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.
“This isn’t only about Asian art,” says Yao Maasbach. “We are part of the American narrative.”
Charlie Lai and Jack Tchen were young men in the 1970s, members of a new generation of Chinese-Americans fluent in English and educated at prestigious universities, often on scholarships. Lai was born in Hong Kong and immigrated with his family to New York in the late 60s, when he was nine years old. Tchen was American-born Chinese by way of Madison, Wisconsin.