Coloring Oakland Chinatown
Felicia Liang illustrates her love for a special neighborhood
By Anna Mindess
Photo by Kevin Chow
Artist and illustrator Felicia Liang (36) has a soft spot for Oakland Chinatown. As she was growing up in Danville, her family would make a pilgrimage to Oakland Chinatown every weekend to go grocery shopping, visit their favorite bakeries, and meet friends for dim sum. Liang fondly recalls dishes at Peony Seafood Restaurant like chicken feet, tripe, rice rolls with shrimp, and crispy pan-fried seafood noodles. They went to Tao Yuen Pastry for savory buns and noodles, and to Napoleon Super Bakery for pineapple buns and egg tarts. The handmade noodles at Shan Dong were always memorable, as were the honey walnut “shrimp” at Nature Vegetarian Restaurant and the duck and barbecued pork at Gum Kuo.
“Spices! 3 is a recent addition,” says Liang, who continues her family traditions, now often with friends. The Sichuan spot is now on her list of favorites, thanks to the friend who first brought her there. “We get the spicy fried chicken,” she adds.
Liang doodled as a kid and took art classes in middle school and high school, but she lost the habit for a while. She moved to New York for a job in the corporate world and eventually found herself picking up doodling again as a way to unwind. She enrolled in continuing education courses at New York’s School of Visual Arts and began connecting with other creative artists as she thought about making a career change.
Moving back to California at the beginning of the pandemic, Liang started showing her work at artist markets. In an exhibit at E14 Gallery, located at 9th Street and Broadway in Oakland, she found herself in a milieu with visual artists who have deep ties to Oakland and express their strong love for the city through their art. She followed that showing with artist markets in Oakland Chinatown, and she signed up with the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce to do live drawings for a Lunar New Year event.
Photo by Anna Mindess
“I was commissioned by the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce to reimagine Chinatown during the pandemic,” says Liang, speaking of that time when small businesses were going through such hardship. The prompt given to artists by the chamber was “How do we imagine Chinatown coming back?”
One of Liang’s Lunar New Year drawings—a structure on the corner of 10th and Harrison—now sits as a beacon on the last page of her Oakland Chinatown Coloring Book, which Liang self-published in 2023. The book pays homage to her favorite cafés and restaurants in line drawings of 16 eateries, which she surrounded by an explosion of the edible tidbits she would get at each one.
“It feels like coming full circle,” she says. “As a kid, I had all those memories, and as an adult and an artist I also have fond memories and ties to Oakland Chinatown.”
Liang has drawn large posters depicting businesses in the New York and San Francisco Chinatowns, but Oakland Chinatown is her favorite, and she dreams of landing some kind of public art commission, perhaps a big mural.
“People who live in Oakland Chinatown are proud of living near there,” says Liang. “It’s a smaller community than San Francisco Chinatown but extremely tight knit. There’s a lot of pride and love for Oakland Chinatown. That makes me happy.” ♦
Note: To find a purchase link, visit Felicia Liang’s Etsy site under “shop” at felicia-liang.com.
Anna Mindess is an award-winning journalist who writes on food, culture, and travel for numerous publications including the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Berkeleyside. Follow her on Instagram @annamindess and find her stories at annamindess.contently.com.
