a gathering place for the voices, healing traditions and inherited wisdom of Chinese American women.
who we are
Tong (堂) gathering places where Chinese immigrants found community, mutual aid, and cultural continuity.
Mother Tong (她堂) gathering place where women find community, mutual aid and cultural continuity within the stories, healing traditions, and inherited wisdom of Chinese American women.
Pearly Liu, Portland, late 1960s, jeweler and mother of 6. Mid-motion during leisure.
As members of the diaspora, we are making the choice to carry forward the rituals of our birthright and live with them meaningfully, within the life we inhabit now.
Mother Tong is a digital publication and physical gathering place in San Francisco's Chinatown, created for women and dedicated to the stories, healing traditions and inherited wisdom of Chinese American women. Through personal essays, interviews, conversations, and community events, we explore how culture is carried across generations, how it evolves, and what it means to inherit traditions shaped by migration, memory, and belonging.
Among those inheritances is Traditional Chinese Medicine, a system of healing that has long sustained the women in our communities through menstruation, fertility, and reproduction to trauma and loss, perimenopause, menopause, and aging.
A brothy soup made a certain way when someone was sick. Warnings about eating cold foods or going out with wet hair. Herbs wrapped in unmarked bags.
While we will never claim to fully understand these traditions in their original form, we believe that because tradition preserved in its perfection is an impossibility, we would rather engage in our inheritance imperfectly and thoughtfully rather than lose it entirely. When we dive into traditional knowledge or offer therapeutic food recipes and herbal preparations, we do so reverently, without turning them into trends or stripping them from the histories and people they come from.
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America
堂
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America 堂
San Francisco, California. Family dinner, noodles for long life, head of household at head of table. red candles carved with double happiness.
