Museum of Chinese in America

The Museum of Chinese in America began in nineteen eighty as the New York Chinatown History Project. Historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and activist Charles Lai founded it after realizing that the personal stories and lifelong possessions of older generations in the community were being discarded and forgotten as families aged. They operated out of a small space in a former school building at seventy Mulberry Street, where they spent decades meticulously collecting everything from old restaurant menus to faded wedding dresses. This effort was a race against time to ensure the history of a community that had lived in the United States since the early nineteenth century would not vanish.