Chinatown and community as a cornerstone

For Thouron Scholar Will Chan, a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics, Chinatowns have always felt like home, no matter the country. It was a Chinatown in his home of Newcastle, England where Chan got his first job at age 16. Later, in Philadelphia, Chinatown was one of the first places Chan visited after coming to Penn for graduate studies. He works as an advocate for building Asian communities as president of the Pan-Asian Graduate Student Association at Penn and the sponsorships and partnerships lead at the Ginger Arts Center, a youth-led organization in Chinatown.

Chan is giving a talk on his personal history and experiences for the Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) in the ARCH building at noon on Nov. 20 as part of the group’s “Explore. Reflect. Become. Lunch Series.”

After arriving at Penn, Chan started connecting with other Asian students at PAACH. The cultural center, he says, “serves as a safe space for a lot of community members to take a break from the things happening in the world and to find some respite for a time. But it’s also a place where, within that respite, you can organize and connect and kind of build power with other people through things like coalition and relationships.”

Before coming to Penn, Chan earned two master’s degrees, one in theoretical physics and one in mathematics. While Chan always loved physics, he says that his father pushed him to excel in math and English as a practical way to succeed in the United Kingdom. The concentration on Western schooling is “the reason why my Cantonese is so bad,” Chan says, as he prioritized education, especially math, over language and culture.

Born in Hong Kong, Chan is the son of a Scottish mother and a Chinese father, who is from Hong Kong and worked as a cook for many years. Because his mother, who died in 2016, was often sick, Chan took on roles familiar to many first-generation children, becoming the translator, facilitator, preparer of documents, and appointment-scheduler for his family.

One of seven children, he started contributing to the family finances at age 16 and continues to send money home as a graduate student. Following his university studies in 2019, Chan worked for two years as a technology consultant and founded and chaired the East Asian network at Deloitte. But all the while he would keep up with physics. The most exciting work, Chan says, was coming out of America, and the Thouron Scholars program was a way for him to get there.

Now in the third year of his doctoral program, he studies the microstates inside black holes. “Things behind the black hole horizon are very hard to detect and access. We propose a new way of trying to, at the very least, gaze into what’s happening inside there,” he says.

Chan is working on what his advisor Vijay Balasubramanian, the Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, calls “the great problem of black hole entropy.” Black holes seem to defy basic principles of physics; they act as if they have an entropy, even though the many microscopic states necessary to account for this entropy are absent in the General Relativity, which is Einstein’s classical theory of gravity.

Chan, Balasubramanian, and others are testing ideas for the origin of these microstates in quantum theories of gravity.

“This is a very deep subject in physics, really on the basics of what space and time and gravity mean,” Balasubramanian says. “A beautiful thing to think about.” 

View large image

Chan has a passion for this work, Balasubramanian says. Besides the technical abilities which are necessary to work in this area of physics, passion is what Balasubramanian looks for in students, he says, and what will sustain them through an academic career.

Chan is also both a leader and a collaborator, Balasubramanian says, organizing the community while working with others on research. “He’s a group player, which matters for morale,” Balasubramanian says. “Taking leadership when necessary, not because somebody told you but because you think it’s a good thing.”

Chan’s leadership also extends to his advocacy work. Through planning 2023’s Lunar New Year event, which was hosted by Chan alongside a coalition of undergraduate and graduate students, Penn alumni, and PAACH, he connected with the movement opposing the proposed Philadelphia 76ers stadium at Market East, which some residents say would negatively impact neighboring Chinatown.

The Ginger Arts Center came out of conversations held by Students for the Preservation of Chinatown about how to add value to the community and bridge generations, Chan says. “It focuses on art projects, archiving, preservation, storytelling, and empowering people to learn how to organize and engage in activism.”

Chan volunteers at the art and youth center, mostly concentrating on securing funding and building partnerships. He stays in the background, because Ginger Arts Center is primarily driven and run by younger students, who run the programming, write grants, and lead media and outreach efforts, he says.

“They have so much fresh knowledge and perspective,” he says. “It’s really refreshing and hopeful to be around them.”

Ten years ago, the Chinatown in Newcastle was Chan’s support network, he says. It was where he got a job and how he supported his family. When he moved to Philadelphia, Chinatown was again a supportive presence. “It was very, very important to me to have something familiar when I first moved here, especially my first time in the U.S., a new country, where I didn’t know anyone, and it holds similar sentiment for a lot of people. It’s also a livelihood for the communities that live there and the families that live above all the storefronts.”

Ten years later, Chan says he draws inspiration from Balasubramanian, who works in both physics and neuroscience. He says he hopes to continue both his research on black holes and space-time singularities, as well as his advocacy. “Finding intersections where both can be at play would be nice,” he says. “I’m still trying to learn how these two very distinct parts of my life fit together.”

Chan’s favorite Chinatown spots

Ming River Side Walk House
Usually only open for lunch, Ming River has food made in the style of the Fujian province in Southern China. 

Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House
Another one of Chan’s favorites, this restaurant is known for their hand-pulled noodle soups. 

Little Saigon Café
Run by “Uncle Sam,” a longtime organizer and Chinatown community organizer, Little Saigon Café serves Vietnamese food: pho, lemongrass skewers, and banh mi.