In the spirit of a "Constellation of Inspirations" (Alice Yuan Zhang 
), here are a range of people, projects, writings, and ideas which have inspired and shaped my work.
Also see:
- the bibliography for this guide
- some of my thoughts on citation in the context of this kind of archival work
RI Chinese History Project by Angela Yuanyuan Feng, Julieanne Fontana, John Eng-Wong, Robert Lee, and others. This project is how I first learned about Providence's Chinatown, and I'm grateful that with their support I have been able to pursue this project. Also see the Public Works podcast interview .
Future Through Memory by Lilian Leung; virtual storytelling through Toronto’s Chinatown, including community-produced 3D scans of important sites.
Long Time No See Chinatown envisioning Chinatown futures (Toronto)
Forever Chinatown is the story of artist Frank Wong's work to reconstruct interior scenes of San Francisco's Chinatown from his memory: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/346740
Prarie Lotus by Linda Sue Park, is accompanied, on her website, by a Native American resource guide compiled by author and educator Andrea Page (Oceti Sakowin Hunkpapa), about the Oceti Sakowin people of the area in which the book is set.
A Portable Paradise , by poet Roger Robinson, has been a big inspiration to me in this work.
Cynthia Copeland: Restoring Seneca Village - Lessons for Snowtown includes historical and archaeological work in a Black community that lived in what is now Central Park, touching on their search for descendants, as well as participatory archaeology work, the use of core sampling and ground penetrating radar in understanding this community.
Tending our Roots - "A growing archive of stories about making places of belonging in AAPI America" - especially the Vision and Values page
Jo Ayuso of Movement Education Outdoors who has integrated deep history and Black and Indigenous reclaiming into powerful outdoors/mindfulness/environmental education programs for BIPOC youth, and who has inspired me with her vision of mutual care in group work.
Mia Warren's Uncovering the Asian American Old West . Mia (my sister!) got me interested in the Asian American history of the West, and put me onto Liping Zhu's work on this topic, as well as Linda Sue Park's.
A Tale of Three Chinatowns, by documentary filmmaker Penny Lee, tells the parallel but distinct stories of Chinatowns in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC: https://www.pbs.org/video/a-tale-of-three-chinatowns-ytmt4v/
Vanishing Chinatown tells the story of a family-run photo studio in San Francisco Chinatown through the photographs and backdrops recovered years after it closed: https://www.vanishingchinatown.com/the-film.html
After Life - a fictional film by Hirokazu Kore-eda on memory, life, death, and creative reconstruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rk1HFC60e0&t=316s
Connie Young Yu is a historian, archeologist, activist and author on the Chinese experience in America. She gave a 2010 interview with Community Balance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XtvCaiKbcQ
Laura Ng's An Archaeology of Chinese Transnationalism and lecture Creating Home on Both Sides of the Pacific: The Archaeology of Old Chinatowns and New Villages
"Denver’s destroyed Chinatown is getting a mural dedicated to the once-thriving area’s past, present and future." https://denverite.com/2022/11/02/denvers-destroyed-chinatown-is-getting-a-mural-dedicated-to-the-once-thriving-areas-past-present-and-future/
"San Jose apologizes for destruction of Chinatown in 1887" https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-28/san-jose-apologizes-for-1887-chinatown-destruction
"L.A.'s memorial for 1871 Chinese Massacre will mark a shift in how we honor history" https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-10-22/how-a-planned-monument-marking-the-chinese-massacre-of-1871-begins-to-fill-historical-gaps
"An L.A. mob once massacred 18 Chinese people. Now, a push to never forget the racist assault." https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-20/los-angeles-1871-chinese-massacre-memorial
"Report of the 1871 Memorial Steering Committee." https://civicmemory.la/report/1871/ & https://civicmemory.la/PDF/
"Request for Ideas: Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre" https://culturela.org/programs-and-initiatives/rfi-memorial-1871-chinese-massacre/
"Broken News." A project by Adit Dhanushkodi, Broken News portrays the deeply troubling vein of anti-Chinese sentiment in the popular press – as relevant today as it was in 1871. https://www.unionstationla.com/happenings/broken-news
http://takachizu.org/treasure/takachizu-zine-1
Remembering the Forgotten Chinese Railroad Workers by Veronica Peterson
How Tacoma’s small Chinese community reckoned with the city’s anti-Chinese history discusses the story of the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park.
Dorothy Berry's The House Archives Built , on Black archiving, Black stories and materials in archives, the trust in contributing family collections, the harm of search terms, and more.
We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was , by Jamelle Bouie, discusses the limitations of understanding the lives of those enslaved during the trans-Atlantic slave trade through data-driven records and the accounts by enslavers.
Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : intimate histories of social upheaval, by Saidiya Hartman, makes use of her methodology of critical fabulation to combine deeply researched archival materials, read "against the grain" to speculatively retell the lives of young Black women in the early 1900s, recognizing them as social innovators challenging oppressive anti-black systems through radical new ways of living.
Venus in Two Acts , by Saidiya Hartman (content warning: accounts of extreme violence and dehumanization)
This episode of the Parenting Decolonized podcast, Rethinking Genealogy & Releasing Ancestral Shame with Walter English , focuses on Black American genealogy and both pain and shame in relation to researching one's own family history.
The National Archives and Records Administration has an interesting and detailed page on harmful content in archival records: https://www.archives.gov/research/reparative-description/harmful-content