For a span of more than a century, New York's Chinese communities have grown uninterruptedly from three streets in lower Manhattan to five Chinatowns, over 100 street blocks, across the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. No other Chinese communities outside Asia come close to this magnitude.

Wendy Wan-Yin Tan, a librarian and associate professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a profound lover of Chinese culture, uses historic and modern images to bear witness to some of these changes in Chinatowns of New York City.