This page was created by Eli Simon.  The last update was by Kate Mcinerny.

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Time Machine & Concluding Thoughts

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If I had a time machine, I would . . .

Eli

I would travel to China City in 1938. I would walk up to Tsin Nan Ling, who had set up a small stand outside one of the Curio shops selling stone artifacts from his native province of Zhejiang. I would ask him, as the swaths of white tourists strolled by his stand, laughing and eating—is Los Angeles home?

Kate

If I had a time machine to explore healing and medicine, I’d travel to 1933 and, as I walked through Old Chinatown, I’d interview ask people how they heal through racialized violence, criminalization, and dispossession -- functions of the settler colonial system that frames our lives in LA and the U.S. I would make sure to visit Yick Chong Fat herbal company in the heart of Old Chinatown. It was once housed in the empty building pictured below.

The most interesting thing I learned was the connections between Old Chinatown and China City in terms of the settler colonial processes of appropriation/consumption of Chinese culture and simultaneous dispossession/displacement of Chinese people.

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