Gentrification often disguises itself as progress, but on its way to creating a polished utopia of glass and steel, the existing community they’re building on (usually consisting of poor people or people of color) are the ones most adversarial to them. To aid in the fight her own way, Montreal-based documentary filmmaker Karen Cho aims her camera at the communities of Chinatowns across North America, in “Big Fight in Little Chinatown” as they battle against gentrification and for the preservation of their neighborhoods during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cho sat with Character Media ahead of the film’s screening at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival to discuss her film, the people whose stories she told, and what people can do to help preserve the legacy of Chinatowns.
Why did you want to cover Chinatowns across North America?
Karen Cho: I’m a 5th generation Chinese Canadian and I have deep family roots that go back to the beginnings of Montreal’s and Vancouver’s Chinatowns. And the very first film I made, “In the Shadow of Gold Mountain,” screened in Chinatowns across North America, so these places were very important to me and I knew these communities well.
I was concerned with what I was seeing in these Chinatowns being in periods of decline or active erasure. I wanted to come back to the community where I made my first films to really explore these gentrification pressures that they were facing in the present.
(Photo by Naomi Mizogouchi.)
Knowing that you filmed this during the pandemic, did what was happening with anti-Asian racism or the mega jail in New York City inform how you were going to cover these Chinatowns?
KC: I wasn’t expecting COVID to happen. I was in a research phase and was actually at a coast-to-coast gathering of Chinatowns…
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