I first photographed Chinese takeout restaurants in Philadelphia between 2008 and 2013, and returned to them in 2020, during the pandemic. As Plexiglas barriers suddenly appeared everywhere, I found myself looking again at a form of separation that had existed in many of these restaurants for decades.

Most of the restaurants I photograph are in predominantly Black, low-income neighborhoods in North and South Philadelphia, run by Chinese immigrants and their families. The architecture makes the relationship visible. A narrow customer area sits between the kitchen and the street; Plexiglas separates workers from customers, while openings in it let food, money, conversation and gestures pass back and forth. People wait, talk, run into neighbors and gather outside.

I am drawn to the arched openings cut into these barriers, even where a rectangle would do, and to what accumulates around them: plastic flowers, handwritten signs, menus, religious images, tape, scratches and repairs. As someone of Chinese heritage who lived in China for a decade, I see these thresholds as places of both proximity and separation, where different communities meet across a transparent but emphatic divide.

The work continues as a wider study of the takeout as an overlooked Philadelphia building type, combining photography with interviews, mapping and archival research, toward a book and exhibition.