Many residents believe that to preserve the story of Chinatown, it makes more sense to safeguard the actual neighborhood than a historical record of it....
[F]or many locals, the museum doesn’t feel like it belongs to Chinatown.... “If we keep going down the path we’re going right now, Chinatown is going to disappear,” said Truman Lam, who is part of the family that owns [the restaurant] Jing Fong....
Even before the pandemic, large restaurants struggled because of high rent and taxes, and that was the case for Jing Fong, Mr. Lam said. All these changes have made Manhattan’s Chinatown even more dependent on tourism and outsiders.
ADDED: The museum is called Museum of Chinese in America, and it teaches the history of the Chinese in America, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Protest signs in a photograph at the link: "Chinatown is not a museum/Stop displacing workers" and "Museum Of Corrupt Asians."
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I visited that neighborhood 25 years ago, and I was there just before the virus locked down travel.
A lot of what is now Chinatown was once Little Italy. Little Italy has gotten littler over the years.
This involves two back stories (1) organic communities resulting from people's choices or laws that caused an ethnic neighborhood to grow and persist, versus (2) Johnny-come-lately urban planners and developers who want to maximize real estate values and income per square foot in an established city.
San Francisco's famous Chinatown is a major tourist attraction in a prime downtown area. It started out in the 1800s as a low-cost segregated ghetto for the Chinese laborers imported to construct California's canals and railroads. They stayed and (until recent decades) thrived on Chinese-focused banks, stores, markets, restaurants. Many old buildings remain, and it hasn't moved an inch. It's now a living museum with a perhaps fading population but protections against development.
San Francisco's not so famous Japantown was added after WW2 in a (then pricey) suburb. This followed California's explicit ban on Japanese people, plus their loss of real estate and interment during WW2. Japantown's main feature is a dated indoor shopping mall, which has had its "ups and downs."
https://www.sfjapantown.org/japan-center-malls/
The locals are right to be suspicious.
"They think that because they speak better English, that they graduated from Ivy League schools, that they are better than us,” said one of the protesters.
True that.
I'd have to do homework to know but just playing the percentages major curators and museum directors tend to graduate from Williams (see: Williams Mafia). Williams is a wannabe Ivy, an 'almost' Ivy.
According to progressive anti-Asian anti-Israel anti-"zionist" self absorbed losers - everyone is corrupt but them.
No - if you support Nancy and Joe, you support corruption. If you support Antifa - you support Nazism in America.
Hmm. Same thing is going on in Chicago with the proposed Presidential Library for His Greatness, Barack. Similar comments from the people who live in the Jackson Park area of Chicago. It is a large abomination being stamped onto Chicago's south side that will do nothing but drive the people who live there, out of there.
And it's huge. Did I mention the size? Almost 20 acres dedicated to His Smoothness. One wonders how they could possibly fill this up with accomplishments other than the Nobel Prize for...breathing.
I'm not sure exactly why a choice has to be made between "Museum" and preserving a living, breathing Chinatown (somewhere). I recommend a Canadian book: The Concubine's Children. A Chinese man, Chan Sam, came to live in Vancouver, B.C., following in the footsteps of his father. His idea was probably always to work for a while, send money "home," and then return home himself. Any idea of moving back to China was eventually made impossible by Mao's Revolution, and in fact the relatives there lost their property. He brought with him a concubine or wife #2, May-Ying. He had already had two or three children by her in China, along with some children by wife #1. One more child, Hing/Winnie, was born in Canada. There was a strict pecking order. As much money as possible, including money earned by concubine or wife #2, was sent back to China. Chan Sam probably travelled to work, but May-Ying and her daughter lived strictly within a very small Chinatown, working and visiting the same few locations every day. There might be some visiting with other Chinatowns, perhaps a day's travel each way. Hing/Winnie married a man of Chinese ancestry who already had seen a bit of life outside the Chinatown world; shortly after they married, they moved some distance away, where they and their children became the first Chinese family in town. One daughter went on to have a big "mainstream" career on the CBC in Canada. Something like this story must have been fairly common, yet it seems so foreign in some ways.
It is kind of a tangent, but these types of stories always remind me of a theme you used to blog about quite a bit regarding how many news stories would change the framing of the stories regarding scientific research vein written in a way to frame women in a positive light and/or men in a negative light (I'm oversimplifying). That same sort of spin is always placed on stories about diversity. Efforts to diversify a primarily white neighborhood are always framed as good, with people opposing framed as bad. Efforts to diversify a minority neighborhood are always framed as bad (gentrification, etc.), while the people who oppose them are framed as bad.
I didn't read the article. I'm sure it would just add more hackles, and it's hard to enjoy your second cup of coffee with too many hackles up.....Why bother with the Chinese Exclusion Act? I'm sure that Chinese were treated unfairly in America, but the prejudices they faced here were just a piffle compared to what the Ming Dynasty, foreign occupying powers--especially Japan, the Red Guard, etc. inflicted on them. The Chinese immigrants had their hardships and sorrows in this country, but there were worse choices, worse lives than those of the Chinese immigrants......Would it be possible for a group of Ivy League graduates to create a museum that celebrates the plus side of their lives in America?......I understand that in the America of the 19th Century there was considerable prejudice against Catholics and the Irish. Maybe so, but it couldn't possibly have been worse than what the Irish faced in Eire and Great Britain. Let it go. Why perpetuate grudges.
Disney will purchase it and market it as Chinatown Land. The rides will be fantabulous with "It's A Mao World After All" being the centerpiece.
Joe Smith said...
"A lot of what is now Chinatown was once Little Italy. Little Italy has gotten littler over the years."
I was going to mention that. Little Italy still has its Italian restaurants and festivals, but only around 5% of the actual residents identify as Italian-American.
The news stories about anti-Asian hate has made a lot of grant money available for things that will not heal any rifts but will give corporations a chance to say they're contributing towards change.
A museum in Chinatown would attract tourists and be used for field trips from schools that want to be able to list it as part of their diversity education. It wouldn't be reaching the people who need it most.
Why stop with a museum? The next step is a living zoo. To the proponents of the museum, go big or go home.
William said...
"Would it be possible for a group of Ivy League graduates to create a museum that celebrates the plus side of their lives in America?"
Nope. That would be "jingoistic."
Check your privilege! Do the work! [/sarcasm]
Bronx native here. The real "Little Italy" - or perhaps "Little Sicily" - is found on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Paisan, that's where you go to eat. Just avoid it on days Fordham University has a home game, all the restaurants are packed afterwards.
As Joe suggests, Chinatown wasn’t built to be Chinatown, they’re merely the latest residents. It’s in the nature of immigrant communities that they are low cost places where recent immigrants band together for comfort and support in their new country. The specific ethnic character changes every few generations as the young people build better lives and move to neighborhoods better suited to their greater economic status, making room for some other wave of immigrants that is probably from another part of the world and brings its own unique character for another few generations.
There is already a tenement museum on the lower east side, there is no need for a specifically Chinese museum.
"Disney will purchase it and market it as Chinatown Land. The rides will be fantabulous with "It's A Mao World After All" being the centerpiece. "
They already have one in EPCOT.
Maybe, but they will need to use better grammar to make that argument. To put it in the plural, I speak better English than them. See now? It's really hilarious irony.
"...better than we are."
@Stephanie Richer
Arthur Ave. as we know it from "A Bronx Tale" is long gone. I grew up in the Bronx, and my most recent visits confirm that while the restaurants are still around, the older residents have died off and the kids moved away. Their places have been taken by Mexican and Albanian immigrants. I give it another ten years tops. Unlike Little Italy north of Canal St in Manhattan, there won't be a whole lot of tourists coming out of their way, and the nostalgia among the next generation will eventually fade.
tim maguire said...
"It’s in the nature of immigrant communities that they are low cost places where recent immigrants band together for comfort and support in their new country. The specific ethnic character changes every few generations as the young people build better lives and move to neighborhoods better suited to their greater economic status, making room for some other wave of immigrants that is probably from another part of the world and brings its own unique character for another few generations."
Indeed, an old story. It's been an interesting little project to track down as many family addresses over the last hundred years or so from census records. Multiple branches of the family, and multiple ethnicities, and the pattern is the same. Folks land in an urban area with a concentrated ethnic community, then tend to hop from neighborhood to neighborhood and town to town, gradually creating another diaspora as their prospects change. Very few remain if any in the "old" neighborhood, having been replaced by successive waves from elsewhere.
I lived in Manhattan's Washington Heights 25-30 years when I was a grad student. The neighborhood had (and still has) a very high concentration of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, but there were a small number of incongruous establishments that never seemed open, but somehow were maintained. These were places that catered to the previous immigrant populations of the neighborhood; the Irish and the Jews. It wasn't until I went for an early morning run shortly after sunrise that I saw a different view of the neighborhood: before the rest of the neighborhood woke up, the remaining Irish and Jewish residents, mostly very elderly, ventured out to do their grocery shopping, to visit the glatt kosher butcher that was only open a few hours in the morning, and to socialize on the park benches. By 9:00 AM, they all but disappeared as the rest of the neighborhood awakened. I always felt like following some of the older immigrant community members would have made for an interesting documentary, but I imagine there are very few, if any, still with us today. Maybe in another 25-30 years, someone will produce a documentary that features bittersweet interviews with elderly residents at the last neighborhood restaurant that still serves a good plate of Dominican-style mofongo.
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