How New York’s Museum of Chinese in America tells ‘the history of people excluded’
When fire ravaged the Chinatown building containing the museum archives in January, it was feared the stories they told would be lost forever
Standing on the corner of Bayard and Mulberry streets in New York’s Chinatown on March 8, Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of Chinese in America, and Yue Ma, Moca’s director of collections and research, are dressed head to toe in white Tyvek hazmat suits, with N95 masks covering their faces.
The museum itself was left unscathed, four blocks away, on Centre Street, in a modern space designed by Chinese-American architect Maya Lin. But shock ripped through the neighbourhood and social media as initial reports suggested that Moca’s archives – more than 85,000 historic artefacts and documents stored at 70 Mulberry Street, the museum’s previous home – had been destroyed.
The collection included thousands of photographs, out-of-print Chinese-American newspapers and signage from old stores. There were artefacts from laundries, sweatshops and restaurants, as well as “paper son” documents of Chinese men who had evaded the United States’ Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by posing as relatives of American citizens.