“Ultimately, we just want people to go out and try new things,” Wu says. You can also follow Cut Fruit Collective on Instagram to learn about fundraisers and upcoming events. If you’d like to get involved, donations are welcome and go towards making the project sustainable. We also connect artists and designers with businesses to help support them in other areas, like painting murals or redesigning menus and logos.” “In certain instances, it’s just finding creative ways to promote their business. If you grew up in a culture where this practice happens, you really get that, and you really understand the notion behind it being about care and community care, and that’s the approach we want to take with our work and our projects.”Ĭut Fruit Collective uses art as a way to bring people together to uplift AAPI communities and neighborhoods and also does outreach to build relationships with small businesses, especially immigrant-owned and monolingual-speaking businesses, to find out how they can best support them.
During the Lunar New Year, you’re constantly gifting bags of fruit, and there’s so much symbolism behind that. If you show up at your friend’s family’s home, there’s always going to be a plate of cut fruit ready for you. “Cut fruit is this funny motif that you see across all of these different AAPI households as a symbol of hospitality, but also care. “We wanted to make sure we had a name that feels inclusive and resonates with people across the AAPI communities,” Wu says. In spring 2021, the women behind Save Our Chinatowns decided they wanted to serve AAPI communities beyond Bay Area Chinatowns, and the organization is now Cut Fruit Collective, a grassroots non-profit that “supports AAPI communities through art, publishing, and a shared love of food.” We spoke to Daphne Wu, a freelance web designer and co-founder (Tsiah stayed on as an advisor), to learn more about Cut Fruit Collective, starting with the name. In March of 2020, she created Save Our Chinatowns, an initiative to support Chinatown communities in the Bay Area through art, conversation, and shared love of food. Jocelyn Tsaih, an artist who made her way to Oakland by way of Taiwan and Shanghai, saw what was happening to SF’s Chinatown and other Chinatowns in the Bay Area and decided she needed to do something about it. And soon, the bars and restaurants were mostly empty, and the owners were uncertain how they could survive. And then so did locals outside of the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, despite our Chinatown being the oldest in North America and an important part of Chinese culture in the city since it was established in 1848, tourists stopped going there. Business for bars and restaurants almost immediately dropped 50 to 70%. In February of 2020, when there were only a handful of COVID cases in the United States, throngs of people stopped going to San Francisco’s Chinatown out of an unfounded fear that the neighborhood was more likely to have people with the virus.