In Conversation with Pearl River Mart’s Joanne Kwong and Welcome to Chinatown Designer, Harry Trinh
Pearl River Mart (PRM) has been a New York City institution for five decades, almost immediately since its inception as a “friendship store” in 1971. The closing of its longtime Soho location in 2016 -- the fifth in the company’s history -- signaled the end of an era that many New Yorkers lamented. Luckily, Joanne Kwong, the daughter-in-law of founders Ming Yi and Ching Yeh Chen, decided to leave her position as Counsel to the President and Vice President for Communications at Barnard College to help her in-laws revive Pearl River Mart and take the company into a new era. From her first day (sitting at a makeshift wood plank desk in a boiling warehouse) to the recent opening of Pearl River Mart Foods, PRM’s fourth NYC location and second store in Chelsea Market, Joanne has modernized PRM for future generations of Asian Americans while preserving the authenticity that has made it special for all New Yorkers.
This fluid reciprocity between the old and the new has become the linchpin of Pearl River Mart’s mission. Its Chinatown Collection collaboration with Welcome to Chinatown was designed with these goals in mind. The products help to honor and support other Chinatown institutions through modern means -- tees, totes, mugs and more that are appealing to all ages and backgrounds are designed, produced, marketed, handled, and shipped out at no cost to the businesses. All profits go directly to the featured businesses while also reminding customers and admirers of the merch of the places they have known and loved for decades.
Shop the collection here
Welcome to Chinatown was able to chat with Joanne, now President of PRM, and Welcome to Chinatown Head of Creative Harry Trinh about their collaboration and how it has helped both organizations towards their shared goal of strengthening community:
On the goals of PRM and Welcome to Chinatown
Joanne: In 1971, the goal of PRM was to introduce New York to Chinese culture, which at the time was commonly thought of as exotic, inscrutable, somewhat suspect - all of the classic adjectives that are now recognized as pejorative to Asian Americans. Mr. Chen and his student-activist friends thought that if people like his neighbors and other New Yorkers just got to know Chinese culture and people on a person-to-person level, then they would admire the richness and traditions of the community. In his own small way, he would be helping to change international relations and stereotypes against Chinese people in NYC.
Today, fifty years later, New Yorkers need no introduction to Chinese culture, but the Asian American community still needs its own spaces, especially physical ones, to celebrate ourselves and invite others to join on our own terms. In the past four years, I’ve evolved PRM to reflect my own experiences as a second-generation Chinese American and others like me, who, in comparison to our elders, are now more global and well-traveled, more discerning with our purchasing power, more integrated with other Asian communities, and more outspoken about Asian American representation in mainstream American culture. Pearl River is a place that I benefited from experiencing as a child, and I’m building a Pearl River that I think my sons and future generations will benefit from having in this world.
Our team clicked immediately with Jen, Harry and Vic of Welcome to Chinatown. In addition to our similar personal experiences and desires for helping Chinatown, we recognized that we were pursuing similar visions for using merchandise to help the community during these crazy times. We were delighted to discover that our capabilities and resources at the time were exactly complementary: Welcome to Chinatown has a wonderful team of designers, and PRM has expertise in production, merchandising, and fulfillment. We both have a passion for marketing and community outreach.
How PRM and Welcome to Chinatown work together
Joanne: I love working with Harry because his creations are not only genius and thoughtful, he is also crazy prolific and fast! I’m pretty decisive as an editor of designs and always keep sell-ability top-of-mind because we’re not helping anyone if we create beautiful things that no one buys.
Hop Kee was one of our first projects together, and it is probably my favorite because it represents well what teamwork can achieve. Before connecting with PRM, Welcome to Chinatown had been trying for a while to convince the restaurant to work with them. It’s not easy to gain the trust and time of local owners who are concentrating on keeping their businesses afloat. When we started working together, Welcome to Chinatown went back to Peter (the owner of Hop Kee) and asked once again if he would permit them to make merchandise for the restaurant. Though my in-laws and I didn’t know Peter personally at the time, he knew and trusted PRM and finally agreed to allow Hop Kee to join. It was an early victory for our team, and we continue to celebrate moments like these.
Every aspect of the collaboration is important -- people love Hop Kee and want to support it, trust Pearl River as a longtime institution, and are proud and excited to wear and use WTC’s beautiful designs.
What PRM and WTC hope to achieve with their collaboration
Joanne: After the first collection went live, the response was enormous. We were grateful and pleasantly surprised that members of the community immediately recognized the significance of what we were trying to do. It meant so much that Asian American journalists at New York Magazine and GQ featured the Collection, and that hometown heroes Awkwafina, Ronny Chieng and Celia Au helped to spread the word. It was funny because I had a list of people to reach out to, including Bowen Yang. I was running behind so I sent him a note an hour or so after the Collection went live, explaining what it was and asking if he’d consider possibly posting about it. He replied immediately and said, “I already bought 4 shirts and a tote and posted about it!!!!” Haha, he’s the best.
I hate the narrative of Chinatown being a place filled with old restaurants stuck in a time warp, or the trope that Chinese food or products should be cheap. Anyone who spends time there knows that Chinatown is incredibly dynamic and fun and filled with passionate, creative, resourceful people. My hope is that the Chinatown Collection reflects this energy and mix of old and new.
As an aside, it is not right when others profit from Chinatown’s reputation and don’t give back to the community it claims to represent. There are some brands that use the Chinatown moniker or copy logos of local restaurants to “pay homage” and exploit the cultural associations that go with them, purely for their own gain. It’s detrimental when they make a profit from businesses’ designs without their permission.
With the Chinatown Collection, we want to put that money back into the businesses’ hands and help support all the amazing work being done in the community by carving out at least 10% for charitable initiatives. It is also important to us to show that the community is incredibly diverse and multi-generational and that there are so many wonderful personalities and stories to tell.
Harry: This is one of the reasons why our upcoming glassware collaboration with Fong On is one of my favorites. Fong On is the resurrection of Fong Inn Too, the original tofu shop started in the 1930’s by the current owner’s grandfather. We gave the shop a new medium to express their story and evolution. The drinking glasses will also be a new product line for Made in Chinatown, and it’s paying homage to PRM’s traditional reputation for home goods.
How a common love for Chinatown pushes the community forward
Harry: It’s really heartwarming to see the local businesses coming together. We’re reinventing what it means to be part of a specific neighborhood.
Joanne: I agree, and I love that during the pandemic, it’s the younger generation that’s forming the glue and bringing everyone together.
Because our parents and grandparents worked so hard, many of us were lucky to have the freedom to get good educations, pursue professional careers of our choosing, and establish families in whatever neighborhoods we want. If you have a similar kind of connection to Chinatown, I would urge you to get involved and support the community that helped raise us.
In my view, PRM has always pushed the boundaries of Chinatown out, welcoming more people in. I love that during the pandemic, all of the amazing work and collaborations in Chinatown have expanded the reach of the community but also made it smaller in terms of bringing people closer together. Working with nonprofits like Welcome to Chinatown has shown local business owners that there are new levers of financial, political, and marketing power that can help us all survive the pandemic and hopefully thrive after it’s over. With PRM, I want to do my best to keep coming up with new ideas that elevate the Asian American community and expand its reach. Short-term I’m trying to get us to our 50th anniversary, in 2021. And maybe then I can take a nap.
Stay tuned for the latest additions of the Chinatown Collection, exclusively at Pearl River Mart, by following @welcome.to.chinatown and @pearlrivermart on Instagram.
