A walk through Corky Lee’s Chinatown

When I moved to New York City in 2008, I rented a room on Eldridge Street, just a few doors down from the Manhattan Bridge. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was living in Corky Lee’s Chinatown.

Before I ever knew Corky—a man who photographed Asian American life for 50 years—I’d heard his name. Perhaps floating in the ether of Mott Street, it had lodged itself in my brain. Years later, when I met him at an event at the First Chinese Baptist Church on Pell Street, it was as if the answer to a long forgotten question had finally presented itself. I went home and immediately googled him. According to Wikipedia, he was the “Undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate”—Corky’s own self-dubbed title that he’d printed on business cards. By the time I arrived on the scene, his reputation preceded him.

Of course, I eventually moved to another apartment uptown, then to an apartment across the river in Brooklyn, and so on. But in the intervening years since my first New York apartment, it has always felt as though I was trying to find my way back to Chinatown. And with it, the near certainty that I might round a corner in the quarter’s pedestrian-choked streets and bump into its resident photographer.

These run-ins happened frequently enough that I learned to politely excuse myself from the lengthy conversations that followed. Corky, in addition to his eye for the decisive moment, had a gift for gab and knew how to hold people in his thrall. He’d often launch into an impromptu history lesson colored by his own wry observations.

In May 2019, when I interviewed him on a train from Ogden to Salt Lake City—where we’d traveled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad—he described railroad tycoon Leland Stanford as a “desk jockey” who “didn’t know how to pick up a sledgehammer” in contrast to the Chinese laborers who did the backbreaking work of laying hundreds of miles of track.

What Corky did for Asian American history at large, he also did for Chinatown. His primary mission in life was to take back control of the narrative—the one the victors usually tell—using his camera. He called it “photographic justice,” another apt coinage that turned his shutter into a tool for social change. His images offer a rare insider’s look at Chinatown, imbued with layers of meaning. “It’s not a drive-by tourist destination to me,” Corky once said. “It’s a real living community of people trying to survive.”

Take, for example, the pictures in “Corky Lee’s Asian America,” a recently published monograph that collects photos from Corky’s archive and brings to fruition the book he had long wanted to publish. When you see his photos of a charity ping-pong game in the middle of Mott Street or a group of old bachelors idling outside a butcher shop or a row of industrial sewing machines abandoned on the sidewalk after the latest garment factory closure, you’re seeing Chinatown through the loving eyes of a community member, one who claimed the neighborhood as his own.

Contrast that with the othering gaze of outsiders like Arnold Genthe, Jacob Riis, or Isaiah West Taber, whose cameras and post-production techniques served to exoticize and mythologize the “crooked alleys” of Chinatown for nearly a century. Corky, somewhat radically, only ever sought to humanize his fellow Chinatown dwellers. Who could forget his portrait of Lily Chow, mother of eight and taxi driver, cruising in her yellow checkered cab, a cup of coffee in hand?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Corky didn’t slow down. Like any photographer worth his salt, he pounded the pavement with renewed vigor—hoping to capture a historic crisis and a city in flux. Suddenly, the streets of Chinatown were empty. But Corky was there to document it all. He outran the virus longer than most, especially considering his increased exposure, but the virus eventually claimed him, too. On January 27, 2021, Corky Lee died from COVID-19 at the age of 73.

“I may be six feet under pushing up daisies when people realize that I’ve had this tremendous visual record of what took place in the 70s, 80s and the 90s. It’s almost the history of Chinese in America,” Corky had said rather prophetically. “I’m okay with not being recognized . . . At this stage in my life, I’m happy with it. I can leave something for future generations.”

His comments ring bitterly true. Corky was so ubiquitous, his constant presence lulled many of us into believing he’d be around forever. As a result, he never quite received the public recognition that his enormous body of work deserves. And yet, he touched so many lives.

Chinatown will always be Chinatown, but it feels different now that Corky is gone. Everywhere I look, I see the places he once inhabited—his perch at Silk Road, the green doors at 21 Pell, the empty newsstand on Mosco Street, now co-named Corky Lee Way after its most memorable personality.

I’m not alone in feeling his absence. I talked to a small sampling of the hundreds of friends, mentees, and admirers Corky inspired, and I asked them to take me to a spot in Chinatown that reminds them of him.

At the end of December 2020, photographer Cindy Trinh ran into Corky sitting outside Silk Road Cafe, one of his favorite haunts. “I was walking by right here on Mott Street,” Cindy recounts, “and I hear my name, ‘Cindy!’ I turned around. It was Corky.” He waved her over and they ended up talking for several hours over tea and cookies. “I had no idea it would be the last time I would see him . . . ’cause you think, oh yeah, I’ll see you again.”

Around the same time, photographer Edward Cheng received a message from Corky. He’d ordered a jacket that was too small for him but thought it would fit Ed just right. The two friends met up outside the train station on Centre and Canal Streets and later followed a group of Guardian Angels into the subway with their cameras. “That’s the last point I saw Corky,” Ed says. “Every time I walk down the streets, it’s like I hear his voice.”

Amy Chin, Yin Kong, and Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan of Think!Chinatown, a local non-profit, recall the way Corky could light up an entire street. For Chinatown Arts Week in the fall of 2020, the organization talked to Corky about mounting an outdoor exhibition that would be safe for people to view while avoiding COVID-19 transmission. “I think this was actually initially Corky’s idea,” Amy explains. “He said, well, how about that newsstand? And so we made it happen.”

Corky invited two other photographers, Edward Cheng and Karen Zhou, to join the exhibition and, with the help of Think!Chinatown, he transformed an old newsstand and hawker stall on Mosco Street into a plein-air art gallery. Corky manned the booth every day of its nine-day run.

“Every time that I walked out, I would see him here, like no matter what time. And then there was always a scatter of stools,” Yin says.

“People would say to me like, ‘oh, meet you at the box, like, Corky in the box,’” Rochelle adds. “Everybody knew that you would see somebody or a friend here, and whether you wanted to see them or not, like, they were gonna be here.”

Photographer Alan Chin traces his knowledge of Corky back to a picture he saw as a kid in a local Chinatown publication. “I remember noticing that picture and thinking it was interesting and unusual. And who’s this? Oh, photographer Corky Lee.” In 2001, when the New York Times assigned Alan to photograph Corky for a story on his solo show at the Museum of Chinese in America, Alan already knew who he was. Over the next two decades, the two men ran into each other regularly and collaborated on several exhibitions.

“We both knew that there were not enough Asian American or Chinese American photographers working in Chinatown at any given minute,” Alan says.

Ava Chin, author of Mott Street, says Corky was a font of information, likening him to a “very enlightened, radical, in-the-know uncle…. He knew everybody.” In the 1990s, when Ava was involved in organizing work in Chinatown, she remembers seeing him on the picket line outside of Silver Palace, the area’s only unionized restaurant at the time. He was also there at her choreography performances, photographing the local culture in Chinatown. “I felt like I just saw him all the time in all of these different spheres that were important to Asian American history.”

In recent years, Corky could often be found at the American Legion or the First Chinese Baptist Church, where he began curating film screenings and lectures in 2015. The series was christened 21 Pell Street—the address of the church. Corky’s ability to broker the use of a religious space for cultural events speaks to his vast network and good will in the community, Ava says. “Chinatown does not have a lot of spaces for the community…. And the fact that Corky was able to work with folks here at the church, it meant that the space was open for more creative and cultural events.”

Writer Henry Chang and production designer Wing Lee have been friends with Corky since the early 1970s. “Corky was such a personable guy. Easy to like, easy to be friends with. But I think my friendship with him was more than just the camaraderie,” Henry says. “I think of it as more like belonging to this brotherhood of the Chinatown streets . . . The streets were deeper than family, thicker than blood . . . we all related to each other cause we identified with the people in Chinatown who had nowhere else to go. That was us. And all we had was each other.”

Henry put these experiences to good use in his novels about a fictional detective named Jack Yu, set in New York’s Chinatown. When filmmaker Patrick Chen decided to adapt some of these stories into a short feature titled “A Father’s Son,” starring comedian and actor Ronny Chieng, Corky naturally volunteered to be the still photographer on set. Patrick decided he would do him one better and cast Corky as the owner of Hop Kee, a well known basement restaurant where some of the scenes were filmed.

One day on set, Corky gave Ronny some good-natured flack for not having his prop gun on him. Ronny, somewhat begrudgingly, asked Patrick who this Corky guy was, but a quick Google search set him straight. The actor’s initial annoyance transformed into admiration.“‘Oh my god, you’re the Corky Lee,’” Patrick recalls Ronny saying.

“I referred to Corky as the Gordon Parks of Chinatown,” Wing adds, cementing his late friend’s legacy. “He was more than a photographer. He was a history maker.”

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I once asked Corky why he kept the word “unofficial” in his moniker. He said it was to give him legal cover, in case some other “official” Asian American photographer laureate came out of the woodwork to claim their rightful title. It has long been clear to me—and to the many people who knew and loved him—that there could only be one. Indisputably, it was Corky Lee. Maybe it’s about time we made it official.