0:00 - Discusses how the idea for MOCA began in the late 1970s and the backgrounds of its founders. Changes in immigration law and the transformation of Chinatown’s population prompted them to try to document and preserve the community’s history. Initially, they started by interviewing laundry workers and bit by bit began getting donations and building a collection
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4:27 - Discusses the uniqueness of MOCA's collection, highlighting how everyday objects, presented with context and stories, helped MOCA tell the larger history of Chinatown and how this community emerged. Explains how they thought strategically about how museum programming could impact the majority of people, from selecting the subjects of exhibits to bringing people together again through reunions and other events hosted at MOCA
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9:15 - Describes how Chinatown is connected to the larger history of the city and nation, and the role MOCA plays in understanding this relationship. Starts with his work on New York before Chinatown and how it was already forming relationships to China with Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain and to notions of what was Chinese through theater performances. Chinatown once it emerges steps into already prefigured imaginary that had already seeped into the mass culture
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11:53 - Describes the epic story and journey told by the current core exhibit, which focuses on the history of Chinese immigration and the limitations imposed by exclusion, violence and racism, and how it is part of a larger American story of racialization. Highlights museum’s efforts to identify the larger structural forces that people have often unknowingly entered and had to navigate and negotiate. The exhibit also tells the story of how Chinese formed communities despite difficult odds
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17:30 - Discusses the experience and expectations of visitors to MOCA. Provides a brief history of how the civil rights movement helped Asian Americans break down barriers. Discusses how exhibits entail a process of constant dialog with those who lived that history and how out of this engagement the museum can build a true history of a community that has not been documented or archived anywhere else. Discusses what Chinese diasporic experience tells us about globalization
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25:13 - Discusses the museum and its collection as a repository of memory and a resource to look at the past to change things for the better. Explains how people can engage with MOCA by sharing their stories publicly and supporting its exhibitions and public programming to help it expand into larger mainstream cultural spaces. MOCA is part of the larger shift towards the Pacific and the more people interact and collaborate with MOCA the more MOCA can help Atlantic-oriented New York with that shift
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31:13 - Shares anecdotes and struggles from early days of dumpster diving outside stores at Chatham Square. Museum's collection recognized that the story of Chinatown was always multi-ethnic, not just Chinese, and the story of old New York was reflected in streets of Chinatown. MOCA was only able to save a small fraction of what was tossed out, which valuably documented the old Chinatown that was changing with the passing away of older generations and coming of new immigrants
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37:57 - Discusses possibilities for creating a public that the new museum space opens up. Has become a space where people from diverse backgrounds can engage with each other, a kind of space badly needed in Chinatown, New York, and nationally. A national vision for MOCA to him means nurturing American participation in leading this country in a more democratic, inclusive, international and cross-cultural way. MOCA is not a museum about a dead past but about building new options for the future
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