Museum of Chinese in America — Attraction in New York

Wow what a gem! I’m lucky and grateful to have squeezed MOCA into my NYC visit hours before departure. It was well worth going of the way from where I was staying on the Upper East Side.

I’m Asian-American and felt an invigorated sense of my cultural identity by spending even a little time here. I’d also add that regardless of your cultural background, if you are affected or influenced by our current state of immigration laws, you owe it to yourself to visit MOCA, since these laws were first passed to exclude Chinese.

(Full disclosure, I was visiting a friend who works at MOCA and I wasn’t expecting to tour it or write this review. I’m not really a “museum person” and I was initially expecting to just say hi and hang out elsewhere. I felt compelled to write this review because I had such a remarkable experience)

I took a briskly-paced but very engaged tour of the whole museum. Initially, I was expecting just some artifacts and interesting stories––the standard museum fare––and got much more.

MOCA packs a lot of meaningful history into a small, yet remarkably designed footprint. The exhibit contextualizes stories, names, inventions, artifacts, and developments within the larger timeline of US history, which gives a much clearer sense of the immigrant story. (I was lucky to have stumbled into an Asian American History class in college, which was impactful but didn’t juxtapose these histories as strikingly.)

Some of the particularly striking topics explored were exclusion laws, immigration hardships, Chinese labor as a substitute for slave labor, typecasting of Asians in media and film, pitting marginalized Asian groups against each other, Chinese biochemistry as an early treatment for addiction, and Chinese medicine’s surprising connection to Tupac Shakur.

One surprising and remarkable design aspect of MOCA was learning that the border artwork of captions in the medicine gallery actually doubled as lines that connected to their respective artwork. (My written description doesn’t really do it justice) I’m sure this was painstakingly done and it gave me a deeper appreciation of the work invested into making this a compact yet impactful experience.

The experience gave me a deeper appreciation of what Chinese and Asians have had to struggle against and overcome in America, as well as a richer personal understanding and connectedness of my Asian-American identity within that larger narrative.

I only spent 30-40 minutes in the museum, my friend narrating a constant stream of information and insight about the exhibition. This made a big difference in my experience, so I’d highly recommend guided tours as there is a lot of reading, which may take away from the full experience if you’re not the reader type. I’d personally still go back for an unguided hour or two in my next visit, and I kind of wish I had my 20 minutes in the Guggenheim (and 20 minutes in line) back for MOCA instead.

Definitely check out Chinatown’s eateries afterward, too. You’ll see the city in a...

I don't see any reason to not come to this fantastically curated, wonderfully informative, and positively enlightening museum. The history of Chinese Americans, in my honest opinion, is a history of suffering that plenty have chosen to push into oblivion. This museum is a stand to highlight the injustices and inform the public about the plight that so many, some just outside of the museum, had to go through. It starts with immigration -- why immigrate? What happened upon immigration? It shows the Chinatowns that formed in America, explaining the reasoning, the discrimination that the Chinese upon immediately faced.

It continues from there, cruising through different time periods in America, showcasing it from the Chinese perspective. It displays the life, the livelihoods that many were forced into due to the racism faced. One particular memorable display was the actual iron that the Chinese had to lift -- eight pounds of solid metal -- every single day to make enough of a living to scrape by. There's also other stuff, plenty I wasn't even aware of. They have playbills featuring Chinese, they have a little display on "yellowface", which is the Chinese counterpart to blackface. They also have a whole mini exhibit on the Chinese typewriter and the backlash it faced as, you guessed it, there was racism against the Chinese.

But, MoCA also chooses to show just how the Chinese reacted and survived despite the blatant discrimination. There's writing about the Civil Rights advocates, posters and magazines covering the Chinese's efforts to gain equal standing along with other races during that time period. And, there were also these amazing black and white pictures, courtesy of some members of the Chinatown community, hung up towards the end of the museum that paint this amazing portrait of the Chinese experience. I particularly loved the mahjong picture and the picture of the husband and the wife who were separated as part of the exclusion act.

Anyway, I hope everyone can come here and read about the Chinese experience in America. I hope people can think differently about their perception of the Chinese, perhaps stop belittling the plight that some still face today. It's informative for members of the community and members outside. Please, please pay a visit. It's worth every...

As a Gen X American-born Chinese, growing up what representation I had was minimal and all but universally problematic. Having a museum like this is so important to give voice to our experience and to those who came to the US before us. Though small, it’s very well done with three gallery spaces plus an immersive space set up like shops, using a range of media, including actual items, portrait photos, images of historical documents, poetry, video, biographical snippets of notable Chinese in American, individual stories, audio, video, original texts, timelines, and narrative. Most is bilingual. The spaces are thoughtfully laid out and the exhibits are engagingly designed.

The American narrative about the Chinese experience has been and still is too often about oppression or geopolitics, with no space made for narratives of strength, innovation, or contribution. This museum provides instead an accessible yet rich tapestry of information that articulates our agency within the power structures of the US. Yes, we are both the actor and the acted upon.

The way the main exhibit presents photos and brief bios of how individuals were pioneers in their field in chronological order, placed among other contemporaneous information and artifacts, gave me a contextualized sense of these individuals that you can’t get from the random AAPI Heritage Month profiles which is where most of us get some exposure to notable Chinese American figures. I also appreciate that it situated the Chinese American story in the wider context of other...