Experience Chinatown is a festival organized by the Pao Arts Center to draw traffic to Boston’s Chinatown. I was commissioned by Pao along with other local artists to create murals on storefronts in Chinatown. This year’s prompt was “What makes a community special?”

Thinking about what makes Chinatown special made me think of all of the immigrant stories. I’m always thinking of birds and the parallels between human and bird migration. People often overlook the diversity of birds, and different species blend together to the untrained eye. Many are migrants and symbolize the beauty of crossing boundaries. The birds pictured are the national birds of Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan - Blue Magpie, Magpie, Red-crowned Crane, and Green Pheasant. Chinatown acts as a meeting place for generations of immigrants of all backgrounds to connect and celebrate their different cultures. People often come from different places, and their shared experiences of migration and building a new home bring them together in this unique neighborhood. Photos by Mel Taing.