Handmade Heritage is a documentary series, focused on the effort to explore, honor, and preserve old-world customs passed down through family lineage in tactile ways—a simple concept with deep roots. One of my greatest regrets is not having the chance to photograph my grandmother’s hands making zongzi 粽子 in her Chinatown apartment before she became too arthritic. I’ve always looked at my grandparents as living relics and realized too late that as the first generation to immigrate to America, they were the time capsules of our family’s history, carrying ancestral traditions and anchoring cultural holidays.

In modern society, we no longer live in multi-generational units. These time-honored practices formerly passed from generation to generation have begun to fade as we move further from our countries of origin. Handmade Heritage is a small preservation of what will become the yesterdays in the stories of tomorrow.