Letters to Hop Alley: Drawing Displacement in STL’s Chinatown at Yeyo Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. by BFFLOCUSTS (Anya Liao + Georgia McCandlish)

You came from Guangdong. You sometimes learned English, you sometimes didn’t. You lived downtown. You supported each other. You were working class. You had celebrations. You were brutalized by the state. You were detained at borders. You faced the wrecking balls twice. You were born in the back of the laundry. You made a home in a landlocked state in the middle of a hostile country. We think of immigrants and Asians as an anomaly in the midwest, but you were here. We are here. We always were.