When people ask why I decided to move to Pittsburgh, here’s the honest truth: I don’t really know.
It was the COVID-19 pandemic and I had recently graduated from college in upstate New York. My boyfriend and I had visited Pittsburgh twice prior, and in our brilliant, possibly naive, shockingly plucky early-20s minds, we set our sights on the Steel City.
In the six years since then, I’ve fallen in love with this wacky, sports-obsessed, unhinged, historical town. We’ve lived in our fair share of neighborhoods (the South Side, Lawrenceville, Highland Park), adopted dogs, bought a house and gotten engaged. It wasn’t until I later learned about the city’s lost Chinatown that I began to feel deeply connected to Pittsburgh.
The once-bustling immigrant community effectively closed after the construction of the Boulevard of the Allies began in 1913, and expanded through Downtown and into Chinatown. Initially, just learning that there had once been a small community of Chinese immigrants made my heart ache, but my connection only continued to strengthen. Most of its occupants, I learned, were first-generation Chinese immigrants from Hoiping (Kaiping) and Toisan, two small cities in southern China. It just so happens that my grandparents, also first-generation Chinese immigrants, were born in Toisan…