Mamiyaroid 24
Corky Lee
In an earlier newsletter I wrote about photographing in Chinatown. One of the photographers I name checked in that piece was Corky Lee, the self-proclaimed “Undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate.” He died last week from complications from Covid-19. He was 73 years old.
Here’s his NYT Obituary and this wonderful remembrance by Hua Hsu, in the New Yorker.
Corky Lee was a community activist who worked at a printing press in Brooklyn but as Hua Hsu puts it, he said his life’s work was “photographing Asian Pacific Americans.” He wanted us to be visible.
When I was in fourth or fifth grade I found a copy of Farewell to Manzanar, about the internment of Japanese (many American citizens) in the American desert during World War II. At that age I was hungry for stories about Asians and I was happy to find the book even if it was a story of injustice. But a white boy in my class sneered when he saw me holding the book and asked, “Why are you trying to be Chinese?” I imagine I said something like “Because I am Chinese,” but I probably didn’t say anything. He said that to me because my father is white (Irish American) but my mother is Taiwanese. I’m guessing if I had tried to hide my Asian-ness he would have asked me “why are you trying to be white?” because people like that pick on the things they think make you vulnerable. He hated that I was making visible what I was expected to be embarrassed by.
I thought my mother was the most glamorous woman in the world and watched her put on her makeup and heels even though she was just getting ready to work in the garment factory, first in Chinatown, and later in the midtown garment district when the downtown shops closed down.
Along with Bud Glick’s Chinatown photography, I studied Corky Lee’s photographs like this one, not as an exercise in exotic voyeurism the way many non-Chinese do when they study Chinatown, but to remember. One of the factories my mother worked at in Chinatown looked very much like this one. I can smell the pattern paper and cloth. And growing up I knew I was supposed to be embarrassed that my mother was a seamstress, but when we made homemade masks early on in the pandemic my mother told me how proud she was of her skills and her fast hands. She said, “Back then I was crazy for sewing. I couldn’t wait to get to my machine.”
There is a photograph of my mother that looks similar to how Kaity Tong looks in these protest posters. That same soft wave perm, large eyes, and wide pretty face. I loved watching Kaity Tong on the news and when I was seven my father helped me write a letter to her. I told her how much I liked watching her and I asked her if she was pregnant because I noticed she looked different. I don’t remember how long it took, but she wrote me back and said I was very perceptive because she was pregnant. That letter probably made my year!
All these years later I think representation is much more complicated than simply having a mirror presented to you by the media, but it’s important to have a record of how things were, who you once were, and who you wanted to be. Corky Lee’s photography captured all of that. RIP.
Until next time…
Adalena
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-Adalena Kavanagh