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Charles Lai is co-founder and executive director of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA)
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A nine-year-old Charles Lai arrived to New York from China in 1965, a year that marked the beginning of a large and sustained wave of immigration in this country due to the abolishment of national-origin quotas. Lai, his five siblings, and their parents moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a tenement building on the outskirts of Chinatown. His father took a job as a cook in a restaurant, and his mother found work in a garment factory.
Lai's story shares much in common with those of thousands of other Chinese immigrants who repopulated Chinatown with a new generation of Chinese Americans. But despite living under cramped conditions and growing up in an area where heavy gang activity dominated the streets, Lai, co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA), never faltered in his determination to give back to his community.
Lai has a distinguished record of public service, including serving as director of programs and planning at the Asian American Federation of New York, where he was responsible for implementing the Federation's 9/11 Relief, Recovery, and Rebuilding Initiative. Prior to that, he served as the executive director of the Chinatown Manpower Project, a vocational training program, and the director of policy and budget for former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger. Currently, Lai serves as MoCA's executive director.
After graduating from Princeton University, Lai returned to his neighborhood armed with a good education and a passion to help his fellow Chinese Americans, who had expanded Chinatown from an eight-block neighborhood into an expansive and ever-growing community. But the question of what defined the community posed a challenge for him.
"In the spectrum of those who have been here for generations or for those who are new, we each had a different view," Lai says. "Out of that, was there something that would bind us?"
By the mid-1970s, Lai found others who were also grappling to define their cultural and communal identity when he joined the Basement Workshop, one of the pioneering Asian-American organizations being formed at the time by a group of urban planners and artists on Elizabeth Street. There, he met Jack Tchen, with whom in 1980 he started another community-based organization, called the New York Chinatown History Project. This early organization eventually grew into today's MoCA.
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| Lai spent over 20 years collecting artifacts, as well as archival and library materials |
"We realized that in that search to define this community, there's one thing that we do not have -- that is what is this history and who knows this history," Lai says. "In our research in the libraries and colleges, there was hardly any information written about us. So it was incumbent upon us to write that history. But you can't write about that without doing research. But who do you go to? You go to the old-timers."
To trace the history of Chinatown and share it with hundreds of thousands of local residents, non-Chinese New Yorkers, and visitors, they collected oral histories and photo documentations of first-generation inhabitants of the neighborhood. On a daily basis, they rummaged through garbage cans and dumpsters collecting everything from rare papers to priceless artifacts -- valuable pieces of history that were being thrown out as new residents moved in and commercial development spread. In fact, some of the items that now make up part of the museum's prized collections, such as original store signs, were things they stopped construction workers from destroying.
"In the early days, we were salvaging," Lai says. "We had created a new terminology as 'urban archaeologists.'"
After more than 20 years of collecting artifacts and archival and library materials, the museum is proud to claim one of the most important national archives of materials about Chinese life in America. Now a Chinatown focal point, the museum has evolved into the keeper of not only the community's documented history, but its cultural history as well. The museum has also broadened its scope to include the diaspora of Chinese settlers throughout the Americas."In the course of processing all that information, we realized that it is more than a local Manhattan Chinatown history, but in fact a much broader Chinese-American history with a significant section of the experience being in New York," Lai says.
As part of the Chinatown History Project, Lai also devoted time to helping community members realize the innumerable contributions they had to make to Chinese-American history. "The fact of the matter is that they are the pioneers that made it possible for all of the generations to come through," he says. "They had made a life for themselves under such harsh conditions and severe discriminations."
The educational component of the project was and continues to be essential to its mission. As such, the museum holds informative workshops on a variety of topics, both on-site and in community and senior centers. They create programs for public schools, work with the local Chinese and mass media to place stories about fellow Chinese Americas, and host tours of Chinatown to give visitors a better sense of a community that has been perceived as "isolated and mysterious."
"We will continue to find ways to get that information to the public -- working with school groups to creating multi-media type programming," he says.
To better understand the consequences of 9/11 on Chinatown and Chinese New Yorkers, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas partnered with other groups to create Ground One: Voices from Post-9/11 Chinatown, an in-depth oral history project. They also worked with local students to collect narratives, videos, and photos as part of the ongoing exhibit Many True Stories: Life in Chinatown On and After September 11th.
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| MoCA's mapping project is an interactive, virtual map of the "Old Chinatown" district |
One of the ways that the museum has been able to keep history fresh and engaging is through its Mapping Our Heritage Project -- an interactive, virtual map of New York's "Old Chinatown" district that provides access to a range of information, including statistical and biographical data, historical photos, documents, individual oral histories, and artifacts. Highlighting the eight-block area that represented the original Chinatown, the map invites visitors to engage by clicking on specific addresses. Doing so brings up artifacts, photos, documents, and oral histories connected to that place and also gives visitors an opportunity submit personal accounts and memories of Chinatown. This format provides a new way of exploring and writing the history of Chinese Americans in New York and will soon be available on the internet, Lai says.
"[The mapping project will allow] anyone, in any country, to be able to see New York's Chinatown and have access to that information and to be able to contribute to that story," Lai says. Because after all, what is the mission of museums? he asks. "It is to make information as widely accessible as possible, and this allows us to do that."
To increase the impact and accessibility of all its offerings as well as accommodate a growing collection, the museum plans to move its headquarters from its current 2,500-square-foot, second-floor home at 70 Mulberry Street to a nearby ground-floor 12,000-square-foot space by next September.
"We believe that information is key. If you don't have information, then you can't make the community better," Lai says. "History is not static. History is not only in the books -- it's how one uses that history to make a better future."
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