![]() ![]() Her husband, Victor, who is originally from Shanghai and is also 60, said the couple, like many other immigrants, “were working so hard, and trying to assimilate that we didn’t know our collective history and experience.”īut for many locals, the museum doesn’t feel like it belongs to Chinatown. “The Asian American experience is not widely taught, so I want my grandkids and their children to know about it.” “I thought, ‘Oh, gosh a lot of this was out there without us knowing about it,” she said. Lucy Kan, 60, a museum patron and a second-generation Chinese American, said she had not been aware of the Chinese Exclusion Act until she first visited the museum. Its mission is to promote the history of the Chinese American experience and bring darker aspects of it, like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to a wider audience beyond the confines of Chinatown. The Museum of Chinese in America, its backers believe, is vital to the community even though it caters largely to visitors. Chu a common denominator in both matters that have enraged the community, battle lines are being drawn between supporters of a museum that comes with a certain cachet and those of a dim sum parlor - two opposing sides fighting over which of the institutions is more valuable, more representative of Chinatown and therefore worth saving as the neighborhood gets shorn of its identity because of gentrification. Chu is one of Chinatown’s biggest landlords and a scion of a real estate magnate from Hong Kong. ![]() Chu are both third-generation Chinese American New Yorkers, educated at Yale and Harvard, respectively. “People don’t understand why they’re angry sometimes, right? And they’re looking for a target,” said Ms. They are hoping to buy the building it rents on Centre Street, a step that would help attract donors to the museum, which survived a fire last year that damaged its archives. They were not involved in talks with the city over the jail plan, but they said the museum could not afford to turn down the money. Chu and Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum’s president, who say that they are being scapegoated for grievances that are unconnected to them. The protests over the award to the museum led a number of artists to show solidarity by removing their work from the latest exhibits, to the disappointment of Mr. In comparison, the Tenement Museum, a small museum that is nearby on the Lower East Side, had 250,000. ![]() The museum drew 50,000 visitors a year before the pandemic. Tan said, has “ripped the soul out of Chinatown.” Jing Fong employed more than 100 workers, and about 10,000 people ate there every week. It received a big boost when the city awarded the institution $35 million out of $50 million distributed to local community projects in Chinatown in return for the expansion of a jail there.īut the generous award has placed the museum at the center of a greater dispute over gentrification and inequality, a kind of class warfare between those of Chinese descent who have established themselves economically and socially over generations and newer working-class immigrants like Ms. The invectives were aimed at a museum that has struggled to survive since it was founded in 1980 to preserve and exhibit the history of Chinese Americans. A man nearby shouted into a megaphone, alternating between English and Cantonese: “They think that because they speak better English, that they graduated from Ivy League schools, that they are better than us.” “Bloodsuckers! Sellout!” she yelled recently, using a handkerchief to dab sweat from her face as the sun beat down. Twice a week, Li Zhen Tan, a former dim sum server, plants herself in front of the Museum of Chinese in America in Chinatown and joins the fervent chants of dozens of others like her who have congregated there. ![]()
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