A Look To The Past To Enrich The Future CHINESE WHISPERS uNCOvERS THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF THE lOCAl CHINESE SHRIMPING INDuSTRY Many of us lead extremely busy lives and often never stop to smell the roses, let alone wonder why those roses are even in our neighborhood. History has certainly become a thing of the past, no pun intended. Chinese Whispers, a multi-phase, site-specific communitystorytelling project, is trying to change that. “We focus on bringing to light the history of the early Chinese in California who helped build the American West,” said Founding and Artistic Director Rene Yung. “We are very community based and we use a number of different ways to bring this history to life.” One example of that is a recent project of theirs titled Chinese Whispers: Bay Chronicles. This is a project that explores the almost 100-year-old history of Chinese shrimp fishing around the San Francisco Bay. It was a very vibrant industry in the late 19th century, peaking in the 1880’s when they ended up exporting about a million pounds of shrimp to Asia. There was a total of 26 Chinese shrimp camps all around the Bay; China Camp in San Rafael is the only remaining remnant, though it’s still not completely as it was in the beginning. Due to a variety of factors the Chinese shrimping industry died out around 1960. “People have forgotten about it,” said Yung. “We’re driving around in our cars, we have bridges that we can drive over, so you don’t think about this body of water other than it’s great to look at.” Yung has already begun to change that. Chinese Whispers collaborated with the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park who own an authentic 43-foot replica 19th century shrimp junk, a traditional type of Chinese sailing vessel, named the Grace Quan. Yung and an interdisciplinary team of visual, sound and media artists, as well as environmental scientists from the San Francisco Estuary Institute, took the boat out for a sailing expedition from China Camp to Richmond to Redwood City to Hunter’s Point and back. They’ve documented the CWBC vOYAGE SECOND lEG - SAIlING FROM RICHMOND TO COYOTE POINT, WITH BAY BRIDGE’S EASTERN SPAN IN BACkGROuND
Contra Costa Marketplace - Jan 2015
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