Written by William Gow (PDF)

The Chinatown Remembered Project represents the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California’s on-going effort to document the history of Los Angeles Chinatown and the surrounding Chinese American communities as they developed in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Between 2007-2008, a group of college and high school interns documented the life histories of Chinese American elders who came of age in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 1940s. The older generation shared their memories of this pivotal earlier period in Chinese American history with our youth volunteers. A more recent group of high school and college age interns have transcribed, cleared, and catalogued these interviews. In addition, many of the articles on this website were also written and researched by local youth: some by our college interns and others by members of the local Los Angeles Chinatown Youth Council (LACYC) of the Chinatown Service Center. Finally, our current project website was designed by one of our recent college interns. 

As a collaborative, community-based project, the Chinatown Remembered Project has two goals: our first goal is to challenge the absence of Chinese American voices in American archives through oral history and community documentation; our second equally important goal is to teach a younger generation the significance of doing Asian American community history in hopes that they will continue this work in the future.