Community Histories and Youth Organizing in Philadelphia’s Chinatown
In this episode of Media at Risk, doctoral students Cameron Moy and Christine Phan sit down with No Arena student organizers Wenxi Chen (‘25), Taryn Flaherty (‘25) and Faye Liu (‘29). Wenxi, Taryn and Faye share experiences as student organizers and coalition builders, stories from growing up in Philadelphia, and what it means to be a Penn Student situated in Philadelphia. We hope you enjoy this conversation and encourage you to reflect on youth voices in organizing spaces as well as the role of institutions in urban and ethnic enclaves.
Wenxi Chen is a technologist, designer, and multimedia artist, working primarily as a digital media strategist for community organizations and movements in Philadelphia. Wenxi is also an undergraduate senior in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, interested in critical computing education and challenging dominant tech narratives.
Taryn Flaherty is a founder of Students for the Preservation of Chinatown and the Ginger Arts Center, two organizations that engage Asian American young people in Philadelphia. She is a born and raised Philadelphian and a graduating senior at UPenn.
Faye Liu is currently a high school senior and a committed Class of 29 Penn student. They have been working with the Save Chinatown Coalition for two years. They are a co-founder of Students Against Sixers Arena and currently a staff member at Ginger Arts Center.
Cameron Moy is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the Media, Inequality and Change center. A proud lasting legacy of Detroit’s Chinatown, Cameron moved to Philadelphia in August, 2024 and quickly became involved in No Arena protests. His research broadly centers around disparate effects of digital platforms and technologies on communities of color.
Christine Phan is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the Center for Media at Risk and the Media, Inequality, and Change center. She is grateful for every ethnic enclave that has taught her about community care, history and organizing, including Tacoma’s Southeast Asian International District, San Francisco’s Manilatown and the I-Hotel fight, and of course, more recently — Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Her ever-changing work currently is focused on Asian American social movements and the role of digital organizing.
Music: Dawn, Royalty Free Music by Ilya Kuznetsov courtesy of Uppbeat.com
Transcript:
Cameron: Welcome to Media at Risk, a podcast from the center for Media at Risk and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. This podcast is being co-sponsored across the center for Media at Risk and the Media Inequality and Change Center. My name is Cameron Moy. I’m a first year PhD at the Annenberg School, a fellow with the Media Inequality and Change Center, a student activist, and a proud, lasting legacy of Detroit’s Chinatown.
Chris: My name is Chris Phan, and I’m also a first year PhD student at the Annenberg School. I’m a fellow with Media at Risk and the Media Inequality and Change Center, and I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Some background on me is that my parents ran a medical clinic in Lincoln International District, which is a Southeast Asian enclave today and was historically a Chinatown in the 1800s. Cameron and I both moved to Philly last August. With Asian American roots and backgrounds in student organizing and activism, we found community in Philly’s Chinatown in the No Arena movement. The No Arena movement began in 2022, when billionaire investors proposed a new 76ers arena in the blocks neighboring Philly’s Chinatown. Chinatown organizers, including our guests today, rallied together a city-wide coalition to lobby, protest, host art builds, and lead teach ins. And this past January, under years of immense community pressure, the 76ers withdrew their arena plans for Market Street. We wanted to capture this moment of victory and also learn from key organizers, as this fight is one that continues to come to Philadelphia and Chinatowns across the United States. Here to share their experiences around student organizing and Penn’s role in the no arena fight, we have Wenxi, Taryn, and Faye.
Cameron: I’m excited to introduce our student organizers today. Wenxi Chen is a technologist, designer, and multimedia artist working primarily as a digital media strategist for community organizations and movements in Philadelphia. Wenxi is also an undergraduate, senior and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, interested in critical computing education and challenging dominant tech narratives. Taryn is a founder of Students for the Preservation of Chinatown and the Ginger Arts Center, two organizations that engage Asian American young people in Philadelphia. She is a born and raised Philadelphian and a graduating senior at UPenn. Congrats, Taryn! Faye is currently a high school senior and a committed class of 2029 Penn student. They’ve been working with the Save Chinatown Coalition for two years. They are a co-founder of Students Against Sixers Arena and currently a staff member at the Ginger Arts Center. And maybe we can just start by going around the room, and you all can share a little bit about your context with the No arena fight, and maybe share a little bit more about your relation to Chinatown before the fight, and or to Asian American communities at large.
Wenxi: So hi, I’m Wenxi. I was not born and raised in Philly. I am from Cleveland, Ohio. And one of the smallest suburbs. There was a lot of Asian American people around me, but I don’t think a lot of Asian American community. We didn’t have a Chinatown or Chinatown was like this mall that functioned as everyone’s both like favorite restaurants to eat and like, merchandise stores and groceries. So when I came here to Philly for college, I was very impressed with Philly’s Chinatown. I have never seen anything like that before. And I felt a lot of connection with it instantly. My parents are from Nanjing, China, and so I kind of found that to be present within Philadelphia’s Chinatown and the food and the culture and all like the festivals going on. So I guess I became protective of Philly’s Chinatown relatively quickly, but I hadn’t learned of the No Arena movement until I went grocery shopping one day and I saw all the posters up and like, I think people were tabling outside and we, like, signed up to be a part of the mailing list. And now I’m here.
Taryn: Yeah. Part of my introduction was that I was born and raised in Philly. I went to public schools all my life, even if they were some of the nicer public schools. But my experience with Chinatown really started with my mom. My mom was an activist or is a very strong Asian American activist in Philadelphia. And she got or she was one of many Chinatown activists in the 2000 fighting against the baseball stadium that was proposed in the neighborhood. I was alive for the casino fight in 2008. I grew up watching my mom lead protests go up against some of the most powerful people in the city of Philadelphia. And when I think when I was growing up, Chinatown was experiencing all of these proposed developments. The stadium before I was born, two casinos while I was alive. And then I had heard about the federal prison, the Vine Street Expressway. And so I grew up in this era of Chinatown in which it was just powerhouse, specifically Asian American women leaders. And so I was really privileged to have all these Asian American women to always look up to. Definitely is a real, real privilege in the US, where a lot of Asian Americans don’t grow up with women leaders, with Asian American leaders. But it was never a question for me could I do something? Can I, you know, accomplish something? I had Asian American women who set that example for me and was like, you don’t accomplish something, you demand it. You go out there and get it for yourself. And so my mom, along with a lot of Asian American activists who were founders of the stadium and casino fights, founded a school that I went to and in that school learned Asian American history, learned to just question history at large.
We didn’t have Columbus Day. We had many points of view day, and we learned about indigenous histories. We had our classes that were not just like, oh, the Asian American folk arts. It was other cultural like artists in Philadelphia that we were learning from. And so when the arena proposal first came out in 2022 my best friend and I, Kaya, who is also the co-founder of Spark were initially just invited to the first organizing meeting as two, 18 and 19 year olds learning from like the older folks on how to organize. And my mom just invited me being like, watch how organizers actually organize. But the question was never, you know, are we going to fight the arena? What are we going to do? It was how we were going to fight the arena? We were going to do something. So how are we going to work together? How are we going to build coalitions to do that? And that’s kind of how me and Kai started the idea for students for the Preservation of Chinatown. And so that has definitely transformed my whole college career. And I think that really brought me from the Penn bubble back to like my roots, which were in Philadelphia. It was not in Penn’s campus near the button. It’s in the neighborhoods that raised me.
Faye: Hi, I’m Faye. So I currently go to a Philadelphia public high school, which is a magnet school, but I’m originally from the Philly suburbs, and I moved into the city around Covid, like basically in the middle of Covid. But even though, like I was grew up removed from the city, I had frequently gone to, like South Philly growing up because I like, would do like karate lessons there every week. And my mom also had like pretty strong connections to the city because my mom like as a Southeast Asian refugee, she resettled in South Philly during the peak of Southeast Asian immigration and resettlement. So she already had really strong ties where she went to high school in Philadelphia. She went through the public high school, but then like that kind of got lost as we moved to the suburbs and like, reset, like as she resettled in the suburbs. And I was raised outside of that, but then coming back into the city, like starting high school in, like a Philadelphia public school was really, like really changed that as, like I was also able to, like, connect with Chinatown in a similar way as my mom, where she saw it as a hangout space, a space to have fun, go after school. So I was able to connect in a similar way.
Chris: Yeah, I love that you’re kind of already tracing this lineage, right? You’re like, oh yeah, Chinatown has been under attack. The Stadium, casino, this is a continuation. And so we’re learning from organizers from the past. We’re also kind of building our own legacy and like or like direction in organizing as students. I was wondering if you could just share a little bit more about, like, what were some of the roles that you as an individual, you as like in your various organizations? What did that look like in the arena fight, which was a huge city-wide coalition.
Taryn: So my role in the arena fight definitely started with this first initial meeting. It was like the day before, right before it publicly came out, maybe the day of and initially Kaya and I my co-founder we just started doing research for the coalition. Kaya got them on slack. We, like, made the first presentation slides that would be presented to like, the Chinatown community on like, the initial details. We were just doing, like, all this different avenue research. And through that, we realized that a lot of the developers were connected to Penn and a lot of the other college campuses. And then that’s when we started forming our own organization as students. And because we also had seen for a really long time, many years ago, like in the Vine Street Expressway and the Stadium Fight. Students were heavily involved, not as much in the casino fight, but there was definitely a lot of youth organizers and we were feeling that, oh, there weren’t some. So many because we are supposed to be the next generation. And so a lot of our organizing looked like a lot, a lot of teach ins. And so, like the first year of the movement, a lot of the organizing work was just telling people like what was happening.
The developers were keeping almost all the media in English, or if they were branching out into the Chinese midway through the fight, like it was very, very skewed propaganda, in my opinion. But we did teach-ins for anyone who would let us talk to them like we stayed on college campuses doing different, like Asian American organizations, on college campuses. We would go to law firms in Center City. We would go to community orgs. Literally anyone who would listen, we would try to talk to them. I think a lot of Philadelphia’s initial reaction to the arena being like, very positive was the fact that no one was told anything. And after you had maybe a ten-minute conversation with any like, everyday individual, they’d be like, this is so fucked up. Like, this is really fucked up. And so, I think that was a lot of my experience where I was like, people do really care. It’s not people being apathetic or Penn students being apathetic, whatever students. It’s just that they don’t know. And that’s purposeful on the developers part.
Faye: I think something that’s important for like the context is that we didn’t really start doing anything until June of 2023, which is months after the initial proposal of the arena. And I think that’s really important to recognize because as like high schoolers, as honestly minors, we were very much like thought that we couldn’t do anything in the fight. Like we thought that we didn’t belong in organizing because we weren’t experienced, because we were young. We very much wanted to get involved since the beginning, like a lot of us were there in the room when the proposal came out. We were there together with organizers, but not a lot of movement happened after that from us because we were very much like, oh, this isn’t our place. Like, we can support the adults, we can show them that, oh yeah, we care. But like, what can we actually do? And I think it took a really long time for us to actually understand that we could do anything. Some of our founders were part of, like a school year internship for high schoolers, which was like also them, like, thinking that, like, oh, yeah, we’re like kind of involved, but we want to do more.
Wenxi: So like, my area of help was really going through learning how to develop like a digital advocacy toolkit. How do I organize people? How do I bring people to Ginger Art Center? And then how do I market these things to them? So I think my angle was really coming from building Media perspective and Ginger Arts was my first dive into media strategy, and I think it’s really due to a lot of different people bringing me in that I was able to be a part of this movement also.
Chris: I actually love that you keep bringing people in. I think that’s like a theme that you guys have all really spoken to is that, you know, regardless of starting points, regardless of the organizations. Like really, this was a coalition and it’s really beautiful that a place of protest has also become a place that is a place of community. One last question on the general movement and your thoughts on the movement before we turn the gaze back onto Penn. There has been a lot of discourse on whether or not the No Arena fight was successful, because City Council ultimately voted to approve the arena before developers withdrew the project. I’m curious if you guys could share your thoughts on these narratives, especially as the community prepares for impending fights.
Taryn: I think the arena fight or the Save Chinatown Coalition was very effective. Right. The whole point is that the developers of the 76ers, arena thought that they were going to complete their project within six months. They thought they were going to have a demolished fashion district, a whole construction site, by September of the same year that they introduced the project in July. And it was because of massive organizing. Immediately the proposal was pushed back like two going on its third year. And if we didn’t have that whole, you know, toxic narrative around the arena, if Chinatown hadn’t organized around the arena so immediately and made the project toxic, they probably would have been able to push the arena proposal through within that first year. And maybe it would have happened, but it was because thousands upon thousands of people all across the city were immediately opposed to the development was that first it was September, then it was December of 22, then it was spring of 23. Then it’s like the citywide protest. Now it’s, you know, all the way in the fall of 23. Then it’s spring 24 December, 24. And it was because of organizing, like Sparks, like Ginger Arts, like the Chinatown Coalition, especially organizations that continually started to pop up. Like there was also the No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity group, which started off as Jewish organizers for Chinatown. Just because the Jewish community and Chinatown communities have had a long history together. The Coalition to Save the UC Townhomes, one of our first supporters Interfaith Black Philly for Chinatown sprouted up people who are organizing amongst themselves in their own communities to support our movement – this was the whole reason why, you know, there was no vote until like December 2024 when they thought it was going to be September 2022.
Faye: I also think that just thinking about how who has power and thinking about in the end, it is still a back door deal between billionaires that resulted in it not being built in Center City. But I again that decision, that little deal that they had was only possible because it got drawn out so much, and that we were able to draw out the decision for literally two years.
Taryn: So I also think it’s kind of how we define success of a movement, right? Is it the fact that you, you won against the developers, or is it how many coalition groups all across the city that was brought together by the fight? I think right now, the question facing a lot of the organizers of the Save Chinatown movement is that there’s so much momentum, there’s so many relationships that have just been built over the past two years. So what do we do with them? How do we keep them? How do we preserve those relationships? How does the Save Chinatown movement shift its focus to help other organizations with their own movements?
And then also like, what is the next greater fight for greater Philadelphia? And then also defining the movement through the leaders who were formed by it. When I think of the stadium fight, I think my mom was really transformed into a leader in that time. And now, you know, 25 years later, we have all these high school students who, like, know how to talk to city council. They know how to talk to them individually. They know how to talk to them publicly. You know how to organize like different high school students, college level. We have I mean, most seniors, most juniors know, they know, like, how to get involved. And so I think the formation of leaders have been, definitely the top of my mind because you always want to cultivate another generation not just of fighters, protesters, but of people who want to build stuff, people who want to invest in their own communities and also other communities. And like Philadelphia, generally.
Chris: Speaking of billionaires, let’s talk about Penn. What was your impression of Penn coming in or knowing that you’re about to come in. What are the societal narratives that you heard around Penn versus like maybe the community narratives? I’ll give myself a little self-insert here and just say, coming into Philly and starting out, when I started visiting Philly spaces, my friends would introduce me and be like, this is a Penn student. I’m like, no, no, no, don’t disclose that just yet. You know, like kind of get to know me. I can feel the tension in the room, sometimes when I like start meeting people and they’re like, this is the context that you’re coming in with. And so I kind of wanted to ask that both the folks who, like me and Cameron, were new to Philly and also folks who have been in Philly for a minute, what’s that relationship to Penn? What does it feel like being a Penn student, and what was that like first impression when you were like, I’m going here versus where you’re at now?
Faye: Yeah. So Penn, in my perspective, because as Taryn said earlier, magnet school, my Central High School is also the number one Penn feeder in the whole country. So we send the most students to Penn out of any high school. I think, honestly, that is part of my school’s very much ‘feeder’ mindset is part of the reason why I kind of did end up committing or applying. I’d say it’s close by to home, but also my school makes it think it’s amazing, which I definitely did break out of from like organizing and meet so many Penn students through organizing at the Ginger Arts Center and things like that. And I think it also is kind of different for me, because another reason that I did pick to go here is because they’re one of the only institutions in the country that has a solid urban studies program, which is what I’m passionate about because of all the activism work I did in high school because of, learning about gentrification and being passionate about fighting gentrification and people’s rights to a home and things like that. There is definitely the dread that Wenxi and Taryn were talking about being very wary and like being aware of what they did, but also like a part of that is maybe reclaiming what they’ve taken as a Philly public school student taking advantage of all the resources that I can in order to give back to the community.
Taryn: Yeah, I feel like towards my junior and senior year, I was all about like, What can I extract from this school because they’ve extracted so much? And I think even though Penn is as an institution so violent, so harmful historically and today, we are all individuals and no one is going to blame you for utilizing the resources your school gives you to do better for the Philadelphia community or for others. So definitely take advantage of all these resources.
Chris: I think all three of you talked about basically how you ended up finding community, or how you understand people who found community within the institution, right. You had some high hopes and then you were also let down. We talked a little about like, how, it’s important to be able to think about what resources we can take from Penn and give to our own community. And with that, I’m curious, like, what were the allies in that space?
Wenxi: I think coming into Penn, I almost was the extrovert of my friend group, where I was just constantly seeking out people to meet. And so I think I very quickly formed a cohort of, queer trans people that I, I still am in close community with. And then I just had those relationships powering me through my first year before I found other pockets of Penn. I had a lot of friends in not just trans and queer Penn in our year, but it was also like they were trans, queer and BIPOC. And I think because we had this shared experience, we were pushed towards movements together. I think it is because I had so many people around me that were trans or queer and of color that I am where I am today. And it was because we were situated at Penn that I even learned about Philly. Now that I’m in my last two years at Penn, I am a computer science major, and that does separate you quite a bit from the political organizing and political education happening on campus and off campus in Philadelphia.
Taryn: I think for me, I feel like a lot of people who are looking for organizing will go to very similar places, find out that that place isn’t as radical as they thought, but then they meet each other. And so a lot of my experience with like creating different kinds of communities on campus was throughindividuals and then building a relationship between the two of us. And then we start like, you know, sprouting bigger and bigger. I think also for me, I went to more Asian American spaces. So, I started building a lot of relationships in the Asian American Studies department or program because they are not a department, they are just a program. And through that, I found a lot of mentors, a lot of a lot of people who are just rooting for me in general and to have especially faculty members to, believe in you and to root for you, send you opportunities. That’s when I felt way more grounded and supported in a space. And so I think I try to now at my end of my four years, maybe freshman year, I would have condemned all of Penn. But now I try to very much think of like what position people are in. And so, we protested the board of trustees back in 2023, I think spring 2023. And that’s because, at the time, our demands were, they had the research, they had urban studies or professors in the School of Design, condemning the arena project. Penn should just say with all its power and influence in the city, that research shows this proposal is not that good. And so that was our focus at the time. That’s how we built our foundations. But one, one and a half years into the founding, how were our goals shifting? And for us, that was really shifting more into investing into the Chinatown community. And that’s how we started to build this idea around Ginger Art Center, how we were invested in as young people. So we should continue that investment. I think a lot of the Save Chinatown organizing and the organizing, maybe we all do as individuals, would be considered radical organizing by a lot. I think it also really helps that I was in a lot of not non-radical. They can be radical spaces, but non-radical spaces, because then you meet the people who are like, maybe they’re not in those political, very politically charged atmospheres or around a lot of political people. And so they don’t really think of themselves as too radical, but they know you and you have some ideas and you can talk on a one on one level. So I think a lot of my experience has been like talking with people who are on very traditional pathways and just shifting them a little bit to just think more critically, think deeper about certain issues. And I think that even though it’s small, it’s like enough for me.
Cameron: We would like to thank Wenxi, Taryn, and Faye so much for their time and the staff at both the center for Media at Risk and the Media Inequality and Change Center. This has been Cameron Moy and Christine Phan. And thank you so much for joining us.
