Pear & Mulberry: What We Keep, What Keeps Us: Chinatown, Between Thresholds

Ilsa Yumeng Li and Zongheng Sun

Content and Concept:
This book reimagines diasporic memory as immersive urban poetics, built from cascading spatial fragments of Chinatowns across the United States. It focuses on thresholds, not only the arch at the corner, but the crossings that repeat all day: street to shop, counter to kitchen, English to Chinese, public face to private life. These transitions accumulate into a lived architecture of belonging.

While the city asks for speed, clarity, and one language at a time, Chinatown holds layered time. Dialects carry intimacy, rituals organize care, and work rhythms make a week survivable. The present keeps arriving. New immigrants bring new references. Younger generations carry modern China in their pockets through messages, trends, and online life. The street absorbs it, even when the storefront looks unchanged.

Made in traditional Chinese Longlin Juan (dragon-scale scroll) binding, the book unfolds twelve interlocking views into one folded neighborhood. Printed in deliberate black and white, it keeps the record steady while inviting participation. Readers can mark, color, and annotate as they move through the scroll, letting Chinatown take shape through attention.

Media and Techniques:
Inverted dragon-scale binding forms a scroll-like sequence, alternating poems with linocut-style illustrations across twelve Chinatown perspectives. The structure creates a tactile, kinetic reading experience shifting into a distinctive dynamic shape as it unfolds.

Inner pages are laser printed, precisely trimmed to maintain the continuous scroll layout, then hand-bound and secured with a handmade backsheet. The finished scroll can be rolled and placed into a protective tube for storage and transport.

Specs: 32 pages. Individual page size: 6 in × 4⅝ in. Overall scroll size: 6 in × 23 in. Package size: 8 in × 4 in × 4 in.