Chinese-American Museums

[GeneChing]

Chinese-American museums in US grow in number as community gains in prominence – but how to tell those stories?
Institutions grappling with how best to tell the story of Chinese in the United States, especially amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington
‘We realised there was no such museum in DC, this land of museums,’ says executive director of new opening in US capital
Mark Magnier
Published: 3:01am, 8 Jan, 2020

The new Chinese American Museum in Washington is having soft openings before it formally launches. Photo: Chinese American Museum

A gravestone. Massive rocks. A mouldy qipao that has been sitting in an attic for 80 years.
Among the challenges for America’s hundred or so private museums devoted to showcasing Chinese culture is how to turn down beloved donations from the public.
This is just one of the hurdles Chinese-American museums face as they increase in number and prominence in line with the community.
Even as the soon-to-officially-open Chinese American Museum in Washington scrambles for artefacts to fill out its collection, established museums routinely turn away old postcards, souvenirs from some recent holiday in China or dusty statues of obscure deities – without hurting prospective donors’ feelings.

[QUOTE]
Museum of Chinese in America

@mocanyc
Herbalist calendarused by Arthur M. Tom Sr. in 1940. Courtesy of Chinese American Museum of Northern California at Marysville, CA.

Come and see it at our new Gathering exhibit!

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“Someone’s garbage is someone else’s treasure,” said Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, or MOCA, the nation’s largest Chinese-American museum, with some 85,000 artefacts.
It traces its roots to the 1970s, and two “dumpster diver” founders who started grabbing valuable heirlooms that were being tossed out by Chinatown residents.
The Chinese American Museum of Chicago has been offered fake antiques, unsuitable art, and a bulky Chinese wedding bed that had to be picked up within hours before its owner moved to Florida.
Recently, it was offered three eight-foot-tall decorative limestone Taihu stones from Jiangsu province that weighed 2,000 pounds (900kg) each. It ultimately accepted one and politely referred the others to a nearby art museum. “I don’t know if he took them,” said Soo Lon Moy, the museum’s executive director.

It’s very import for these museums not to become just victim museums. It’s also about belonging and their contribution to America
Selma Holo, expert on ethnic museology

San Francisco’s Chinese Historical Society of America has turned away qipao, traditional Chinese dresses, that aren’t museum-quality and photos taken during recent Chinese vacations. “That would be considered outside the scope of our collections,” Pam Wong, the museum’s deputy director, said diplomatically.
Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum regularly declines World War II war memorabilia and “Asian souvenirs purchased by Caucasians”.
This can be tricky, added collection manager Robert Fisher: “You don’t want to offend a potential financial donor.”
Among MOCA’s more memorable rejections was a chipped tombstone, cumbersome to store and bad feng shui for superstitious visitors. The museum pivoted, asking its owner for an oral history while politely declining the stone itself. Other museums write a collection policy to make decisions appear more objective.
But there are also times when seemingly worthless items are warmly welcomed, including old Chinese menus detailing the concoctions Chinese chefs crafted for American taste buds. These range from egg foo yong and orange chicken to fortune cookies, crab rangoon and General Tso’s chicken.
“All those moo goo gai pan menus, dishes that no Chinese from the Northeast would ever recognise – this captures the story of such a large portion of early Chinese immigrants,” said Yao Maasbach.
Because migration and ethnic politics are so fundamental to American society, museums often mark a community’s rising social status, affluence, political clout and struggle for acceptance, while papering over internal divisions.
Recent popular Chinese-American exhibition subjects include the 1882 Exclusion Act that effectively barred Chinese immigration for eight decades; the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad, which was largely built with Chinese labour; and past examples of discrimination.
A racist 1886 cartoon in the Chicago museum collection, for example, promotes the “George Dee Magic Washer”; makers of the appliance claimed it would replace, and therefore allow America to deport, Chinese laundry workers.
“Yes, you want to make people aware of the Exclusion Act. But it’s very import for these museums not to become just victim museums,” said Selma Holo, executive director of museums at the University of Southern California and an expert on ethnic museology. “There’s pain, suffering, victimhood. But it’s also about belonging and their contribution to America.”
[/QUOTE] continued next post

[GeneChing]

Continued from previous post

An image from the Chinese Historical Society of America’s new permanent exhibition, which looks at the history of the Chinese in America. Photo: Chinese Historical Society of America

Chinese-American museums have proliferated in line with the community’s growing stature. Of the 29 Chinese-American museums and cultural organisations profiled in “Gathering”, an exhibit at MOCA celebrating Chinese in America, nearly 40 per cent opened after 2002.
This has sparked a cooperative push. In late September, representatives from nine prominent Chinese-American museums and cultural centres met in San Francisco to discuss a more collective approach after years of limited exhibit sharing.
“It’s been, with a fair amount of accuracy, zero,” said Hoyt Zia, recent past president of the Chinese Historical Society of America’s museum and organiser of the September meeting. “We should’ve been doing this 20 years ago. In unity there is strength.”
But widespread sharing could take a while among local museums protective of their turf and collections – including a few nearly a century old. “You can’t get too far ahead of yourself,” said Zia.
This comes as Chinese-Americans grapple with how best to tell their story amid growing prominence, in good ways and bad.
Rising economic, political and military tensions between Beijing and Washington have spilled over, leading to mounting suspicion of Americans who look Chinese, even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation ramps up investigations of scientists and students of Chinese descent.
Most museums are quick to stress their American roots and lack of ties with, or funding from, Beijing as Confucius Institutes come under suspicion as vehicles for espionage.
“How do you cover the Chinese revolution? How do you cover the situation in Hong Kong?” said David Uy, executive director at the new Washington museum. “We’re a museum of Americans. So naturally we assume we have a pro-democracy point of view. But we also have a pro-China view, although not necessarily pro-Chinese government.”
Chinese-American museums also find themselves navigating deep political fissures involving the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Uygurs and Tibetans. “These are confusing times, complex political and social times for Chinese-Americans,” Uy added.
Museum directors pushing for greater Chinese-American recognition have debated whether to lobby for a new Chinese-American Smithsonian museum, a permanent display at the Smithsonian’s American history museum, or settle for better coordination among existing private museums, said Ted Gong, executive director of the 1882 Project Foundation, the name of which references the Exclusion Act. Gong is also a partner in the new private Washington museum.
America has some 33,000 museums, around 60 per cent of the global total. Most are privately managed. But the federal government’s Smithsonian Institution runs 19 museums, including those devoted to American-Indian and African-American heritage, that are among the nation’s most prestigious.
Congress has resisted funding new “hyphenated American” Smithsonian museums – Korean-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans – fearful of opening a floodgate.
“If you had a Chinese-American museum, there would have to be a Japanese-American museum” and numerous others, said Holo. “And pretty soon the [National] Mall is drowned.”
The 146-acre (59-hectare) National Mall is an area of Washington flanked by the US Capitol and the White House, and features several iconic American monuments.

The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in May 1869, in what was then Utah Territory. Chinese workers were excluded from the photograph. Photo: Andrew J. Russell via Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Alternately, the Chinese-American community could push for a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, although this would require lobbying, funding and some of the same “me too” resistance.
In July, Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat from New York, introduced a bill to study funding, potential locations and artefact collection for a possible Asian-American museum in Washington, potentially part of the Smithsonian. Prominent Asian-Americans have also launched a US$25 million fundraising drive in support of the initiative.
While some argue that joining with other Asian-Americans enhances their clout – Chinese-Americans comprise some 1.5 per cent of the US population while another 19 Asian-American groups comprise 4.1 per cent – others believe it is an artificial construct.
Finding a unifying theme is difficult, and combining detracts from efforts to address unique Chinese-American concerns, they say.
“China is not Japan, Japan is not Korea, Korea is not Thailand,” said Holo. “There are enmities and friendships, racism. To be lumped into an Asian-American museum, I’d be real careful.”
Yao Maasbach believes it is too early to create a national Asian-American or even a Chinese-American museum in Washington, favouring instead more organic museums rooted in local Chinatowns.
Pei Ming, a 23-year-old Columbia University pre-med student from Henan province, wandered through MOCA’s “Gathering” exhibition on a recent rainy afternoon, hoping to better understand the Chinese-American experience.
Most mainlanders have little knowledge or even interest in Chinese-American history given China’s long history of cultural insularity, she said.
“From the Chinese-American perspective, I think they’re sometimes confused about their identity, especially because the US is so multicultural,” Pei said.
Efforts among Chinese-American museums, historical societies, associations, temples and foundations at sharing exhibits come as technology sparks a broader debate over the importance of artefacts, given the wider reach of digital collections.
But even these require significant investment. MOCA, which boasts 35,000 digital renditions of Chinese-American items, the world’s largest collection, estimates that a proper website showcasing its collection will cost US$500,000.
The new Washington museum seeks a balance. It has spent heavily on one floor of multimedia exhibits, including video testimonials and a digital timeline of Chinese in America, while relying on photographs and soliciting “legally and ethically obtained artefacts” for other parts of the museum.
Started with funding from the family foundation of Philip Qiu, a wealthy entrepreneur based in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, the new museum plans to launch officially later this year after soft openings featured exhibits on the contribution of Chinese women and a history of Jews in China.
“We realised there was no such museum in DC, this land of museums. It’s an under-represented story,” said Uy.
Starting a Chinese-American museum these days has its challenges.
“We’re working so hard to be neutral, non-political, non-geopolitical. It’s hard because history is unfolding before our eyes,” said Uy. “But even if we were in a different time, this story would still be relevant.”
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Mark Magnier
Mark Magnier is a US correspondent based in Washington. Before joining the Post, he worked for the Wall Street Journal in China and for the Los Angeles Times in India, China and Japan. He’s covered the Chinese economy, China and India’s explosive rise and conflicts in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I didn’t realize there were so many of these. I’ve been to the one in San Diego.

[GeneChing]

An ad for this just popped up on one of my feeds

GOLD MOUNTAIN: CHINESE CALIFORNIAN STORIES
All-new signature exhibition opening January 26, 2020

Discover the history and contributions of Chinese Americans to California from the Gold Rush to the present day in Gold Mountain: Chinese California Stories.

This all-new signature exhibition explores how Chinese immigrants came to California in search of a better life, then stayed and helped to build the modern state. In so doing over the last 150 years, they triumphed over racism and other obstacles with ingenuity and perseverance.

In their stories, visitors will see the contributions that Californians of Chinese descent have made to our states economy, governance, and culture, and recognize the strength that comes from the states rich diversity.

I hope to make it over for this but I’m already scheduled for JAN 26. It’s the day after CNY.

THREADS
Chinese-American Museums
Bruce Lee Museums and Gallery Exhibits

[GeneChing]

Museum of Chinese in America burns

85,000 Pieces From Beloved Chinatown Museum Likely Destroyed in Fire
The president of the Museum of Chinese in America said that she was “just distraught” and that the collection was one of a kind.

Much of the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America may have been ruined after a fire broke out at a building in Chinatown where its acquisitions were stored. Credit…Lloyd Mitchell

By Annie Correal
Jan. 24, 2020

The 85,000 items, some dating to the 19th century, told the rich story of the Chinese migration to the United States: textiles, restaurant menus, handwritten letters, tickets for ship’s passage.

All of them could now be destroyed.

Officials at the Museum of Chinese in America said Friday evening that thousands of historic and artistic items it had carefully collected and curated over decades were most likely lost after a fire tore through a Chinatown building where most of its acquisitions were stored.

“One hundred percent of the museum’s collection, other than what is on view,” said Nancy Yao Maasbach, the president of the museum. She said that the collection was one of a kind and that she was “just distraught” after receiving the news.

The fire broke out Thursday night at 70 Mulberry Street, in a former school that educated generations of immigrants before becoming a cherished cultural landmark in the neighborhood. In addition to the museum’s storage, the building housed a senior center, the Chen Dance Center and a number of community groups.

The Museum of Chinese in America opened in its current location nearby on Centre Street, in a building designed by Maya Lin, in 2009. It had started nearly three decades before as the Chinatown History Project, and grew over time from a local project to a national one. Among the thousands of items in the collection believed to be lost is a document from 1883 about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Other irreplaceable pieces included the carefully written letters of bachelors working in the United States to send money home “even though they didn’t live a full life because of discrimination,” said Ms. Maasbach; traditional wedding dresses from the early 1900s known as cheongsam; items brought by emigrants in suitcases that in some instances were later left anonymously outside the museum’s front door; and photographs from Chinatown in the 1980s.

“We keep replaying everything that’s there,” Ms. Maasbach said.

Ms. Maasbach said that she had been told by those coordinating the emergency response that the roof and part of the upper floors had collapsed in the building, which was determined to be structurally unsound.

No one will be able to enter and retrieve items for at least three weeks, she said she was told. The items, which are believed to have been soaked by water, are likely to be irreparably damaged by then, she said.

Ava Chin, a writer who teaches at the City University of New York College of Staten Island, called the likely loss of the archive, where part of her family’s history is stored, “absolutely devastating for the community and families like my own.”

Her voice cracking, she said, “Let me tell you what we lost: The ticket for our family’s passage to America, from 1914, my grandfather’s oral history, my great-grandfather’s ID papers.”

“It is the only — the single most important — repository of New York’s Chinese community,” she said, noting that the museum, once a grass-roots effort, had assembled a history of a community that “larger institutions had tended to ignore.”

A spokesman for the city Buildings Department, Andrew Rudansky, said its inspectors had determined there was “significant interior fire damage” to the building and deemed it was not safe to occupy. The department did not issue a timeline for rescinding the order.

Nine firefighters and a 59-year-old man were injured in the blaze. The man was rescued from the fifth floor of the building and was reported to be in serious but stable condition, fire officials said. The firefighters sustained minor injuries.

The man told firefighters that no other people were inside, Thomas Richardson, the deputy chief of operations of the New York Fire Department, said during a news conference early Friday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

As firefighters battling the fire sprayed the building with fire hoses, museum officials called in conservators and found freezer space, hoping they could salvage soaked items, according to Ms. Maasbach. But after receiving word that they would not be able to enter the building for weeks, hopes of saving the collection were dashed.

About 35,000 items in the collection had been digitized and those files were backed up, she said. On Friday evening, as water poured from the building, museum officials braced themselves to notify families who had donated items, artists and others of the destruction.

“People will be crushed,” Ms. Maasbach said.

Earlier on Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the building, which the city owns, and described it on Twitter as a “pillar” of the community.

[QUOTE][QUOTE]Mayor Bill de Blasio

@NYCMayor
· Jan 23, 2020
Firefighters are battling a 3-alarm fire in a City-owned building in Chinatown, just across from Columbus Park.

The @FDNY is working hard to knock down the blaze on upper floors — please avoid the area as they work to bring it under control. https://twitter.com/FDNY/status/1220537913336909826 …

FDNY

@FDNY
FDNY members continue to operate on scene of a 3-alarm fire at 70 Mulberry St. in Manhattan.

Mayor Bill de Blasio

@NYCMayor
This building is home to many local non profits and a senior center that serves as a pillar to the Chinatown community.

I know the neighborhood is in shock tonight. We’re going to help the community get through this.

138
7:23 PM - Jan 23, 2020
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55 people are talking about this[/QUOTE]
Before being turned over for use by community groups, the building housed a public elementary school, P.S. 23.

Councilwoman Margaret Chin wrote on Twitter that she went to school in the building after her family came to the country from Hong Kong.

Margaret S. Chin
@CM_MargaretChin
I attended school when I got here in 1963. It was PS23.
70 Mulberry and the community groups housed here have been a cornerstone to Chinatown. It provides workforce development, cultural programs and a senior center. We will work to make sure vital services aren’t lost. https://twitter.com/nypd5pct/status/1220567819928178688 …

[QUOTE]NYPD 5th Precinct

@NYPD5Pct
Happening Now - Active fire scene at the corner of Mulberry St and Bayard St. 3 Alarm Fire at 70 Mulberry St. Please avoid the area for emergency vehicles access. @FDNY #Chinatown

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8:58 PM - Jan 23, 2020
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See Margaret S. Chin’s other Tweets[/QUOTE]
Kent Zhang, the owner of the Bodhi Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant, across the street, watched as dozens of firefighters milled outside the debris-strewn building on Friday afternoon. They had been there through the night, said Mr. Zhang, expressing his gratitude.

He said he was more accustomed to seeing older people come and go from the building, which he said was central to the Chinatown community.

“It’s the heart, the heart,” he said.

Annie Correal is a reporter covering New York for the Metro section. Since joining The Times in 2013, she has covered breaking news and reported on immigration and social issues from homelessness to the opioid crisis. @anniecorreal[/QUOTE]
How tragic.

[GeneChing]

More on that tragic fire

[URL=“https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-we-lost-in-the-museum-of-chinese-in-america-fire?irclickid=x9BQPlwW%3AxyORV9wUx0Mo34BUknTCRw5uQ-LX40&irgwc=1&source=affiliate_impactpmx_12f6tote_desktop_Viglink%20Primary&utm_source=impact-affiliate&utm_medium=27795&utm_campaign=impact&utm_content=Online%20Tracking%20Link&utm_brand=tny”]
WHAT WE LOST IN THE MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA FIRE
By Hua Hsu
January 27, 2020

Of MOCA’s archive, only about forty thousand items had been catalogued and digitized before the fire; most of its materials will likely be unsalvageable.Photograph Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America

As the story goes, it was the late seventies, and Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai began noticing all the old junk left out on the curb in New York’s Chinatown. It was left behind by the neighborhood’s old-timers as they passed away: luggage, clothing, personal papers, mementos. Many of them had come to America for work in the first half of the twentieth century, only to never make their way back home. They never imagined themselves as part of a history here; some were in denial that you could call this new place a home at all.

Tchen, a historian, and Lai, a community organizer, had met in the early seventies at the Basement Workshop, a Chinatown hub for activists and artists. Tchen was often frustrated by how hard it was to find the documents, photographs, and letters necessary to write a history of Chinatown. It turns out that many of these materials weren’t in libraries but in dumpsters. Tchen, Lai, and others began salvaging as much stuff as they could. The New York Chinatown History Project began at 44 East Broadway in 1980. Four years later, it moved to 70 Mulberry Street, taking up the second floor of a rickety old schoolhouse. In 2009, the newly renamed Museum of Chinese in America (moca) relocated to a large, custom-designed space on Centre Street. The bulk of its collections stayed behind at the schoolhouse.

Last Thursday night, 70 Mulberry Street caught on fire, likely destroying much of the museum’s collection of some eighty-five thousand items. Besides the collection, the building, which was owned by the city, also houses a dance center, a senior citizens’ center, a vocational training office, and an athletics association. As of now, the cause of the fire remains unknown. Firefighters worked through the night to contain the damage. There were a few injuries, but nobody died. moca staffers kept a vigil, watching water pour through the building. They won’t be allowed back in for weeks, at which point most of the materials will likely be unsalvageable. Only about forty thousand items had been catalogued and digitized. Among the objects in danger of being lost: paper fans, books and magazines, photographs, printing blocks; old records, recital programs, and musical instruments; flyers announcing social services and open jobs; restaurant menus and signage; suitcases, cigarette cartons, old newspapers, immigration documents, and passports; film reels and lobby posters from legendary Chinatown theatres; irons, washboards, spool holders, and laundry tickets; wooden dolls, a plastic toy of a man being pulled in a rickshaw, opera costumes, silk jackets, embroidered slippers; a hand-painted T-shirt from a comedy troupe that only ever performed once.

As Nancy Bulalacao, who formerly worked as the museum’s director of public programs, wrote on Instagram, the heart of moca has always been its collection. The museum’s name changes and the staff turns over, the mandate evolves. Even the meaning of who is centered in the “Chinese in America” part shifts over time. These immigrants came for the railroads, or to run laundries and restaurants, and now they’re engineers. Now they’re from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and not the mainland. Now they’re from Fujian. Now they’re young, middle-class college students, not old laundry workers. Now they settle first in Sunset Park or Flushing or Elmhurst, not Manhattan. Now to call it Chinese sounds monolithic and strange. Every new generation contributes to the collection in their own way.

Ico-curated “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a show about music and the Chinese-immigrant experience, at moca last year, and, when we were gathering materials, I was genuinely shocked at how difficult it was to locate good ephemera—family photos of recitals, old mixtapes or concert T-shirts, ticket stubs. Admittedly, I am a pack rat who, until recently, kept a folder of my family’s old phone bills from 1985. (I liked the typefaces.) But, at a time when there’s no greater social currency than a photo of you as a power-clashing twelve-year-old holding up your favorite CD, I found it odd that very few people still had those physical photographs, let alone any of the items in them. (Admittedly, I also still have my favorite jacket from when I was three.) When I asked my parents and their friends, I often heard the same answer: nothing seemed worth keeping. Perhaps, as I wrote in a piece last August, it was simply a part of the immigrant mentality. You might save soap by fusing together old bars, or sheath your remote control in plastic to protect it from dust and wear. But you view yourself as marginal, and self-archiving can feel like a waste of time, or a bit too hubristic.

All that remains of moca’s archive might be what is currently on premises at the museum. Somewhat ironically, its current show, “Gathering: Collecting and Documenting Chinese American History,” is about the very nature of preservation and collection. The curators Herb Tam and Andrew Rebatta, assisted by Sojin Kim and David Lei, asked Chinese historical societies and museums across the country to lend them a single item from their respective collections. Some of these artifacts vibrate more than others. There’s an old clothing iron, a horseshoe modified by Chinese workers to help their horses trudge through mud, a calendar from a local herbalist. And there are event calendars and commemorative T-shirts of more recent vintage. As a whole, one gets a sense of the collective spirit uniting these organizations. For some, it’s about the mystical bonds of history. For others, in far-away locales, it’s just about having a space for people to come together.

“Gathering” hints at some of the challenges of keeping historically minded organizations viable at a time when people seem uninterested in the past. We live in a moment when minimalism is a virtue, when it’s become a mantra to keep around only things that, in the words of the tidying guru Marie Kondo, “spark joy.” The past is joy, but it also consists of struggle, confusion, moments that evade easy emotional categorization. Places like moca stand a bit outside of the rhythms and currents of our present, in order to point at unfollowed paths of possibility. American life, the Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong remarked, is about looking forward. He visited the United States in the forties and was especially bemused by Superman, the human embodiment of possibility, hurtling ever forward. Americans believed in superheroes, but not in ghosts. Ghosts draw you into the past. They are history.

The fire comes at a particularly odd time for moca. It moved from Mulberry to its current location, which was designed by the architect Maya Lin, in 2009. Over the past decade, institutions and nonprofit spaces throughout New York have felt the pinch of development and rising rents, and moca, which leases its current location, is no exception. For decades, those who lived outside of Chinatown regarded it as an exotic enclave, and it was largely left alone. It certainly didn’t represent opportunity. Outside of the Financial District, few neighborhoods were hit as hard by 9/11 than Chinatown.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

Continued from previous post

Things change. The cafeteria that once sold impossibly cheap Chinese food becomes an upscale diner. Chinatown is transforming, occasionally at the hands of people with roots in the neighborhood, and the museum has been a part of debates about who is benefitting. In October, city officials went against local sentiment and moved forward with plans for a new jail in Chinatown. To soften the blow, the city, often seen as a half-hearted supporter of Chinatown arts and culture, pledged to improve nearby housing developments and parks. moca would receive a substantial grant toward finding a permanent home.

The museum’s leadership and board of directors were heavily criticized for their coöperation with these efforts, even if they were meant to insure the institution’s survival. In the absence of a meaningful response, rumor and innuendo filled the void. There was one story circulating that the new jail would include a moca performance space. It was inevitable that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to close Rikers Island would result in the construction of smaller jails throughout the city. (Perhaps it was inevitable, too, that they would see a museum, parks, and public housing as opportunities for good P.R.) Many were disappointed by moca’s willingness to enter into conversations with the Mayor, let alone extract something material. moca was accused of straying from its community roots. Though there’s been an outpouring of support in the wake of the fire, those concerns will probably resurface quite soon.

Last Thursday night, a fire at 70 Mulberry Street, moca’s former location, likely destroyed much of the museum’s collection of some eighty-five thousand items.Photograph by Robert Bumsted / AP

With more scrutiny on the systems of largesse that keep arts and cultural institutions afloat, the controversy around moca seemed a way of localizing similar movements against powerful donors, such as Warren Kanders, the former Whitney Museum board member who was perceived to be profiting from the Trump Administration’s border policy, and the Sackler family, who converted pharmaceutical profits into art-world capital, predominantly at the Guggenheim. Of course, one imagines that those mainstream institutions, with their global brands, innate prestige, and non-stop donor cultivation, will survive.

Independent of these current controversies, I’ve sometimes wondered if spaces like moca will remain vibrant in a future where notions of community grow more abstract. Similar questions have encircled El Museo Del Barrio, another cultural institution with modest roots. moca is the kind of place without a preëxisting base of Chinese-American donors—they are the ones who often need the museum to see themselves as such in the first place. The museum’s challenge has always been the eclecticism of its core audience; moca promotes awareness around traditions and lineages unfamiliar to many, who may even include those who live down the street. Beyond this community-oriented or educational function, its curators must also participate in more sophisticated, art-and-museum-world conversations around, say, representation or patronage. The controversy around the jails has called into question the purpose of moca itself—whether its survival is worth going against the will of some of its neighbors and constituencies; whether it can still abide by its hyper-local, dumpster-diving roots at a time of constant global exchange; and who such a museum is for in the first place.

When we did our music show, I would often hear about people who walked in off the street, or e-mailed from afar, wondering why we had left something out. What about our band? Why didn’t you include this party? I loved these responses. Our show wasn’t comprehensive; it couldn’t be. But, at a basic level, it was about encouraging people to see themselves in a museum space, to see themselves as characters in a larger story, and it wasn’t the final word.

moca did that for me, too. I once gave a lecture and slide-show presentation on my own clutter. I had a book party there, and, in that glorious winter of 2012, there were all those screenings of N.B.A. games starring Jeremy Lin, full of youngsters who’d only ever been to the museum for a school trip and older folks drawn by the free refreshments. Of course, there have also been shows about the railroads, Chinese food, fashion designers—the stuff that makes Chinese people visible to others. But I’ve also gone there to learn about the short, transfixing history of the Chinese typewriter, and to marvel at the paper boats constructed by the undocumented immigrants who were kept in detention after their cargo ship ran aground in Queens, in 1993—an echo of the poetry that immigrants carved on the walls of Angel Island, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

“When I open a box of these materials, pick up an object and examine, I can almost visualize the history behind it,” Yue Ma, the director of collections at moca remarked, in 2014. Ma and Tam co-curated “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving,” a show that saw them pull items from their vast collection and place them in unlikely conversations. The most mesmerizing part of “Waves of Identity” involved the personal effects of Shuck Wing Chin, one of the many early-twentieth-century immigrant laborers who lived alone, as a bachelor, in Chinatown’s cramped apartment buildings. He had come to the United States in his twenties and served in the Air Force during the Second World War. After that, he lived on Mott Street for about forty years, working in restaurants. The contents of his apartment were salvaged by moca, and now they were on display as part of this show. You couldn’t help but wonder who he was—the scale of his imagination, what he would think of those of us who followed, trying to convert his life into a narrative. How would you even explain this museum to him?

Around this time, my friend Herb took me to the archive warehouse on Mulberry. I met him on a busy corner, clueless as to where it was. He pointed at the sky, and I saw the fading sign of moca. The door closed behind us, and we were sealed in the past. Compared to Lin’s modern museum, full of aesthetic gestures and seamless surfaces, the old building on Mulberry felt airy and bright, neglected yet well-loved. We weren’t looking for anything in particular. It was the thrill one feels rummaging through second-hand clothes or digging through a stack of old records: underneath a layer of dust, the possibility of treasure. We climbed on top of boxes to get at other boxes, we un-jigsawed things that the archivists had carefully stowed away for latter-day explorers. There were hand-painted signs that weren’t created as art, suitcases that were only meant for a one-way passage across the ocean, tiny mementos that outlived the reasons for their aura. It was all so worthless, yet so priceless.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.”
It’s always such a loss when a museum falls.

[GeneChing]

Bok Kai Temple Museum

LOCAL
New museum opening in one of Northern California’s oldest Chinese temples
The Bok Kai Temple in Marysville has centuries of Chinese history on display.
Author: Eric Escalante
Published: 1:52 PM PST February 19, 2020
Updated: 8:20 PM PST February 19, 2020

MARYSVILLE, Calif. One of the oldest operating Chinese temples in Northern California is opening a museum highlighting nearly 200 years of Chinese history.

The Bok Kai Temple Museum in Marysville will carry a display of 300 artifacts that were previously hidden away in storage, including what is believed to be the oldest Chinese dragon to have ever come to the United States.

To me, if nobody saves those pieces of history, they would be in boxes and they would rot, and I had a really big problem with my culture and history rotting in boxes, Heather Young, project manager for the museum, said.

Young has spent more than four years on the project, aiming to share centuries of Chinese history and stories in a city once known as the third largest Chinese population in California. While the population was once booming, she says the community started to dwindle around the 1950s and 60s, leaving the Chinese community scarce.

The Bok Kai Temple is one of the oldest operating Chinese temples in Northern California, with its origin stretching back to the 1850s before it was rebuilt in 1880. It was renovated more than a decade ago, and it has been carrying centuries of artifacts that had been stored away in boxes.

Those artifacts were a big reason why Young took the project on.

I didnt like the fact that all of those peoples sacrifices and all of those stories and all of those moments in history would be lost if no one actually put them on display and told people about it, Young said.

Four years ago, Young started a Kickstarter campaign to turn two rooms of the historic temple into a museum, and she ended up with double the amount she originally asked for from people. She even got help through private donations and a state grant to bring the project to life. Graduate students from San Jose State University were called to help the museum catalog and identify the hundreds of artifacts that had been brought to the temple over the years.

The museum has displays of hand-carved sedan chairs, old photographs, opium pipes, and small shoes for foot binding. When you explore the museum, it wouldn’t be unusual to find a hat on display and later, find a photo with the exact same hat from another time period.

For a while there, I wasnt quite sure if I opened Pandoras box or not," Young said. “I wasnt quite sure if doing this project was a smart idea because it was just sheer massive amounts of information and massive amounts of things we needed to do in order to preserve this history.”

Years later, the efforts and fundraising paid off, and the history held in the temple is nearly ready to be put on display.

The museum is preparing for its grand opening on Friday, Feb. 21, which coincides with the 140th Bok Kai Parade in Marysville, which draws thousands of visitors to the small town every year.

The museum is free to the public, but you might need to make an appointment to visit on weekdays. Otherwise, the temple and museum is open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends.

Found article for our Chinese-American Museums thread off an article I just posted on our new Parades thread.