NYC Chinatown Museum Reopens With Anti-Asian Racism Exhibit

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese American history marked its reopening to the public on Wednesday, with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism that it curated partially through submissions gathered during the pandemic and a surge of anti-Asian bias incidents around the country.

The opening was a long time coming for the Museum of Chinese in America, not only because of the pandemic shutdown of over a year but because of a fire that ravaged though the space where its collection was housed in January 2020. Luckily, most of the collection was salvaged.

Looking back, there was a question of “how were we going to survive, but we kept pivoting,” said Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum’s president.

That included a lot of virtual programming, including the call for submissions that became part of “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism,” opening to the public on Thursday.

In the exhibition, the outer walls are a running history of sorts, a timeline showcasing the racism and bigotry that’s been turned toward Asian and Asian Americans throughout their generations in the U.S.

They touch on the treatment of the earliest Asian immigrant communities, how stereotypes connecting them and disease have a long history, to more recent issues like the treatment of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The anti-Asian bias of the pandemic is on display, with a timeline including top government officials using anti-Asian slurs as names for the coronavirus and blaming China for its existence.

There’s also a listing of various attacks that had Asian victims, like the shootings at spa businesses in Georgia in March, where six women of Asian descent were among the eight people killed.

In the center of the show are items collected by the museum showing how Asian Americans have tried to push back against bias in the past year, like photographer Mike Keo’s series of images of Asian Americans sharing their identities with the hashtag, #IAMNOTAVIRUS.

Another piece is a collection of yellow whistles, which visitors are encouraged to take. Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang founded the Yellow Whistle Project this year, offering the items as a security measure in case help is needed and making them yellow in a reference to how the color has been weaponized as a xenophobic slur against Asian Americans.

It was important to include both the history and the pandemic-related material, said Herb Tam, curator and director of exhibits at the museum.

“We felt like even though the submissions since April 2020 were really wonderful ... it wouldn’t have been enough,” he said, and they wanted the exhibition to “make people aware of how this is not new, the way that Asians have been made to feel foreign, or the way we have been scapegoated for a disease.”

The opening didn’t come without controversy. Two artists who had been slated to have their images of Chinatown in Oakland, California, in the show pulled their photos in recent days, following a similar action from other artists in a show the museum was supposed to have put on last year.

The artists, Colin Chin and Nicholas Liem, withdrew their work over a controversy about a contested city plan to site a new jail facility in Chinatown. In talking about the overall project, the city said MOCA would be getting $35 million toward its capital needs, which critics of the jail plan have used to condemn the museum.

The museum has been adamant that it does not support the jail, and Yao Massbach said it had been asking the city for capital funds for several years before the controversy.

Liem, speaking to The Associated Press from Seoul, South Korea, wasn’t convinced. “You can’t say you’re against something while financially benefitting from it,” he said.

At the press event for the new exhibit on Wednesday, protesters could plainly be heard from the street outside, at times right up next to the clear windows at the front of the building.

Tam called the artists’ withdrawal “disheartening” and the controversy was being fueled by “mischaracterizations.”

By DEEPTI HAJELA

The Oldest Chinese Restaurant In America

The oldest continuously-running Chinese restaurant in the U.S. isn't in San Francisco or New York. It's in, of all places, Butte, Montana. The Pekin Noodle Parlor opened in 1911. Jerry Tam's parents, Danny and Sharon, were the third generation of the family to run the restaurant.

"This was a traditional mom-and-pop restaurant, where my mom used to work here, my dad worked here," said Tam. "I have four older sisters that all worked here. My first job was washing dishes. And still, I'm still washing dishes today!" Walking around the Pekin Noodle Parlor can feel like walking back in time – like its iconic booths. "They were originally put up in the early 1900s for privacy," said Tam. "This is sort of social distancing from 100 years ago," said correspondent Luke Burbank. Tam's father read that the unusual orange color stimulated appetite.

Speaking of unusual things, the Pekin is actually up on the second floor of the building. The first level, said Tam, was at one point a herbal shop. "And then we go to the sub-level, where it was all the illegal gaming." There are dusty keno boards, old betting slips, slot machines, and even the suitcase that Tam's father brought over in 1947, when he was just 14 years old: "It was just him and this suitcase." Burbank said, "It's a pretty amazing thing to think about this whole building we're in, all the people who've eaten in the restaurant, and the people who've gambled down here in the basement, all those experiences …" "… Stems from one man, his vision to come to America," Tam said. Technically, it was more than just one man, going back generations of Tam's family and extended family. The history of Chinese-Americans in the West is almost as old as the American West itself. In the 19th century, tens of thousands of Chinese, mostly men, came to work on the railroads, or in mining. But they weren't always so welcome, according to author Jennifer 8 Lee: "Starting in, like, the 1870s and onward, there's huge waves of anti-Chinese violence. You know, there were shootings, there were beatings, there was lynchings." The hatred culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. "It was the first time actually in American history that the concept of illegal immigration was introduced," said Lee. One of the ways Chinese immigrants got around the law was the so-called "lo mein loophole," which allowed restaurant workers into the country. From 1910 to 1930, the number of Chinese restaurants quadrupled.

Today, there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonalds. To cater to local tastes, Chinese restaurants in America created a cuisine quite distinct from the food in China. For instance, chop suey: "The word chop suey in Mandarin is zasui, which means basically odds and ends," said Lee. "So, we actually thought as the United States, for a long time, that, like, chop suey was, like, the national dish of China. This is what emperors ate!" Today the Pekin Noodle Parlor still proudly serves up its chop suey, along with all sorts of other time-honored favorites: sweet and sour shrimp, pork fried rice, and noodles.

Jerry Tam isn't sure how much longer the Pekin will be serving its noodles. Like everyone, they've been hit hard by the pandemic. But one thing is clear: His family's place in American history is here to stay. "We've been through the Spanish flu, we've been through two World Wars," said Tam. "So, I guess people in Butte, they love my father, they love the restaurant, and they would never want to see anything happen to it." Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Carol Ross. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-oldest-chinese-restaurant-in-america-pekin-noodle-parlor/