Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche

 Dec. 31 (by James S. Russell) -- I didn’t want to let the year close without reflecting on the new Museum of Chinese in America designed by Maya Lin.

The location, on Manhattan’s lively Centre Street, poignantly underlines the mutability of ethnic identity. It is steps from the bargain-hunting throngs on Canal Street, around the corner from what’s left of Little Italy, and smack in the path of SoHo’s encroaching slickness. It’s the perfect spot to consider what it is to be a hyphenated American.

The museum’s tinted-glass storefront, half-framed by a long horizontal L of wood, is a rather tentative invitation to a building with richly entwined stories to tell and tough questions to ask.

It’s too bad that Lin, famous for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., avoided the tough task of making a specific statement rather than a generalized one.

Museums that focus on ethnic and racial heritage often can’t find a firm footing. The bombastic National Museum of the American Indian in Washington and the tiny Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle give every group a voice, but they tend to preach, as it were, to the choir.

These museums offer a corrective history. Going beyond that is tricky, as immigrants and their children try to hold onto, or rediscover, what their offshore heritage means. Homeland memories recede and the homogenizing nature of America’s commercial culture exerts its pull.

In a diminutive 14,000 square feet, the Museum of Chinese in America engages the Chinese-dash-American tension by weaving together three narratives in a core exhibition. Thread one, the story of China and its relationship with America from the late 18th century, explains much about thread two, which illustrates Americans moodily oscillating between acceptance and rejection of the Chinese in their midst.

‘Yellow Peril’

The third narrative presents the accomplishments of Chinese in America, many of whom fought the racism and fear of the “yellow peril” told in thread two.

John Kuo Wei Tchen, co-founder of the museum, curated the exhibitions with Cynthia Ai-fen Lee. The exhibits were co- designed by the firms MGMT Design and Matter Architecture Practice.

Lin lets an edge creep in by using an existing interior courtyard, which provided air and light, as a centerpiece. She wraps the exhibition’s disturbing stories around the court in a series of small rooms. A restored skylight casts a weak light over walls stripped to battered bricks. New windows cut into the walls permit views into this haunting, shadowy space.

Translucent-glass partitions divide the thematic rooms, printed with short introductory texts and verses by Kuo that are evocatively accusatory: “As if by magic, we appear and disappear, in their gaze, at their will.”

Immigrant Flood

The real flood of Chinese began in the middle of the 19th century on the West Coast. They headed to the California Gold Rush and helped build the transcontinental railroad.

A fish-processing machine called “iron chink” sums up the respect for the hard-working “coolies” along with the racism that would drive passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. All but ending immigration, and denying most Chinese any road to citizenship, the act forced immigrants to create big-city Chinatowns.

That’s when a glimpse into the museum’s courtyard enriches the story. Such courts reminded immigrants of traditional Chinese houses, while reminding us of the dim shafts between the tenements that stacked laborers like cordwood.

Movie Parts

An essential parade of mini bios of key historical figures can barely compete with the sordid historical vignettes. A “documentary” photographer airbrushes white people out of a Chinatown scene -- better to evoke the mysterious east. Images of charming laundrymen and servile domestics vied in the American mind with inscrutable denizens in film thrillers depicted by white actors in “yellowface.” China dolls danced a promise of exotic opium-scented sex on the Chop Suey cabaret circuit.

Only when China became America’s ally in World War II did the exclusionary era end. Acceptance once again turned to suspicion after China’s move to Communism. A 1950s TV plays interviews with victims of Red Scare tactics. Civil rights legislation aided the Chinese aspiration to equal treatment, and that led to today’s quest for authentic identity.

A series of temporary exhibits explore modern content in a traditional context. “Crossing Boundaries” closes Jan. 4 and “Towards Transculturalism,” featuring New York artists Emily Cheng, Hung-Chih Peng, YoYo Xiao and Shen Chen, opens Jan. 21.

The Museum of Chinese in America is at 215 Centre St. in Manhattan. Information: +1-212-619-4785; http://www.mocanyc.org.

(Source:Bloomberg)