You know, a lot of folks are like,
“Oh my gosh, like, you have five generations of legacy.
Like, that's a lot of pressure to carry on.”
My name is Mei Lum.
I'm 28 years old,
and I'm the fifth-generation owner of Wing On Wo & Co.
There isn't a place like this that exists anymore.
And these stores, there were so many of them,
but now we're the only ones.
When I was growing up—I'm 64 this year—
every other store sold some porcelain.
They always had something special, something different.
I took over in May of 2016.
My family was at a pivotal moment with the business.
It was a very natural decision to make.
And I always grew up here,
helping stock the shelves, working the cash register.
Being a small business in Chinatown,
it ended up being really hard for my grandparents to
change with the times.
I think that social media and having a website
has really changed our reach.
Being able to use something like Instagram or Facebook
to tie in the history of the shop.
We definitely see people in their 20s and 30s coming in
and being really interested in stocking their new homes
with different wares.
It's been really fun to engage my grandmother
in modeling certain things,
or like, you know, taking sips out of like a tea cup.
She has caught on and knows that I use them for Instagram now.
But I think she,
she understands why I'm doing it.
It's even beyond what she has imagined,
so I think all of those different facets have really helped us.
A lot of these patterns holds nostalgic memories
for the folks that come in,
like the wanshouwujiang or the linglong.
All those things are tied back to childhood memories
and family histories.
Cabbage is like my ultimate favorite pattern.
The detail in the leaves
and how much time it took for the painter to draw the veins.
It's very complex and multidimensional.
This pattern is one of the first patterns my grandmother sourced.
I would say this one as well.
So probably like, 50-plus years old.
So the way that my grandparents
sourced all the porcelain in the shop
was taking annual trips to Hong Kong.
They visited different showrooms,
so they were able to have a curated experience,
pick things, and then have the quantities packaged in crates,
and then shipped over to New York on a boat.
And now what we're doing is
going straight to the source in Jingdezhen,
which is known as the porcelain capital in China,
and we're visiting different small workshops and studios
and meeting the people behind these places.
The people that come through to the shop,
they might have no idea about the history of Chinese porcelain.
And what we try to do is contextualize all of our pieces
and educate our audience because it's really important to us.
We're working against certain stereotypes,
like Chinese manufactured goods are cheap in quality
and cheap in price.
No, this is not actually true.
These are made by people.
They spend a lot of time painting these peaches.
Nate and I have gone into storage apartments,
where there's just boxes of things and rummaging through that
and cleaning off lots of dirt
because they haven't been touched by anybody.
It's harder to find top-quality
older-patterned porcelain these days
because there aren't a lot of studios
that are willing to invest in hiring painters
to paint all these intricate designs anymore.
A lot of these things could be seen as like antique
or old for a previous generation.
Without updating and being able to market to a younger audience,
it's hard for these businesses to survive.
A big question is what's the future of business?
I think Wing On Wo
has proven that there is a future for this,
and there's a way to tie it back into our culture and identity,
to have those conversations and to also educate people
about why this craft still should be valued.
Thanks for watching.
If you like that video,
we've got more on our channel about Chinese porcelain.
Including one where we went into the factory
that makes the blue and white bowls you saw earlier in the video.