Good things happen in Chinatown
In 2021, Victoria Lo founded Chinatown Runners in New York. An alternative take on what a social run experience can be, she helps runners see a new side of a city they already call home.
Victoria Lo started Chinatown Runners a year into the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight, and help combat the 361% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes that she had seen proliferating around her in New York.
“It was this feeling of helplessness. I didn’t know exactly how I could contribute back to the Asian American community with what I had in my tool belt.”
The run club that’s not a run club
Victoria did know that she was deeply embedded in New York’s running space with connections with different run clubs across the city. She set about inviting other run clubs to run through Chinatown, and introduce them to Asian-owned businesses.
The first run was in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. 80 people showed up and spent the day “giving those businesses some love and attention, while creating and curating a space for Asian-identifying people who had been feeling very nervous and anxious.”
But Chinatown Runners isn’t a run club per se. It has no members of its own to arrange runs for. Chinatown Runners is an experiment in connecting adjacent, but otherwise separate communities. It’s a beautiful movement that aims to weave the social fabric of a city’s people into a rich tapestry of life through running its streets
These days, Victoria is a pacer for Nike’s Project Moonshot marathon training program, and continues to call upon the New York running scene to help organize Chinatown Runners events, but it wasn’t always this way for her.
She tells me how she was “medically diagnosed as obese - the antithesis of athletic” until her early 20s, but she had started running by then. There came a moment when she was at university when she decided that she just wanted to be able to run a mile. So she ran. She ran around the block from her mom’s house. She ran at night because she was afraid that neighbors would see her. She persevered, night after night, until she ran that full mile, and she hasn’t stopped running since.
Too much of a good thing?
Victoria moved to New York in 2013 and ran regularly with Bridgerunners, and with Black Roses NYC for two seasons, as well as regularly traveling to and from California, Europe, and beyond. She always found a crew to run with wherever she landed, making friends along the way
“I've always been a floater. People always ask me how I know so many people. I think I just talk a lot.”
“In the last couple years, New York City has really heated up. Are there too many run clubs? I don't think such a thing really exists. If you want to make a space that is for a specific vibe or neighborhood or hobby, more power to you. Other people might think that it's at an oversaturation point, but I think it's quite lovely that we have no shortage of running clubs.”
Using run clubs to affect social change
To reiterate: Chinatown Runners is not a run club. Victoria is very clear about never wanting to be a founder or captain because she had witnessed the amount of work and dedication it takes to do that. It wasn’t for her. So she looked at all those run clubs, and set about harnessing their power.
“I want run clubs that don’t typically hang out in Asian neighborhoods to find a reason to visit these places - especially during COVID, when a lot of people were just not going to Asian neighborhoods, for whatever reasons…”
People were scared by the brand new virus that was killing so many around the world, inching violently, and definitely through the time zones. We heard tales from Iran on NPR, then saw bodies piled high in Italy, and then the head-in-sand chaos in the UK. When it hit New York, the overflowing hospitals were frightening but abstract. The lack of financial safety net in the USA, however, was very real. People were just as worried about losing their livelihoods as lockdowns were put in place. All they knew was that it originated in China, and when the most powerful man in the world casually referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus,” that was enough to not only continue boycotting Asian businesses across the world, but for many to actively search out Asian Americans in order to harm them. Xenophobia was in full effect from the top down. It reminds me of the time a week after 9/11 that I was traveling on the London Underground, and an old woman looked at me, clicked her tongue, and moved train carriage. She continued glaring at me through the smudged sliding-glass window. I didn’t have a Chinatown Runners equivalent to be a solution back when I was an 18-year-old Bangladeshi-English atheist. I still don’t - certainly not in Los Angeles - but it makes me all the more grateful that Victoria Lo exists for her community.
“My whole concept is trying to cross-pollinate, and bring other communities to Asian communities, so that we can all celebrate and share that culture together, and understand the value of all of these different ethnic enclaves.”
“I'm lucky enough to have been to many places in the world. I see the contrast of a city that's very monocultural, versus cities in America. For better or worse, when you get a lot of different people together, there are also a lot of conflicting beliefs and personalities, but it's such a uniquely beautiful thing to live in a major metropolitan city in the United States because you do get that very interesting juxtaposition of a Chinatown next to a little Caribbean.”
It’s those features of a big, big city that allow a cultural club like Chinatown Runners to have an impact. Even in the melting pot of a major conurbation, people still tend to stick to their own clans. Getting them out of their comfort zones so they can understand another, maybe completely different culture takes time, and careful effort. The results are hopeful, but real. Three years in and the schedule has been honed and is now spreading to Chinatowns in other cities.
What would Victoria’s dream club collaboration be? She talks about reaching the level of exposure of partnering with an organization as monolithic as New York Road Runners, but there’s more to it, fundamentally.
“The clubs that I would be the most excited to partner with are the ones that are the least connected to the urban running community - the kind of run clubs that our parents might have run with in their heyday. Also, run clubs that just have a very different audience. Maybe a run club that's primarily not Asian.”
“This is very much about finding people who don't already know the secret of how wonderful Chinatowns are, exposing them to that, and sharing with them the magic of those places.”
Where next for community?
I’ve previously written about run clubs as essential third spaces, about dating run clubs, and about run culture being the new streetwear. It’s all true, isn’t it? We are living through the next great running boom. This era will have a Wikipedia page just like the 1970s running boom does.
As running becomes more mainstream, the overlap in culture will increase more and more. People have found their romantic partners or lifelong friends in social spaces since the beginning of time. People care about how they look (“The lay flat is a must-do ritual on Instagram and TikTok the night before.”) when they run as they do in the rest of their life. It’s not your parents’ run club any more. The workout schedule is almost incidental.
“I see other parts of life fusing into running. I see running becoming a conduit into other types of social activities. When I started Chinatown runners, that was very much inspired by Ahmaud Arbery and Black Lives Matter.”
“Activism and social movement intersecting with running is not going to go away anytime soon, which makes me very excited and happy because it's another way to engage with newer generations of people and get them to mobilize, and care about things.”
Chinatown Runners is the perfect example of run club culture in 2024. Purpose-driven, filled with hope, and community-led. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?
I’m happy to say that we’ll hear more great insights from Victoria Lo at Knees Up in East London on August 8th as she joins as my final guest for Run Club Culture: a conversation.
Links & further reading
Victoria Lo [IG]
Chinatown Runners [IG]
NBC: NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year
Jan 2020 My Friends Refuse to Eat in Chinatown Due to Coronavirus
May 2022 Chinatowns across the U.S. are struggling to recover from the pandemic
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Thanks for reading
- Raz
Reading Running Sucks and about people like Victoria helps keep me balanced from despair these days. To be simplistic, there are terrible elements of human nature, but there are always ALWAYS people actively living the best idealistic parts of being human, too. Not sure how you find all of these fascinating people, Raz, but thank you!
361% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes! Wow. All the power in the world to Victoria for finding ways to take this kind of prejudice on.