Originally published in Issue No. 12
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You enter the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) on Centre Street, but that’s not its only storefront. Tucked at the back of the ground floor, and visible through glass on Lafayette Street, is a re-creation of a Chinatown shop. The combination of wood cabinetry, age-worn to a high gloss, and soft light filtering through the window into the low-slung room, the carefully arranged old jars and boxes, the juxtaposition between stillness and the energy of the neighborhood beyond—all contribute to an atmosphere that is almost holy.
As an example of adaptive reuse as a vehicle for remembering, MOCA shines. Opened in 2009, the museum, designed by Maya Lin (whose firm worked with Bialosky + Partners), occupies two floors in an office building that was once a machine repair shop. In a nod to Chinese courtyard buildings, its compressed galleries revolve around a moody central atrium, with punched openings affording intimate looks at the building’s original brick, tattooed and scarred.
But more so than the atrium, the re-created shop is MOCA’s true heart. After all, the loss of businesses like it compelled founders Jack Tchen and Charles Lai to form the New York Chinatown History Project in 1980. As Chinatown’s older generation disappeared, Tchen and Lai saw an urgent need to collect the documents, photographs, ephemera, and stories they left behind.
Storefronts are a quintessential New York typology, part pedestrian scenery, part best-kept secret; they are also increasingly homogeneous. The change that Tchen and Lai observed in the 1970s and ’80s has only accelerated in the past decade. MOCA’s own future, ironically, is precarious now too; it’s also a tenant, subject to the same pressures smudging distinctions between Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho, and Nolita. In exchange for city support for a permanent home, the museum controversially supported the opening of an expanded jail—part of New York City’s plan to replace Rikers Island—in Chinatown.
On January 23, 2020, a five-alarm fire devastated a historic schoolhouse at 70 Mulberry Street, where MOCA had been storing most of its 85,000-item collection. Though the fire spared MOCA’s floor (water damage is still being evaluated), it destroyed the building’s upper levels, which had housed community non-profits, a senior center, dance company, and athletics club. Overnight, a vital cultural hub went up in smoke. It foreshadowed the precariousness of MOCA’s project. On top of existing market forces, Chinatown faces a one-two-punch of coronavirus-related closures and the rise and resurfacing of anti-Chinese racism. Chinatowns in cities around the country face similar challenges. These problems have made the neighborhood’s usual vitality all the more obvious—and its loss all the more unacceptable.
Last spring, I visited MOCA to see “The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory, and Belonging,” an exhibition about music and identity co-curated by Hua Hsu. The exhibition—dynamic, diverse, and specific—presented a polylith of Asian American expression, sounds of Teresa Teng’s iconic ballad colliding with DJ sets from queer dance party collective Bubble_T. At the time, it set my heart pounding; I could feel each ache. The show took up little more than a single room, but the space couldn’t contain all those feelings, so specific, all in one place.
As I write this, so many lives, so much city, is at stake. Cross any threshold in Chinatown and you’ll find layers of emotion and time and work beyond it. It just so happens that beyond MOCA’s, those layers are curated. The museum, sandwiched between two storefronts, straddles public and interior, insisting on the thread between the bygone shop inside and the ones outside. It’s an echo from a song that is still playing—for now.
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Citation: Museum of Chinese in America, Maya Lin, New York City, 2009.
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Katie Okamoto is a writer based in Los Angeles.
You can find her at: http://katieokamoto.com/
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