“This space could have become parking garage, but it didn’t,” Anita Yip explained as she presented “Still, We Gather” at Metropolitan Courtyard on Oak Street, in Boston’s Chinatown, on May 16 as part of “Performance Pilgrimages on the Immigrant History Trail.” Her talk recounted community activism that turned what was known at “Parcel C” into housing. “What stands here grew out of that struggle.”
“Performance Pilgrimages on the Immigrant History Trail” offered a series of live performances and presentations throughout Chinatown that invited audiences “to find refuge and meditate on the deep histories embedded in the neighborhood.”
The event was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams,” at Pao Arts Center in Boston from April 8 to June 19, 2026. “Across many regions of Asia, temples serve as a site of ritual and ceremony, offering protection for ancestors and their descendants of the land,” curators Sung-Min Kim and Wenxuan Xue write. “This exhibition invites you to invoke and honor Chinatown as a temple that holds ancestral histories and dreams. The segregated burial grounds at Mt. Hope Cemetery, the bulldozing of neighborhood life through urban development and gentrification, the echoes of children laughing, and the voices of labor and community organizing are but a few examples that evidence histories of struggle and resilience in Boston Chinatown and Asian diasporic communities. In observance of these lineages, this exhibition serves as a portal for grief work that can open towards respite and healing.”
The exhibition ranges from Zhonghe (Elena) Li’s 2026 “Returning To The Shore–Peace And Compassion” origami cranes and cut paper art to Joanna Tam’s 2025 video “Visibility Studies (Activists Inspired),” which aims to highlight activism in Boston’s Chinatown and “unpacks the meaning of hypervisibility, invisibility, and safety for folx whose identities do not align with societal norms.” Ying Ye’s 2025 installation “The Soybean Cannot Grow in Gold,” a sign explains, “presents soybean sprouts suspend beneath gold-coated stones, forming a sculptural offering that examines the extraction of global commodities, labor, and the pursuit of material stability within interconnected systems of capitalism, racialized labor, migration, and cultural consumption.”
Today’s performances also included Feda Eid and Jassi Murad’s “Plantcestors, Awakening the Sacred” at Johnny Court. “Eid’s performance draws inspiration from writer Layla Feghali in ‘The Land in our Bones’: ‘the [dabke] song becomes a chance for healing through collective grief… [and for] transforming in the soulful vocalization and communal witness—not unlike the bitterness of olives and their leaves in their power to heal us.’”
Lani Asunción presented “Hilom Community Circle: Between Water & White Flowers” at One Greenway Park on Hudson Street. The event website explains: “Hilom is Tagalog for to heal, to restore, or to recover. This gathering is a call to mourn the loss of water, land, and life due to the climate crisis as a result of environmental capitalism. It is an invitation to gather to mend our communal wounds, aiming to restore balance and reconnect to one another.”
“I think there’s also something about the smell that’s healing, that reminds me of home,” Asunción said of the white flower oil used in the presentation. “…This has been so healing–just sitting in the sun and sharing.”
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