Our group chose Chinatown as our neighborhood and after the color walk, we realized that all of our interests were very much focused on the immersive components of Chinatown (the supermarkets, the food, the artifacts we found on the floor) and therefore we wanted our zine to reflect this and allow our audience to interact with our zine so it mirrors the feeling of being in Chinatown. To begin planning for our zine, I opened up a shared google document and we brainstormed how we could each make our zine pages. We split the pages by theme and each person made 2 pages (4 sides). Below was how we planned our zine:
Our zine will be:
- Flippable (landscape book where the binding is on the short edge)
- Dimensions: margin = 1cm, width = 21.5cm, height = 16.5cm
- The book will be bound by a thread (golden thread)
Aidan – (food) 4 red packets, 2 on each side. Make a total of one page.
Joy – (history) string pulling side, text, and abacus (made out of buttons), red collage, text about history. Make a total of two pages.
Alex – (architecture) opening window for one side of the page, photography on 2 sides of the page, 1 side of the text. Make a total of two pages
Liv – (fashion) make 1 page out of fabric, make another page manipulating Chinese newspaper. Make a total of two pages.
Ciara – (general) 1 side of the floor plan, 1 side for an explanation of the floor plan, 1 side of a foldable map, 1 side of calligraphy. Make a total of two pages
A process of me making the pages and typing up the text regarding the historical context of Chinatown
My contributions to the zine were making the 2 pages of the zine (shown below) and brainstorming most of the ideas for the pages in our zine. I organized how we were to split the workload and came up with a lot of the concepts and themes (history of Chinatown, food, fashion, architecture, and general). I came up with the concept of doing a more interactive zine based on everyone’s experience at Chinatown. The overall concept is to make a zine that makes the reader understand and feel as if they are experiencing a color walk through Chinatown themselves by reading our zine.
Below are the pages I made for the zine:
On my color walk, something that really fascinated me was going into supermarkets and finding packaged food products that are discontinued in Asia. I remember seeing a canned peanut dessert I used to eat a lot as a child but could no longer find in Asia in an Asian supermarket in Chinatown and feeling a weird sense of nostalgia in a country I just moved to. Below is an excerpt from my seminar writing assignment:
Never quiet, Chinatown never ceases to amaze me. Much like the feeling you get when you first arrive in a new city, the grandeur of New York’s Chinatown hit me with all its might the moment I stepped off the cab. As much as it felt like I was visiting a brand new city I had never been to before, I also felt a strange sense of nostalgia when I looked at certain corners of the street.
Here is the end result of what our zine looks like:
