMAACC/A-VOYCE youth and artist Trisha, two current A-VOYCE youth) came to help us scrape. We kept the door open during the frigid New England winter, and we purchased 5+ types of solvent. We are now graffiti removal experts.
& polyurethane removal
Something that we also did during our hellish week of graffiti and removal was to try to remove the oil-based polyurethane coat. The oil-based coat tinted everything yellow (so much so that many people thought the mural was green), and it had started flaking off. I was worried that paint wouldn’t adhere on top of the poly, but Vivian assured me that the black boxes painted by the city of Boston’s “Graffiti Busters” had adhered JUST FINE. So fine, that it was almost impossible to remove.
However, our enthusiastic scraping had removed some of the original paint, too. Oops!
So, we moved onto…
repainting & protecting the mural from the elements
I pretty much repainted the entire mural. It was so sad looking that everything got a fresh coat. (Though, I was eager to paint some things better than I did the first time.)
I was determined to prevent warping and yellowing this time. I had a short-lived dream of coating the entire mural in table-top epoxy, but I quickly abandoned the idea after watching a man on YouTube laboriously coat a tiny table top with like 2 whole gallons. Instead, I chose to coat the faces with water-based exterior spar urethane and the edges with exterior silicone sealant, which is like the stuff you put to waterproof your bathroom, but for outdoors.
At this stage, past and present Red Oak (the program I used to direct) staff: Ivy, Martin, Ga Tsung, Cara; former ACDC youth: Lina, Chloe, Jennie; and other community volunteers like Kaitlyn, Jenn, Yen, and others joined in.
Finally, a small but mighty crew of us, led by my wife Vivian, described by Globe photographer Craig as “very ….handy,” installed the mural back into its original home. We, in classic Holu fashion, ran out of screws mid-way through, and had to go buy more screws in the middle of the process.
Honestly, this restoration was hard. It was harder than painting fresh new murals on outdoor walls, because I had to move the boards myself each day to the community room. The first time, someone else (Jeena & Jennie lol) coordinated all the logistics, extra stuff, and installing, and this time, it was on me. There were moments I felt a tiny, tiny bit of despair (…like the first day we unsuccessfully tried to remove graffiti, volunteers spilled paint on the ground, or when a custodian of the building told me “NO PAINTING"…). But people always showed up miraculously at the right moments with the right tools.
To everyone: thank you, thank you, thank you. You all have shown me what community could look like. I just feel comforted knowing that we love Chinatown, each other, and our neighborhood. And we’ll defend it together.
千絲萬縷 — we are inextricably linked, tied together by a thousand threads.
more mural stuff
To learn more about the mural and its part in creative placekeeping strategy in Phillips Square, you can read the Boston Globe’s much better coverage here (by Abigail Lee)!
Reb Leu’s informative write up for this fundraising campaign raised $4K in a few weeks!
There are some people who aren’t part of ACDC nor appear in any written material about the mural but should be acknowledged for their out-sized contributions of unglamorous cleaning, scraping, mixing work behind the scenes: Josh Lam, Laura Le, Ga Tsung Chan, Cara Lew.
some things i’m enjoying and want *you* to enjoy
Christina, who owns Malden-based Monkey King Tea, right down the street from my house, took some time out of her very busy schedule running a whole dang small business to come help me on Monday. One of our favorite orders from MKT are their homemade crab rangoons, which comes with really good sauce that we think has apples in it.
I just discovered Chelsea Time, written by my cousin. One memory with Chelsea that comes to mind: at her parents’ backyard rose garden, watching my sister [name redacted] stuff rose petals into her own butt. Chelsea and were twin were completely nonplussed by this. Anyway, now, Chelsea is a 30-year old published writer & book critic with sophisticated analysis of Justin Bieber’s Peaches.
When I was a student teacher, I was obsessed with my mentor teacher’s nap time playlist, which was a lone CD titled “Instrumental Dreamland.” We used to run a noise machine, turn all the lights off, and authoritatively whisper “close your eyes” to the 5-year-olds as they, sweaty and confused, stumbled in from recess. All I want now is to take a nap every day to this soundtrack. You can listen to the entire Fairfield K2 Classroom nap soundtrack below.