The W.O.W. Project is thrilled to curate a digital care package centering community care and resiliency in a time when we need it the most. Our care package features materials from our Care as Community Medicine 4 year anniversary programming series, where we created space to explore what healing, resiliency and grounding can look like as we experience and emerge from this moment of grief, rage and most importantly, hope. How do we take care of each other in this moment? How do we move forward individually and collectively? What is Chinatown’s role? We offer these resources, materials, and activities to further your practice in discovering your self and collective healing powers.
We created this care package as non-Black Asian American folks interested in doing internal work toward community healing and dismantling oppressive structures of power, and we encourage others in our community to engage in similar work. These resources and materials are available to anyone who is interested.
Rootedness and Resilience
Chinatowns were created as safe havens for Chinese immigrants to find community, safety and security against racial and economic oppression. Our ancestors founded Chinatowns out of necessity and survival: a home that was made safe by us and for us. The historic uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives has called on us to revisit questions about community safety that feel so inherent to how our ancestors built our Chinatown communities: Who are we making home safe for? What does community safety look like? How do we reorient what this means?
Healing Within
The impacts of the systems of oppression and exclusion are first internalized by us individually: how do we make sure that white supremacy doesn’t isolate us? We recognize that the work must first start within: in order to change our communities on a global or even local scale we must first change ourselves. Inspired by our month-long exploration of creating community care and healing spaces, we share the following prompts and activities for you to begin or continue this process of doing the internal work to build a pathway for our collective liberation.
Bridging our Futures
Intergenerational relationship-building is at the heart of organizing, and the learning is multi-directional: youth and elders can learn from each other in order to imagine new futures and continue a lineage of resistance and care. We’d like to highlight resources on intergenerational solidarity and explore what justice means for all of us as we engage in internal work and resistance from within. We are inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic, in which she writers, “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”
Before we begin, we’d like to offer this illustration of the five elements as a way to think about collective and individual healing and agency at this moment. The five elements form a dynamic cycle that feed each other in a continuous pattern, highlighting the ways in which everything is interconnected, fluid, and cyclical.
In response to the five elements, how do we take care of ourselves and what can we do to pivot the cycle of our energy based on the 5-phases e.g. planning and supporting (as Donna talks about)?
How do you encounter these 5-phases in your life?
Donna M. Mah, L.Ac., is licensed to practice Acupuncture in the State of New York and is nationally board certified in Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) at Bridge Accupuncture. Here are some acupressure resources provided by Donna as we continue to ground and self care:
How to Perform Acupressure for Headaches and Generalized Pain
Acupressure Points for Neck Pain and Headache | Acupressure for Nausea and Vomiting
Chinatowns were created as safe havens for Chinese immigrants to find community, safety and security against racial and economic oppression. Our ancestors founded Chinatowns out of necessity and survival: a home that was made safe by us and for us. The historic uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives has called on us to revisit questions about community safety that feel so inherent to how our ancestors built our Chinatown communities: Who are we making home safe for? What does community safety look like? How do we reorient what this means?
In this moment, we are pushed to imagine community safety — in ways that harken back to its original incarnation — rooted in love and care.
We enter this exploration of love and care through tapping into an understanding of the connections between emotion, body, and spirituality. Demonstrated through the practice of qigong and its healing sounds, we are offered channels of spiritual care that are facilitated by the synergy between elements and their correspondence to different organs as well as multiple incarnations of emotions. In this, we are brought to understand that the conditions of our mental, emotional, and physical health are all components that comprise our spiritual health.
Our pursuit of a more holistic notion of community safety necessitates an attentiveness to the state of our spiritual health. The tools of spiritual care offered here equip us to bring our realities into closer alignment with our aspirations of community safety for all.
Courtesy Lingji and Singha Hon
Love Letters to Chinatown seeks to collect creative work to help uplift our neighborhood in its darkest times. The project invites members in the community and across the diaspora to submit poetry, stories, letters, illustrations in response to Huiying B. Dandelion’s prompt: Write a love letter to a person, business, or organization you hold dear in Chinatown. Consider Chinatown as a living being. What would you say to Chinatown during this time? What do you want her to know? What stories do you want to share? In response, these letters are posted in public places for residents to encounter in their daily lives. LLTC is a project born from love, tenderness, and resilience, expressing collective support for the Chinatown community.
For a look at similar care work in other cities, check out DC Chinatown’s Dear Chinatown Project, Seattle's Wing Luke Museum's #CIDLoveLetters Project, or submit a letter to Boston's Pao Arts Center Love Letters to Chinatown Project.
To view the full Love Letters to Chinatown zine compiled by the W.O.W. Project intern team and designed by Clara Lu, visit here.
The impacts of the systems of oppression and exclusion are first internalized by us individually: how do we make sure that white supremacy doesn’t isolate us? We recognize that the work must first start within: in order to change our communities on a global or even local scale we must first change ourselves. Inspired by our month-long exploration of creating community care and healing spaces, we share the following prompts and activities for you to begin or continue this process of doing the internal work to build a pathway for our collective liberation.
Masks as Protection
Starting with the exterior as an access point to delve into the interior, we are inspired by our workshop on traditional Cantonese opera
makeup to explore the nuances of presentation and performance and their impact on one’s relationship to self and
the world around them.
Using these templates illustrated by Singha Hon, fashion a mask for yourself.
What function does it serve for you? How does performance empower you, what appearances speak to protection for you?
What are you preparing to face with this mask?
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Inspired by NYC POC Healing Circle
Shifting more explicitly towards the interior, we are inspired by the wisdom and contemplative explorations shared by healers
from the NYC POC Healing Circle featured in our Open Mic event, to further ground this introspective work in our senses and
felt realities as they impact and reside within our physical existences.
If you could illustrate/indicate or map the way that emotions are felt in your body or housed, what would that look like?
If the emotions you feel are fixtures in the home of your body, how would you illustrate or represent their sensed arrangement?
How do you envision or understand their roles and locations?
Inspired by the pleasure activism work carried out by healer Charlie L’Strange,
we are brought to focus specifically on pleasure for a moment.
How can we center pleasure as an integral part of seeing ourselves and one another through the challenges of this pandemic,
namely the digitization of social connection and associated exhaustion we are experiencing?
Inspired by Kay Ulunday Barrett
Further unfurling the significance of connection, we are also brought to consider the facets of isolation, rejection, and solitude and how these experiences shape our power. Indebted to the poignant words shared by Kay Ulunday Barrett in their reading during our Open Mic Performance, their poem, “brown out shouts!” pays homage to the loneliness, resilience, and tenacity and borne out of surviving in the margins.
We offer for consideration, what are the roles of solitude and isolation in your life? How do you dwell in your power in tandem with these moments of loneliness? How do you care for yourself in these moments, what does it mean to access your power in this solitude?
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Inspired by the Black School
Moving towards harmonizing this interiority with external elements, this next exercise aims to facilitate reflective mapping, to help articulate the geographies that you find yourself a part of and how these impacts are felt. The art shared by organizers from the Lower East Side’s Black School draws from ancestral voices and speaks to their role in the imaginings we weave and realize for our futures.
We are inspired to ask: how do you feel yourself in dialogue with ancestors in the ways that you care for yourself, in the ways that you bring yourself to your politics, your communities?
Using the linked slides as a template to build with and from, how would you map these dialogues and connections?
To support the work of organizers practicing and living these changes, do check out The Black SchoolHouse as well as the NYC POC Healing Circle’s Black Healers Fund. The Black School is currently raising funds for the building of a schoolhouse to assist in laying a physical foundation to base their work out of as well as expand from. Donate to support the fruition of this project! The NYC POC Healing Circle is accepting donations to their Black Healers’ Fund, designed to uplift and support the work of the Circle’s Black healers and enable them to make their services accessible to Black folx for free. The mission statement and objectives for the fund can be found here.
Intergenerational relationship-building is at the heart of organizing, and the learning is multi-directional: youth and elders can learn from each other in order to imagine new futures and continue a lineage of resistance and care. We’d like to highlight resources on intergenerational solidarity and explore what justice means for all of us as we engage in internal work and resistance from within. We are inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic, in which she writers, “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”
To help us explore ideas of harnessing our internal strength to heal collectively and individually, Lingji Hon has provided us with a suggested booklist for those interested in deepening their spiritual and emotional knowledge and connection with the self.
We are spotlighting Audre Lorde's book Sister Outsider , particularly her chapter “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”. Lorde’s ideas about self care and self realization through the “erotic” and its use to empower femmes and QTPOC folx and dismantle patriarchal power structures resonate as we continue to talk about intercommunity and intergenerational relationship-building. Lorde’s emphasis on the multiplicity of experiences within ourselves and amongst each other is paramount to nourishing these relationships and makes her work an ideal feature from Lingji’s booklist as we move forward.
Lessons from my grandmother
By K-Ming Chang
To safekeep a daughter, swallow her
at birth. What you can’t kill, you eat
alive. If your daughter loves you, beat her
the color of water: every sea
she’ll cross is her own
body. When you pray, god will return
your wounds unopened
I have so many lives, I give them away
unworn. What can a man’s hands make
that mine cannot
butcher? Hunger is my wife & I
its knife. Worship is my whetstone
& the wound my witness. I married
for meat, birthed my children
before I had breasts
to feed them with. Once, while my husband
slept, I threw all my children off a bridge
so I’d never be outlived. Below,
a rain-fattened river:
Your mother went in last, bobbed
once, hollow as a spent bomb.
Your aunts swam away, lived in schools
of silver fish, nibbled away
their own corpses. Now write me
the river’s next move.
Tell me if I dive after
my daughters or if death
is the better mother. Tell me
if your mother is swallowed
out to sea & returns to me
a storm. Throw her
a storyline & fish her out
dry. You can revise this river
into myth, rebuild this bridge,
In every life, I hold your mother
hostage from you.
I drown her to keep you
unborn, not yet
named but already spoken
for. Not yet your mother’s
but already mine.
"Tell me if your mother is swallowed out to sea & returns to me a storm. Throw her a storyline & fish her outdry. You can revise this river into myth, rebuild this bridge, In every life, I hold your mother hostage from you."
As we begin to start conversations to help us dismantle anti-Blackness and systemic oppression, we hope that provided by Vivian Mac, will help nourish us and create the space we need to start and sustain difficult conversations for long-term internal and external change.
Talk Over Tea: Herbal Tea for Tough Conversations
3 parts plantain
3 parts oatstraw
2 parts chamomile
2 parts dandelion leaf
1 part cinnamon
1. Set an intention and mix the herbs. (Keep the rest of the herbal tea blend in an airtight container away from direct sunlight.)
2. Boil water.
3. Steep 1 tbsp of tea in a cup of boiling water for 20+ min. (The longer you steep, the more plant constituents the water will extract. You can also do a medicinal infusion which is 1 part tea to 4 parts water, and steep for several hours or overnight.)
Inspired by Franny Choi
Shared during our Open Mic program, Franny Choi’s poem, “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” echoes the wisdom articulated by many ancestors and reiterated by Autumn and Adrienne Maree Brown: there already exist populations and communities whose worlds have long ended, who have been surviving in the margins. Centering and learning from these voices hold vital keys to our collective survival and triumph (listen to the Brown sisters’ podcast here).
We are compelled to reflect: Whose worlds have already ended?
Who do you recognize as surviving these long past apocalypses and how have they done it?
What tools and skills have been successfully fashioned and used to survive, thrive, even?
Recall a moment in history where the world became stronger through a difficult time.
How do you see yourself change throughout this moment?
How would you equip yourself for the apocalypse?
What knowledge would you draw from, which ancestors would you call upon?
In further exploring intergenerational solidarity and relationship-building, we also encourage you to check out these amazing intergenerational mutual aid efforts that are ongoing in NYC and beyond:
CCED LA (Chinatown Community for Equitable Development), in partnership with SouthEast Asian Community Alliance, is collecting funds to be used for food, care packages, and financial support for Chinatown, Lincoln Heights, and Solano Canyon elders and members in critical need.
Heart of Dinner (NYC) is operating as a relief efforts hub where they are cooking hot lunchbox donations for those most vulnerable in/near the Chinatown area with a heavy focus on the homebound elderly.
Yarrow Society (Vancouver, CA) is running a number of programs that provide medical accompaniment and case management for low-income seniors, promote language access in health care, and foster intergenerational solidarity.
We hope that these materials provide multiple pathways and entry points into self-reflection, exploration, and healing. Like the five elements that cycle in continuity, we hope to continue cultivating spaces of care beyond this space as well, and invite you all to share these materials and start conversations within your own communities. This is not only a culmination of our month-long programming about community care and healing but a way to further these conversations as we imagine new futures and work toward them.
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