At this year’s Data Through Design exhibition in Brooklyn, dozens of artists offered their own creative interpretations of public data published by New York City’s government. One exhibit in particular seemed to keep the crowd it brings in. Children played with delicately-painted mahjong tiles, older folks wrote down their thoughts and hung them on a response wall, and teens scanned a QR code to follow along with the interactive art installation.

New York City artist Michelle Hui’s participatory art piece “Aging Out of Place” uses the cultural symbol of mahjong to explore what it means to grow old, isolated and increasingly invisible in a rapidly-gentrifying Chinatown – and to allow viewers to reimagine the neighborhood for the better. The exhibit will also be shown May 16-21 at the NYCxDesign festival.

The title is a play on the research field of aging in place, or the ability to stay in one’s community and live independently with dignity, rather than being moved to a care facility or a senior home.

Read more: Public Spaces for Older Adults Must be Reimagined as Cities Reopen

“My piece is called ‘Aging Out of Place’ because it’s not only the idea that you’re perhaps being sent to an elderly home, but you’re quite literally going to another country to age,” says Hui, a master’s student at Cornell University studying urban technology. “So you’re aging outside of your community in a completely different way.”

Hui designed the project in hopes that urban planners, housing developers and the people who are entrusted with making city planning decisions can see how their choices ultimately affect this entire population. But she also hopes that it helps people think about how to protect their own cultural institutions and the vulnerable seniors in their own neighborhoods.

“The key goal was for some to think about how they might care for elders in their own lives,” she says. Based on the reactions that viewers shared on the feedback wall, it seems to have worked. “A lot of people are thinking about how they can protect their parents in a supportive environment, how they can protect their own enclaves.”

Tile by tile

In 2012, New York City passed an Open Data Law requiring the New York City government to publicly release all of its data through a single site. Every year members of the Data Through Design collective organize an annual exhibit featuring creative explorations of datasets found on the NYC Open Data web portal.

Blending city data with resident interviews, “Aging Out of Place” begins with a guided storytelling zine. The zine provides context on this vulnerable community — from seniors’ access to health services to how the neighborhood’s seniors have been targeted by private casinos who bus in from Atlantic City, offering Chinatown residents a free ride to and from the casino along with meal stipends and slot machine vouchers.

It also shows players how to use the hand-painted mahjong tiles, laid out on a four-sided board depicting a map of Chinatown. Some of these are fixed, while others are movable, representing buildings that are vulnerable to gentrification – such as libraries, restaurants, community centers, churches and temples.

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The fixed pieces that are permanently attached to the board represent the information from this community that can be found in the Open Source web portal. These include gambling arrest sites, NYPD departments, and places that are not susceptible to being displaced from the neighborhood.

Players are encouraged to add or take away pieces – benches, libraries, elderly homes, soup kitchens and more — to envision a neighborhood where residents can age in place.

Falling into addiction

“Mahjong is, in Chinese culture, designed to be a game of social connection. Really, it’s for people to gossip and tell community stories over the game,” Hui explains. “But that also means that within Chinese culture, gambling is less stigmatized. And when they come into the U.S., they face a lot of immigration isolation, and so it’s very easy for them to fall into gambling addiction.”

But the stereotype of “the Asian gambler” minimizes the structural causes of problem gambling in Asian American communities.

Nearly half of the elderly Chinese American community in New York’s Chinatown are living in poverty, relying on government benefits and local food halls to address housing and food insecurity. In 2016, WABC-TV reported on how hundreds of older immigrants living below the poverty line took free buses to New York City casinos in the hopes of making a few extra dollars and making ends meet.

Several social workers Hui interviewed also attribute these seniors’ isolation and mental health challenges with the lack of third places, social gathering areas beyond one’s home and workplace.

As researchers noted in 2022 after a series of interviews with Asian Americans in Boston, “many individuals in these Asian immigrant communities were striving to make a living off low wage and stressful jobs and struggled to integrate into American society. They often lacked culturally appropriate and accessible social and recreational activities, a void that casinos capitalize on through targeted behaviors.”

It’s a familiar story for many communities that see members turn towards gambling as a way to cope with ongoing racism, trauma and displacement. Indigenous communities are also vulnerable to higher rates of gambling as a form of addressing isolation and have a long history of being exploited by the casino industry.

Hui says she’s already heard from local seniors that the project has changed how they perceive their experience of aging and isolation.

“One of the reasons I decided to make this game of mahjong so interactive and engaging with the piece is because I think it’s more impactful when people can actually build their own stories and share their own stories,” she says. “Ultimately, you want to reveal how people connect to the piece. It shouldn’t be a top-down data thing and it shouldn’t be a government thing.”

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.