Reopened Museum Tells Chinese-American Stories
Talisman Brolin for The New York Times
Museum of Chinese in America: Faces past and present greet visitors at the museum. More Photos >

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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: September 21, 2009
“Iron Chink” proclaims the raised words on a cast-iron sign, once mounted on a fish-processing machine. In the early 1900s in Seattle the machine had been invented to replace Chinese laborers, who presumably were constructed of weaker mettle.

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Talisman Brolin for The New York Times
Documents and artifacts in the museum’s main exhibition, “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America.” More Photos »
Now, of course, its casual slur inspires some shock. It is a companion piece to another object, a cap-gun toy from the 1880s, when the “Chinese Question” (as objections to Chinese immigration was called) turned violent: pull the trigger, and a suited gentleman kicks a braided Chinese man in the rear, setting off the miniature explosion.

As you walk through the Museum of Chinese in America, which is reopening in Chinatown on Tuesday in a warm and inviting new space designed by Maya Lin, you can’t see these objects and not be aware of the kinds of challenges these immigrants once faced. Such artifacts also reflect the expanded ambitions of the museum itself: it began as a community institution almost 30 years ago, dedicated to preserving and commemorating the history of Chinatown, but with this $8.1 million transformation it now has a 14,000-square-foot space and national ambitions.

Its goal is to explore the experience of Chinese immigration and the evolution of Chinese communities in the United States, to account for a people’s struggles and triumphs and honor their artistic achievements. One of its galleries is now showing works of four Chinese-American artists.

With these ambitions the institution is joining an ever-lengthening roster of American museums of identity. All of them — whether they deal with Latino-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Nordic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans or African-Americans — are celebrations of hyphenated existence.

And the strange thing is how similar the arcs of their stories are: they recount how after a long period of suffering, prejudice and hatred, a group has carved a distinctive place in the history of the United States, its once scorned identity now a source of strength. Many of these museums also serve as anchors for the community and as educational centers, recounting political morality tales and honoring a shared history. That is certainly the case here as well.

Ms. Lin designed the institution’s main exhibition space to surround a bare-bricked, sky-lighted central area between the two connected buildings that constitute the museum. The central atrium, with a staircase leading down to a floor of offices and classrooms, invokes both a traditional Chinese courtyard and a rough-edged shared urban habitat that recalls yards or alleys over which neighbors shared stories, sometimes leaning out of windows.

The main gallery rooms even have windows looking out over the bricked space, only here each window also functions as a screen on which videos and photographs are projected as autobiographical histories are recounted. The galleries (with exhibition design by Matter Architectural Practice and mgmt. design) are intimate and make it seem as if you were passing through the rooms of a modest home. They lead chronologically from the 19th-century history of China’s encounters with the West to lives of contemporary Chinese-Americans told on a wall of video screens.

This core exhibition, “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America,” was created by the historian John Kuo Wei Tchen, a co-founder of the museum, along with Cynthia Ai-fen Lee. It depends less on artifacts like the cap gun or the display of irons used by once-familiar Chinese laundry establishments than on the arc of the narrative.

One side of some galleries tells of struggle and hardship, showing images of the riots that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, in which unskilled Chinese immigrants were barred. Also on display are the crib sheets an aspiring immigrant once studied to convince officials at Angel Island (the San Francisco counterpart to Ellis Island) that he was more than a “paper son” whose false documents affirmed a connection to someone already in America.

The most fascinating galleries are compressed displays of how the image of Chinese-Americans was shaped into stereotypes in early 20th-century culture, ranging from Fu Manchu’s villainy to chop suey’s homogenized exoticism. The position of Chinese-Americans became still more complicated when China was an ally during World War II, a Communist enemy in the 1950s and a warily watched trading partner and political rival in the 1980s and ’90s.

The other side of the main galleries contains illuminated panels with brief biographies of individuals who transcended all these obstacles. There is Dr. Faith Sai So Leong (born 1880), for example, who became the first female Chinese dentist in America; Du Lee (born 1879), who organized the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in 1915 “to combat anti-Chinese sentiments”; and Yan Phou Lee (born 1861), who became the first Chinese student elected to Phi Beta Kappa and gave the commencement address when he graduated from Yale in 1887. And, of course, more contemporary Chinese-Americans are here as well, including Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the architect I. M. Pei and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

But despite the museum’s considerable achievement it also harbors a tension that reveals some of the problems with the identity archetype. Like some other identity museums celebrating ethnic groups and communities, this one can too easily slip into the “we,” making it seem as if it were an internal account rather than a public statement. Each gallery includes a poem by Mr. Tchen and a narrative highlighting identity issues.

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More Arts News“Years of floods and droughts push our sons and fathers to leave ancient homes,” we are told of the 19th-century emigrations. “We find work and opportunity, but we also find many enslaved and dispossessed,” we read. “Writers like Jack London call us ‘heathens’ and say we can never become real Americans,” another display says.

And as a kind of haunting theme there is the question: “So are ‘we’ to be included in their sacred ‘We the People’? Or not?”

This approach tends to accent the hardened formula of the identity narrative (and overshadows the museum’s ability to explore more fully the nature of Chinese culture and immigration). Typically, in this account, triumph is reserved for the very end, with the 1960s as a turning point: the civil-rights movement is hailed for weakening the hold of prejudice and loosening the fetters of xenophobia. It is as if identity itself becomes the source of salvation. It may have begun as the instigation for oppression but it ends as a force for liberation. One gallery here contains posters and publications from that era that emphasizes these themes.

There is no question that the ’60s political movements had an effect on the status of all minorities; the identity narrative itself was shaped in that era. But aspects of this exhibition, particularly autobiographical statements that can be read, listened to or watched, reveal that model’s limits.

While the actual texts of some of these accounts are constructed from historical information by contemporary Chinese-American writers, including David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen and Ha Jin, the nuances they introduce are important. A 19th-century laborer, Ah Quin, speaks of working in Alaska as a cook for miners, sending home $30 every few months. Another 19th-century figure, Wong Chin Foo, makes it clear just how old certain political movements are: “When the Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 with even more restrictions on the Chinese here, I helped form ‘The Chinese Equal Rights League.’ Through our efforts, we managed to persuade some congressmen to consider our proposals to grant us the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

And later in the exhibition there are brief written accounts by more recent immigrants, like Sam Wong, whose wandering first took him to Vietnam and Cambodia before “the U.S. welcomed me.”

In these voices, and others, we can hear the mixture of prospects and obstacles that Chinese immigrants encountered. This must have been true even in the worst of times: Chinese laborers sought to come here even after it was clear that nothing like paradise was in store. Many must have recognized degrees of restriction and opportunity and risked their lives to minimize one and maximize the other.

This is an aspect of the history that was once emphasized in older stories of American immigration, demonstrating how opportunities trumped hardships and possibility triumphed over prejudice. There is no point in returning to that model’s glossy idealism, which too easily elided over injustices and failings.

But the first-person stories here suggest that the dominant identity model has its own form of exaggeration, heightening trauma and minimizing promise. The hope is that over time this will be amended (and not just in this museum) with a fuller understanding of both sides of a hyphenated identity.