For Mei Lum, the oldest-running business in Manhattan’s Chinatown is at once a symbol of the neighborhood’s resilience and an informal living room where she came of age. In the space tucked behind Wing on Wo & Co’s modest red storefront on Mott Street, she shared meals with her family, took Chinese lessons with her grandparents and helped out with the cash register as a young girl.
In 2016, her grandmother planned to sell the porcelain speciality shop and its building, which the family owned and whose estimated worth neared $10m. Lum, who was preparing to study international relations at Columbia University, decided to take over the store – not only to preserve its cultural value, but to create a community hub. Her newly imagined iteration of the family business would be a shop that was also a clubhouse for activists and artists to address local issues like gentrification and displacement, both of which she said would have been exacerbated by the building’s sale to an outside developer.
