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    Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors
    Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors
    Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors
    Ebook494 pages3 hours

    Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors

    By Valerie Luu and Andria Lo

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    About this ebook

    Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns.

    Andria Lo and Valerie Luu have been interviewing and photographing Chinatown's most fashionable elders on their blog and Instagram, Chinatown Pretty, since 2014.

    Chinatown Pretty is a signature style     worn by pòh pohs (grandmas) and gùng gungs (grandpas) everywhere—but it's also a life philosophy, mixing resourcefulness, creativity, and a knack for finding joy even in difficult circumstances.

    • Photos span Chinatowns in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver.
    • The style is a mix of modern and vintage, high and low, handmade and store bought clothing.
    • This is a celebration of Chinese American culture, active old-age, and creative style.

    Chinatown Pretty shares nuggets of philosophical wisdom and personal stories about immigration and Chinese-American culture.

    This book is great for anyone looking for advice on how to live to a ripe old age with grace and good humor—and, of course, on how to stay stylish.

    • This book will resonate with photography buffs, fashionistas, and Asian Americans of all ages.
    • Chinatown Pretty has been featured by Vogue.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Design Sponge, Rookie, Refinery29, and others.
    • With a textured cover and glossy bellyband, this beautiful volume makes a deluxe gift.
    • Add it to the shelf with books like Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen, and Fruits by Shoichi Aoki.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateSep 22, 2020
    ISBN9781452175836
    Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors
    Author

    Valerie Luu

    Valerie Luu is a writer and one-half of the Vietnamese pop-up restaurant Rice Paper Scissors. She lives in San Francisco.

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      Book preview

      Chinatown Pretty - Valerie Luu

      SAN FRANCISCO

      Home is where the heart (and fashion) is

      San Francisco’s Chinatown is one of the most iconic, magical, and historical Chinatowns in the world. We’re not just saying that because it’s our home base.

      During the past five years, we have taken hundreds of laps around the same twenty-four blocks in hopes of bumping into Chinatown’s Next Top Model. The alleyways always hint at a possibility of a visual discovery, like a van being loaded with floral arrangements, a lion dance troupe practicing stunts, or a pòh poh shuffling home after a day of errands, gray hair lit by golden-hour sunlight.

      Over that time, we’ve encountered a wide range of souls and styles on the busy streets and in the enchanting alleyways. Like Buck Chew, dressed in dapper tailored suits from Hong Kong and colorful ties, who never lets us forget how old he is. I’m ninety-six! he’ll yell, since he’s a bit hard of hearing. Or Mei Ha Wong, who sells flower arrangements (and sometimes zippers) on the corner of Powell and Jackson in her flower-adorned bucket hat.

      San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest in the United States. It has served as a landing pad for immigrants since the mid-1800s, when laborers came to join the Gold Rush and work in accessory businesses like laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores. With California’s abundant resources, agriculture and fishing were also major industries for the new immigrants. Since then, people have migrated over to build the Transcontinental Railroad, or to find political freedom or the American Dream, or to enjoy their retirement.

      Within this neighborhood outlined by Broadway, Powell, Bush, and Kearny Streets, buildings are in various states of old and new and hundreds of Chinese businesses serve tourists and locals. Chinatown bumps up against Italian restaurants and third-wave coffee shops in North Beach, San Francisco’s Little Italy, and gray high rises in the Financial District. It’s a wonder to see how neighborhood lines blur and how many different demographics intersect: Chinese residents, international tourists, and young professionals on their way to work downtown. Chinatown also features one of San Francisco’s most iconic features: rolling hills that leave us breathless—partly because of the steep climb, but also because of the epic views they reward us with.

      San Francisco Chinatown is still mostly inhabited by a monolingual Chinese community of seniors. Living in Chinatown allows these seniors an independent life where they can easily go downstairs to get groceries, socialize with friends at the park, or step out for a walk and not depend on a car (or relative) to get around. The majority of seniors live in single room occupancy buildings (SROs) and affordable residential buildings like the I-Hotel, Ping Yuen, or YWCA. Because some of these residential buildings can be small, public space is utilized to the fullest.

      After traveling to Chinatowns around the world, we’ve come to understand what makes San Francisco the hotbed of Chinatown Pretty fashion: The secret is in all the layers.

      Layering is key, since seniors spend so much time out in the city. They have to prepare for all the different climates that can characterize a single day in San Francisco—sunshine, fog, and a reliable afternoon wind—and they do so with a mix of color, patterns, and texture as well as a combination of modern streetwear with clothes from China that they’ve owned for decades.

      There is a San Francisco adage that says you should never leave home without a jacket. In the case of Chinatown, it’s never leave home without a few jackets.

      Chinatown seniors are the ultimate urban dwellers. They really inhabit this place by taking advantage of the neighborhood’s parks, playgrounds, and plazas. At Portsmouth Square, also known as Chinatown’s living room, groups of grannies in floral hats of every brim size sit on pink plastic stools no more than a foot high, throwing down cards on makeshift cardboard tables. Men in monochrome outfits claim the steps near Kearny Street, where they play games of Chinese chess or spectate with their hands clasped behind their backs or cigarettes between their lips. We usually admire their looks from afar, since they don’t like it when we interrupt their game, even if it’s to pay them a compliment.

      At Washington Park, seniors host a consistent schedule of exercise classes from morning till night—tai chi on the east, social dance between the trees on the south side, and Luk Tung Kuen on the north side, where seniors use parking meters as ballet bars.

      People also pass time at a variety of businesses: dim sum joints, Hong Kong–style cafes, and Chinese bakeries, where men in fisherman’s vests and baseball caps sit for hours chatting and mulling over a Chinese newspaper and a cup of dollar

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