Photo courtesy of Anne Lowe
PublicDomainPictures.net
In the heart of New York City’s Chinatown—the
largest Chinatown in the USA, streets bustle with restaurants and chop suey
joints, vegetable markets sell snow peas and ginger, exotic pears, lichee nuts
and comquats and busy fish stalls offer seafood so bright and fresh and shiny you
can smell the sea’s brine. Chinese New Year will be celebrated in the streets
and its celebrated dining places on January 31.
Here, at 215
Centre Street, Museum
of Chinese in America presents a fascinating journey into the history and
culture of the Chinese people and their thorny relationship with America.
Through artifacts, collections of memoirs,
photographs, videos and exhibitions of art, visitors and students may study and
research the events and chronicles of the Chinese in the Western
Hemisphere.
An
introductory video disc transports us back in time to the 1600’s before Chinatown
was Chinatown and the region was home to Native
Americans who traded with the Dutch at Werpoes Hill and Center
Street; by 1626, the Dutch had purchased Manhattan
Island and small farms dotted the
area. Tanneries used the standing water in nearby swamps and provided
employment and pollution around the area that is Worth, Centre and Mulberry
Street in the late 18th century and
butcher shops occupied Mott, Pell and Bayard Street. The neighborhood was crowded, filled with the
stench of the slaughterhouses and the poverty of the poor. Free blacks and
escaped slaves moved into the area in the 1830’s, labored in the tanneries and
were active in the abolition movement. Then Irish and German immigrants arrived
in America in
the 1850’s, crowding tenements and Italians and East European Jews followed
them. Today, the area is becoming though visitors may tour the past in the Tenement
Museum at 970
Orchard Street, the St. Paul Chapel dating from
1766, that miraculously survived September 11, and the Eldridge Street Synagogue
built in 1887. Though Chinese traders and sailors brought tea and silk to our
ports in the early 1830’s, permanent Chinese residents in the neighborhood in
the 1850’s only numbered about 150.
Displays of artifacts and memoirs
illustrating the dispersion of the Chinese to the Western Hemisphere
mesmerize. The Chinese immigrated from the coastal provinces of Guangdong
and Fujian, fleeing a
deteriorating economy, floods, food shortages, government corruption and
violence. Called Collies or “Bitter Strength,” in Chinese, they came to find
their Gold Mountain.
Many arrived in San Francisco in
1849—thousands of others traveled to Peru,
Trinidad, California,
Montana and Oregon
seeking a new life in a new world. They labored in gold mines and later ten
thousand men were recruited to build the first transcontinental railway while
others washed, ironed, served food and harvested crops. The immigrants found
lives of harsh manual labor and prejudice based on race.
When the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
joined tracks at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869, the Transcontinental
Railroad transformed the West—no longer needed by the railroads the immigrants
were used as replacement labor in a depressed economy. Mob violence and discriminatory laws followed
and many Chinese fled to larger cities; their ghettoized neighborhoods becoming
known as Chinatowns. By the 1880’s, the number of
Chinese in New York was close to
one thousand—the foundation of the largest Chinatown in America.
The United
States reacted to the hostility toward the
Chinese by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which prohibited laborers
from entering the United States. Merchants were exempt under Section Six of
the act.
A current exhibition features The Lee
Family of New York Chinatown
Since 1888. Harold L. Lee and Sons, Inc. outlines the growth of a small
foreign exchange company, founded in 1888, to it’s success today as a national
insurance agency. This year is the agency’s 125th anniversary.
The Exclusion Act was finally lifted in
1943 and China,
our war-time ally, given a small immigration quota. In 1968, the quota was
increased, the population grew and today, Chinese citizens are prominent in the
arts, science, technology, medicine and politics.
Amongst the highlights in past exhibits were
Chinese American Designers such as Vera Wang, Anna Sui and Vivienne Tam and Shanghai
Glamour between 1910 and the 1940s. Shanghai
was a modern city by the 1920s with its fashion known worldwide.
Currently on display is a
more serious presentation Life in Chinatown
On and After September 11. The
display communicates the experience of Asian New Yorkers during and after the World
Trade Center
attacks through documents, images and artwork and is dedicated to those that
lost their lives.
Chinese American art historians and
students founded the museum in 1980, as the New York Chinatown History Project,
to show the “Chinese experience as part of the larger history of America” MocCA’s
mission is “to reclaim, preserve, and broaden understanding about the diverse
history of the Chinese people in the Americas.”
Happy Chinese New Year
Elise
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