The Power of Miniatures: How Frank Wong Captures Chinatown’s History
Frank Wong’s Miniature Masterpieces of Chinatown
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May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and I spent it thinking a lot about Frank Wong. He is the subject of Forever, Chinatown, one of my favorite documentaries. (you can probably find it on Kanopy via your public library). This shortish film follows Wong as he revisits the Chinatown of his youth in San Francisco, which he has immortalized in gorgeous miniatures he’s built over a lifetime. Since 2004, the miniatures have been on display at the Chinese Historical Society of America, referred to as “Memories in Miniature.”
The film opens with Frank describing his impulse to create these miniatures. In highly relatable content, he says that he is starting to forget things. “I want to capture my memories,” he tells the camera. “ And the only way for me to capture my memories is to make them in three dimension.” When the film debuted in 2016, Wong was in his 80s and recalling Chinatown of the 1940s when he was a child.
His impulse to recreate the scenes from his childhood was not just to remember in old age, but to create an archive of spaces that would otherwise be lost. Walking through Chinatown in the film, he notes “there’s no record of the old Chinatown.” While museums like CHSA and others are curating collections to recover and preserve these memories and histories, the fear that it might be lost if he doesn’t make miniatures is a real driving force for Frank. It feels so personal to see the spaces that resonated with him enough to put in the painstaking work of recreating them in miniature.
Part of his skill at this craft, and his choice of it as his means of memory-making and preservation is likely because he spent his life as a set designer working in television and film. That work took him to Hawaii for decades where he worked on shows like Magnum P.I. (Please tell me he was the designer on the iconic crossover episode with Murder, She Wrote!) When he retired, he moved back to San Francisco and that distance of both space and time allowed him to see how much it had changed. He is not the only one to notice the effects of urban development and gentrification in San Francisco, and in Chinatown specifically. Many have written about the movement of Chinese immigrants away from Chinatown to the suburbs at the same time as the demolition of affordable housing to make way for luxury buildings. This erasure not only impacts the capacity of Chinatown to serve as a cultural center in the present but also erases the importance of its past. Enter Frank Wong.
Using painstaking detail, Frank makes almost photo-realistic recreations of spaces like a laundry, a single-occupancy room in a boarding house, and a family’s dining room on the lunar new year. When people tell him how real they appear he says “It’s real in my mind.”
Because he’s working from memory, he acknowledges the slippery line between reality and memory. “Our memories are sometimes prettier than what they really are.” he tells the camera.
“All my miniatures are composites. It’s half wishing and half memory.”
Still, these scenes in miniature are such a beautiful gift to the present. There are some moving scenes in the film when Frank is working on a fabric store miniature with his god-grandson as he calls him. He spends many scenes in the film walking Chinatown with the chosen family of his godson and his child. Explaining the way things were to his adopted grandson feels like such an offering, a desire to be known by someone lacking so much of Frank’s vanished context. As Frank reflects, “People shape places and places shape people.” The miniatures allow Frank to share stories of how this place shaped him.
This desire not only to remember but to connect appears to have influenced Frank’s choice to donate the miniatures to the museum. Originally, he shared that he wanted his miniatures burned with him upon his death so he could “live in them forever.” By giving them to the museum, he lets visitors live in them instead. The film shows people of his generation who also grew up in Chinatown marveling at his creations and remembering their family dining rooms and spaces. Some think they look too perfect, “like a department store depiction,” but everyone was prompted by the memories to share something of themselves, which may be the point.
Using miniatures to remember the past is not a practice limited by any means to Frank. Dollhouses have a long history. Like Franks’ miniatures, they were not designed for children originally, although miniatures and dollhouses frequently are associated with children and play. In the past, dollhouses and miniatures were displays of wealth designed to impress guests.
What I find fascinating and powerful about Frank Wong’s work is his use of miniatures to remember and preserve spaces co-opted or destroyed by wealth. He is not alone in this. Hank Cheng, a Taiwanese artist, similarly uses miniatures to memorialize scenes from his life and preserve spaces erased by urban development. Randy Hage makes miniatures of scenes in New York lost to gentrification. Similarly, artist Drew Leshko makes miniature recreations of lost spaces in Philadelphia, like Pub Grub: (I also love miniature artists like @aleia who play with the insanity of our Halloweentown world times by making miniatures for slugs to live in).
But thinking about Frank, and all these other artists who turn to miniature to recreate and preserve their pasts, I wonder what we can make of it ourselves.
At the end of Forever, Chinatown, Frank is with his miniatures now at home in the Chinese Historical Society of America. As we watch footage of people gazing into the spaces, we pause on a scene inspired by his grandmother’s kitchen. Having decided to donate them to the museum, and not take them with him into the afterlife, he reflects on the value of letting others share his miniatures. The value he sees is not necessarily that people will remember the places of Chinatown, but rather, the personal memories he holds of the people who defined those spaces. “When somebody walks in here and take a look at the kitchen, and says, ‘Look at that kitchen. It’s his grandmother’s kitchen. Boom! My grandmother’s kitchen comes to life and my grandma’s cooking in it. . . that means more people will remember my grandmother.” The magic of the miniatures is that it not only resurrect spaces he grew up in but also the people who defined his life. They insist not only that we not forget the past, but that we carry memories (however imperfect) and the people of the past into our present.
Thinking of miniatures this way offers them to our historical imaginations as ways of preserving our past and our stories. I’ve seen this documentary a few times now, and I get emotional each time I watch it. In part, because it reminds me of people from my past.
When I was young, my grandmother gave me her dollhouse. It is a massive (and heavy) wooden structure that some firefighters who were family friends built for her when she was hospitalized for scarlet fever as a child in the 1930s. Legend has it it was cobbled together with building supplies lifted from a local church renovation (so it has lifesize shingles, etc.) It was wired for electricity (!) and has a detachable front porch on which they’ve lovingly painted a name for the house, “Mary-Knoll.” (Her name was Mary Margaret Rynn, later Sposato). My grandmother and I were tight. I am afraid I’m turning into the wife-guy version of a person known for how much they loved their grandmother, but here we are. Getting this dollhouse felt like such a treasure, and it still does.
When I was younger, I tried to update it to bring it back to life. It had been played with by my mom and her sisters and then sat for many years in my grandmother’s basement, waiting for me to come along (or so I tell myself). Once it was in my childhood basement, my dad and I made a start of renovating it. My parents had an electrician update the wiring (we don’t love a fire trap). After that, I painted some of the trim red, which I instantly regretted. At that time, I played with the dollhouse, my imagination not limited by the blank walls and floors. But I couldn’t bring myself to change or update the paint or inside. In part, this was because I was too busy doing a million other kid things, and because I had my grandmother. I didn’t need to live inside this memory of her childhood because she was still such a big part of mine.
I have never lived anywhere that could house this behemoth of a dollhouse, but when my wife and I were lucky enough to move into a house last year it became a dream. Now it’s sitting in my living room, and I find myself staring at it and trying to imagine my grandmother as a child. How did she play with it? What did she imagine for her life at that age? Did she play it out in this house? What would she think of my life now?
I am in the middle of a million house projects (my house is from 1968 and needs some updates), but it’s this house I find myself dreaming about. I want to finish renovating it and use it as a space to remember my grandmother and honor her life. There are some days I worry I will forget what her voice sounds like, or the chaotic ways she’d leave me voicemails (a technology she barely understood) of clipped phrases that I somehow understood. She once left me a message yelling simply “TV OUT THE WINDOW!” This was code for “I have hit the wrong button on my remote and need help getting my cable back on track before Judge Judy.” Initially, she’d leave messages saying simply “I’m going to throw my TV out the window!” but over time, simply shortened it because who has the time for full phrasing when Judge Judy is getting ready to rule? I think about making a space with miniature items that may not be her exact space, but conjure memories of my time with her. Will I include a TV that never seems to bend to her will? I don’t know. I think often about her dining room with her treasures, the china her mother brought from Ireland, the mirror she would check herself out in through her 80s, and the hutch where she stored her tablecloths. Before holidays, I would help her set up, and loved the reverence with which she’d open a drawer and run her fingers over the cloth, remembering things from long before my time. I never knew her as a daughter, or a sister, or a wife. The people who defined her life that way had passed before I was born. The things she kept could help her remember, and then inspire her to explain that part of her past to me.
When Frank Wong talks about recreating his grandmother’s kitchen so he can visit her there, and so that others who may see it can conjure and honor her memory, that resonates with me. I had never thought of miniatures as a way to preserve history or honor our memories, whether against the encroachment of gentrification or time, but now I do.
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This is a free post for subscribers of Landline. Consider subscribing to the paid plan to get my weekly email of recommendations and links, a podcast episode, and more! You can also help me spread the word by sharing it with a friend who would love it. Thank you for being a friend!
