The New Yorker-Picturing a Chinatown Family Across Twenty-Two Years

When Thomas Holton, a photography graduate student, strolled through Chinatown in the early two-thousands, snapping street shots, he found the resulting photos to be “superficial”—no different from the pictures any tourist might take. During one particular walk, he looked upward, took in the little windows of the apartment buildings lining the way, and saw where he really wanted to be—on the other side of the glass, behind the closed doors, capturing portraits of what everyday life was really like for those who called the neighborhood home. An image he took that day, which became the cover of his first book, embodies Holton’s curiosity about these thresholds to private worlds: a door textured and stippled with layers of red paint, marked with the apartment number fifteen.

Holton’s desire to find an in was both professional and personal. He was born in Guatemala to an American father—also a photographer—and a Chinese mother. He grew up in Manhattan, and his grandparents lived in Chinatown, but he always felt like an outsider in that part of the Lower East Side. So he hit the pavement in pursuit of a connection to those who lived there. Holton sought out housing advocates who might be open to taking him on home visits and came upon the University Settlement, an organization that offers support to immigrants living in the neighborhood. One afternoon, Holton shadowed a housing advocate on her visits to a few households, taking publicity photographs as a service to the nonprofit and to the families. When he returned to the homes to deliver the developed prints, he found most of the families unwilling to engage with him. He ended up slipping many prints under closed doors.

There was one exception: the Lams. Shirley Lam, the matriarch of the family, not only opened the door to their tenement apartment but welcomed Holton in for dinner. An enduring relationship unfolded from there: every week, Holton visited with the five Lams—Shirley, then a homemaker; Steven, who worked as an insurance adjuster; and their three children, Michael, Franklin, and Cindy. Holton helped with school pickup, babysitting, household chores, and continued to join them for dinner. He quickly became an integral member of the household, privy to the hubbub of everyday life, camera in hand. And so began “The Lams of Ludlow Street,” a photography project that is now twenty-two years old and counting.

The photo taken during Holton’s initial University Settlement visit is rendered in grayscale and titled “Passport Photos.” The three Lam children are standing on chairs in the common area, holding their respective passport photos and gazing into the camera. Of the three, only the baby of the family, then two-year-old Cindy, is smiling. The building’s stairwell, visible through the apartment’s open front door, is empty and sterile; by contrast, every crevice of the Lams’ apartment is bustling and full of life. Just to the right of and above the children are hangers of the family’s clothing. Behind them are stacks of boxes, illustrating a truism of New York living: there is not an inch to waste. The photo also speaks to Holton’s limited access at this point—the shot is taken right by the apartment’s entry and the kids are highly aware of this stranger and his camera.

Over time, the images burst into full color. The Lams became oblivious to the camera as they grew comfortable around Holton. And we now have access to every angle of their lives: the adjacent beds covered in orange, pink and yellow, green; Shirley and Steven’s wedding photo smiling down from the wall; the hangers that adorn the windows and descend from a shower curtain rod. Looking at an intimate shot of the three kids playing in a bubble bath, next to Shirley doing the dishes at the sink—the overhead loofahs and soap shining in bright hues—Holton told me that he never rearranged anything to compose his pictures. After the fact, however, he would sometimes play with color and saturation. “Color is information,” he said. “All of a sudden, you start seeing the soap.”

At the Lams’, scarcity of space is a source of beauty. In one shot, for instance, suspended clothing forms a plush, colorful backdrop for the family members at dinnertime, where the five of them smile from behind a dining table that boasts six settings—one reserved for the unseen Holton. Cindy, now in her twenties, told me that she cannot remember a time when Holton was not taking her photo. His documentary approach is palpable: quickly, we, like Holton, become one with the Lams, looking on as they lounge, eat, and watch TV.

The project is also a testament to a time and place. The Ludlow Street apartment—a roughly three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot, two-room unit on the fifth floor in a century-old tenement building—is an integral member of the family. The building had access to the roof, which the Lams used as a playground and for drying laundry when the weather permitted. Shirley’s mother—a “freedom swimmer” who escaped China’s Cultural Revolution by swimming to Hong Kong—had rented the unit around 1980, and Shirley and Steven began living there in 1996, when she moved elsewhere in the neighborhood. One photo from 2004 depicts the Lams’ string of hangers on the roof, showcasing a lower Manhattan skyline that had yet to see the rise of tower upon tower of new luxury construction.

Holton’s ties with the family expanded beyond the apartment: he accompanied the Lams to Hong Kong and China in 2004; Cindy was the flower girl at Holton’s wedding, in 2007. But, as in any close relationship, there were shifts and fractures. Although Thomas continued to visit the family, he stopped photographing them for the five years during which Steven and Shirley’s marriage unravelled, sensing that the family needed space. In 2008, a fire in a neighboring apartment destroyed part of the Lams’ home, compounding the strain. Financial realities propelled Shirley to seek training as a home-care nurse, and she moved in with her new patients—a one-hundred-year-old Chinese woman the children called Granny and her eighty-year-old son Bo—in a nearby tenement on Henry Street. Cindy often slept there while Steven and the boys stayed at Ludlow.

Once the family settled into their new normal, Holton resumed his photography. The tones of these prints are darker: shadows replace the bright colors, and family members are visibly tense. Each person appears more often alone or separated from others through curtain, doorway, or darkness. As time passes, the project moves out from the Ludlow apartment: the kids go off to college; Steven finds a place of his own, first in New Jersey, then the Bronx; and Shirley grows closer to her patients, who also become family.

Neither the project nor the Lams were immune to the vagaries of the real world: when the pandemic hit in 2020, months elapsed before Holton was able to join the family for photos. By this point, Granny and Bo had died, and Shirley was back living at home. Despite the familiar cacophony of hangers and clothing overhead, the apartment becomes almost unrecognizable. Screens and computers appear, as do pieces of furniture arranged to create a sense of privacy among the grown children. The city, too, was changing: the building was undergoing renovations and most of the Chinese families who had lived there were being replaced with higher-paying renters. In 2021, Shirley fought to hold on to Granny and Bo’s apartment (she had received their blessing to inherit it), taking it as far as housing court. In one arresting print, she is standing tall over the stairs in the Henry Street tenement, in an outfit of red, white, and blue, and stars and stripes, holding an orange, a Chinese symbol for good luck. Shirley lost in housing court, and, in another print, we see her back in the bunkbed at Ludlow, smiling wistfully into her phone while listening to saved voice mails from Bo.

In July, I met Holton, along with Steven and Cindy at BAXTER ST, a camera club on the Lower East Side, where an exhibit of “The Lams of Ludlow Street” ran through mid-August. Holton said that, more than anything, this project is about real life in New York, tracing the “ups-and-downs” happening just blocks from hip new bars. “This is more representative of New York,” he told me. He emphasized the universality of the project: the Lams are “an American family that lives in New York City who happen to be Chinese.” Steven echoed this notion. “This is a very ordinary family,” he said. “Not the family that people think of, the immigrants who become doctors, lawyers, a stereotype. [We’re] not that. We are a really ordinary family, just living here, and there are so many families like us.”

For Steven, the relationship has always been founded on trust: he and Shirley have always been open people, welcoming others into their lives. Holton said he sees his collaboration with the family as a lifelong project. He told me that he would keep shooting the Lams “as long as they open the door for me.” Leaving the gallery, I was moved by the intimacy I witnessed between Holton and the family: the jokes and memories they exchanged seamlessly, and the ease with which they glided into making impromptu plans after our chat; noodles, it was decided unanimously. Of everything that Holton has captured in “The Lams of Ludlow Street,” perhaps the most timeless, the most quintessentially New York, is how so many strangers happen upon one another here, step through the threshold, and become family.