Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2966-9853
Date of Award
Spring 6-1-2026
Document Type
Thesis (Undergraduate)
Department
Geography
First Advisor
Erin Collins
Second Advisor
Mona Domosh
Abstract
Boston's Chinatown has persisted despite highway construction, urban renewal, and institutional expansion that destroyed much of the neighborhood. This thesis asks how residents have shaped and inhabited that space and whose contributions have been forgotten in the process. Through entangling frameworks from Geography and Asian American Studies, the thesis approaches Boston's Chinatown through walking, archiving, and counter-mapping. The first chapter reads the streets as a layered record of historical ruptures, which leads to a dichotomy of presence and absence. The second chapter then examines the archives of the 1993 Parcel C struggle. It creates an original counter-archive, titled the "Collection of Eating Bitterness," to repoliticize overlooked work by Chinese immigrant women. Finally, the third chapter produces a counter-map that challenges the boundaries conventional maps impose on Boston's Chinatown. Drawing on Avery Gordon's theory of haunting and the processes of urban palimpsest and metabolism, the thesis argues that, to hear Boston's Chinatown speak about its layered hauntings, it cannot be captured by any single method. Its significance lies in what exceeds and resists definition, the debts, memories, and everyday labors that keep the neighborhood alive on its own terms.
Recommended Citation
Lin, Lin, "Can Chinatown Speak? Mapping hauntings, dispossessions, and diasporic lifeworlds in Boston’s Chinatown" (2026). Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses. 22.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/geography_senior_theses/22
Included in
American Studies Commons, Human Geography Commons, Social Justice Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
