Photo by Emma Quirk '26. Mei Lum '12 showed images, above, during her keynote talk at the celebration of Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
By Emma Quirk ’26
Staff Writer
On Friday, April 7, students, faculty and staff gathered in Hooker Auditorium to listen to Mei Lum ’12, the keynote speaker for Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. While AANHPI Heritage Month is usually celebrated in May, Mount Holyoke celebrates it in April while students are still on campus. This year’s theme is “Rewriting the Narrative.” The goal is to fight against Asian hate and emphasize the achievements, resilience and joy of the AANHPI community.
Lum is the fifth-generation owner of her family’s porcelain business Wing on Wo and Co. and the founder of the W.O.W. Project. The W.O.W. Project is a community-based initiative that focuses on “growing, protecting, and preserving Chinatown’s creative culture through arts, culture, and activism,” according to its website. While at the College, she was an East Asian Studies major. Her family’s store is the oldest operating store in New York City’s Chinatown, which she took over in 2016. At this time Lum also established the W.O.W. Project in order to amplify community voices in light of gentrification and cultural displacement.
Lum began the event, “Art Activism and Community: Fighting Gentrification in New York City’s Chinatown,” by giving a brief presentation about herself, her family’s business and the W.O.W. Project. Lum brought up Asian American activist and feminist Grace Lee Boggs, highlighting her quote, “The most radical thing I ever did was stay put” and discussed how this notion resonates with her decision to take over the family business. Lum felt strongly that she must continue Wing and Wo to preserve her family’s legacy and the culture of Chinatown.
In 2016, Lum got the opportunity to engage with the Chinatown community through interviews and conversations hosted in her store to discuss concerns. “It was a really resounding message that there was a huge concern about the gentrification and displacement that was happening,” Lum said.
Photo by Emma Quirk ‘26. Lum, above, is the owner of her family's porcelain business and the founder of the W.O.W. Project.
Listening to these worries and people’s reasons for cherishing and staying in the neighborhood changed her perspective. She explained that this “shifted the ways in which I started to think about myself and my own role that I play in encouraging this complex system of gentrification in Chinatown” as well as how “letting [Wing and Wo] go would really impact the block, the neighborhood and what could be in my own power to stop that.”
This inspired the W.O.W. project, which focuses on cultural displacement and, as stated by Lum, considers “how we can preserve and also breathe new life into the traditions and the culture and the art that already exists in our neighborhood.” The W.O.W. project meets in the store, and she believes that this “honor[s] that legacy and that lineage” of her ancestors. It also allows her to consider how the store “could be a sign of politicization, a sign of storytelling, and also cultural production and cultural organizing.”
Despite her desires to maintain aspects of culture and cultural identity, another important facet of W.O.W. is “actively resisting the patriarchal lineage and roots that our neighborhood has and has had in its history” by “creating space for women, nonbinary, queer and trans young people to come and really try to understand their relationships with [the] community,” Lum said.
She expanded on this idea during her conversation with AASIA members Emily Nishikimoto ’23 and Joan Kang ’23. When asked how her experiences at the College influenced her activism now, Lum stated, “Mount Holyoke gave me an opportunity to really be my full self, to make mistakes, to have opportunities of knowing and understanding who I am but also to understand the importance of community and friendships and sisterhood.” Also, the “idea of queerness and queer being something that is an identity that’s also in opposition to everything that is beyond the confines of the systems in place” has stuck with her, Lum said.
It has influenced the way that the W.O.W. Project focuses on having “young queer women, nonbinary, trans, Asian youth at the at the helm of what we’re doing because whatever they create, however they create it is already an act of resistance to our lineage and history and it’s already creating an alternative future for us,” Lum stated. W.O.W. works to do so by creating an arts and activism program called Resist, Recycle, Regenerate.
Lum stated that it is to ensure that “joy and celebration and connection is at the heart of what we do because that keeps that that’s what keeps us sustaining through this work.” She feels that combining art with activism is a way to do this.
Attendees of this conversation appreciated Lum’s commitment to her community. Ajay Sinha, a professor in the art history and architectural studies department said, “What I admired most in Mei Lum is her political commitment. For them, it was not simply a matter of economic success as an individual alone, but a political success for the whole community.”
The event concluded with a lively Q&A, where audience members asked Lum all kinds of questions ranging from how did she build the original W.O.W. team to her thoughts about the role of femininity in fighting gentrification.