Amy Chin’s Birthday Safari through the Wilds of New York

Ending with a Prequel

Poetry of Everyday Life Blogpost #32
Guest Blog
Created in cooperation New York Folklore and Voices

If you’re truly lucky in New York, you buy a ticket at your local bodega and win the lottery. A close second is receiving an invitation to Amy Chin’s Birthday Safari. A few weeks prior to Amy’s birthday, July 16^th, a message sails into your in-box inviting you to a week of events with a common theme.

This year’s friends-of-Amy week-long safari began at the Obon Japanese folk festival on Sunday, July 13^th; continued with an immersive theater experience, “Viola’s Room” about a bold, mythical Princess Viola; followed by Think!Chinatown’s exhibit, Jia Sung’s Winged Seeds, featuring community-embroidered images of both historic photographs and invasive plants –– a metaphor for immigration; next a play, “The Other Mozart,” about Amadeus’s genius sister; the following day, a program on women and fashion at New York Historical Society; next, another evening at a one-woman show ‘Lizzy Sunshine’;  Amy’s Birthday Safari ended a week after it began with a burlesque performance, Queen of Hearts at Théâtre XIV in Brooklyn.

Amy provides a set of rules: No presents, no singing happy birthday, no cost to you, and no need to attend every event. Whoever attends the most events at this “coalition of the willing” is crowned King or Queen of the annual Birthday Safari.

On Amy’s birthday safaris, folk art (ie: the Giglio Festival); pop art (Talking Heads David Byrne playing a piano hooked up to different parts of an old maritime building); high art (a show about painter Toulouse-Lautrec); and social history (a visit to Weeksville, a historic community of free formerly enslaved Brooklynites) all play a part in Amy’s expansive love of the arts and humanities.

I first met Amy when I was just starting City Lore –– she was my program officer at the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). DCA was only one step in her storied career in the arts. Amy Chin 陳雪媚 is a cultural leader who has advanced the role of arts and culture in communities for over 30 year in a host of Chinatown organizations. She was first a student, then performer, administrator and director of the Chinese Folk Dance Company. We filmed her masterful tour of Chinatown in 2008 (which you can watch on youtube here). An experienced genealogist and researcher, Amy lectures and conducts genealogy workshops nationally and internationally.

Around 2014, I introduced Amy to Marci Reaven, formerly Director of City Lore’s Place Matters Program, then a Vice President of New York Historical Society. The Historical Society was planning an exhibit on the Chinese Exclusion Act. They loved Amy’s story of her grandparents’ and parents’ immigration saga so much that they developed it into a fabulous comic book for the exhibit which is also  now part of the NYC public school’s social studies curriculum. It is a true prequel to this story which all of you should read with delight at the conclusion of this piece.

Now, if you’re truly lucky, you receive an invitation. But beware –– if you are invited and do not attend ANY events for a few years, you may have the misfortune of being dropped summarily from the list.

In her own words: 

Amy’s Early Days

My birthday safaris had their roots in my old neighborhood. My first birthday parties were in the Pang F. Chin laundry my family owned in the Bronx. My parents would set up a table, and light candles on a cake. At the time, there was probably a Chinese laundry every three blocks in this city. I once read that there were something like 3,000 Chinese laundries in New York –– most people didn’t have washer dryers back then. The families who ran them worked all week. On weekends, my family like so many others would go down to Chinatown to buy provisions, to get food and news. I remember how during the week Chinatown was pretty empty, but on the weekends, jammed.

Our laundry was set up like most laundries–– we had the customer area, the work area, and then the living area. There was a clear sense of what’s external what’s internal, what’s public what’s private. In a way, it parallels the stories of American immigration–– the way each immigrant group lives within their own cultural boundaries, while finding ways to interact with the outside world. There’s the story you tell others, versus the real story. 

We developed relationships with our customers across the counter.  Robert Levinson, a little Jewish kid, for instance, became my lifelong friend. But we had a rule at home–– my mother didn’t care what you spoke on the street, but when you’re home, she said, you speak Chinese. You’re not allowed to utter“the foreign tongue.” Hoisanese was our first language.  In our early years, my sister and I used to pretend to speak English to each other.

When I was a kid, outside the laundry, it seemed like every block would have a shoemaker, a candy store, a Jewish deli, maybe an Irish Pub. We would buy our comic books in the candy store where my dad would buy the Daily News every night –– he had to check on the horse races. Our laundry was next to the Playdrome bowling alley. We got ices and the best Sicilian pizza at Leonard’s Italian bakery.  There was a movie house around the block, and a beauty parlor on the corner, where my Mom had a standing Saturday appointment. One of my friends once heard me describe my old neighborhood and asked, “Where’d you grow up?  On Sesame Street? That’s the way it was –– and it helped inspire my birthday safaris.

It wasn’t all rosy. There were good times and bad times.  My Dad was robbed a few times toward the end of the laundry business. And in 1961, there was a fire in the laundry. My brother can remember how mad he was. He said he had a piggy bank containing all the red envelope lucky money that family members had given him during Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, and the firemen stole it. He told me he saw a fireman go into the deli next door and steal a whole salami.  Then he got really philosophical, and he said, well, I guess you can’t really blame them. They probably think –– I’m risking my life running into a burning building. I deserve something.

Birth of the Birthday Safari

 When you’re a kid, your birthday is such a big thing, and you’re always looking forward to it. Then when you’re in your 20s and 30s it’s like –– meet me at this bar. Yeah, yeah, you go with a big group of friends. And you don’t really have much time to spend talking to everybody. It all seems kind of lackluster.

Then, in 1995 when I was celebrating my birthday in mid July, I stumbled into the restaurant Florent where, on Bastille Day, July 14^th, the owner dressed up as Marie Antoinette and constructed a fake guillotine. There was a big street party around it. I said to myself, oh my God, that was so fun. Like, you grab a corner any place in New York, and you’ll find something interesting. That stuck with me.

 I always had imaginative friends and wanted to live a creative life – so why not start with my birthday? At first the idea was let’s explore neighborhoods. Because, you know, there are so many pocket neighborhoods in New York. So one year we did Brighton Beach, and went to little Odessa and the next year we did Coney Island with all of us eating at Nathan’s and riding the Cyclone.

At first, I did it all in one afternoon and evening. That was often exhausting.  One year I had a friend who started calling it the birthday Death March, because it was so hot going from place to place. That was a hint. Then I realized that to properly celebrate my birthday I needed to do things that didn’t quite fit in a day. Also, my friends are getting older, as am I. And so, to be more humane, I started spreading it out over the course of the week.

Some Highlights

In 2000, PS1 in Queens installed a construction chute as part of an art exhibit. It went all the way from the fourth or fifth floor down into the courtyard. They had us sign a waiver and we actually got to slide down it. My friends Jodi and Mimi did fine – I think I ended up spilling out of it upside down!

2009, I had a picnic on the newly opened Highline and made it into a New York Times article where they also revealed my age! 

Some urban safari activities can never be repeated. In 2012, we visited the legendary graffiti mecca, 5Pointz – a 5-story factory building where aerosol artists from around the globe painted colorful pieces on the walls. Artist Meres One painted a special birthday wish for me on its walls. Two years later the entire building was demolished

In 2013, we went got a tour of the troll Museum, Rev Jennifer Miller’s home.  She had a collection that included wild-haired troll dolls, paintings of trolls and troll ephemera like play sets which she exhibited in a Lower East Side tenement.  My sister nearly passed out from  heat exhaustion, because Rev. Jen had no air conditioning. Luckily, we caught that exhibit before she was evicted in 2017.

The safaris were an issue during the Covid pandemic.  How do you stay socially distanced and safe?  In 2020 we did an outdoor dance. 

The choreographer, Pina Bausch created a dance called the Nelken, and it has four specific body movements done in a long line, each one representing one of the four seasons. This year was some kind of anniversary for the company, and so they were encouraging people worldwide to do the Nelken, film it and send it to their archives. So that’s what we did.  Some people did it online, and groups of us went out to the Hudson River and local parks, got in a line and did the Nelken.  We filmed and edited it, then sent it to the Pina Bausch archives. 

The ethos of my birthday safari is to explore, explore, explore. Live a creative life. You’re only on this earth for a short amount of time. Let’s make the best of it.

Prequel

And now, the PREQUEL, telling the story of Amy Chin’s family history through the Chinese Exclusion act through their days in the Pang F Chin laundry.