Elizabeth Fair

My project explores memorialization and migration in California, following more than three generations of Chinese Americans. I analyze how their conceptualizations of cultural heritage were expressed in the built environment and its decoration, and how such expressions have changed over time. My research focuses on three sites: the carved, calligraphic poetry reliefs at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1940; the architectural designs of San Francisco’s Chinatown as rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, particularly the Chinatown YWCA (1932, architect Julia Morgan), later home to the Chinese Historical Society; and the surviving nineteenth-century temples of northern and central California. These local sites all functioned as conscious constructions of identity in landscape through architecture, objects, and surfaces—including, importantly, calligraphic inscription. Moreover, each was reimagined multiple times between the 1870s and the present in response to changing narratives of migration and Chinese American material and conceptual cultural heritage.