Earlier this year, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York unveiled a 10-foot by 15-foot mural depicting the Brooklyn Bridge rising above the Manhattan skyline with a traditional Chinese boat passing beneath it. That drawing, East Meets Westwas created in 1951 by Dong Kingman—one of the most important American watercolorists of the 20th century—at the Lingnan Restaurant on the Upper West Side. When the restaurant closed in 1980, the wall was damaged during removal and left among construction debris. It survived because Roslyn Gamiel, a former student of Kingman’s at Hunter College and a regular at the restaurant, saw what she was looking at and refused to let it go to waste.
One of Gamiel’s terms of surrender East Meets West it was that any institution we were in had to display it, and the work spent years on display at the Brooklyn Public Library. But while the library is being renovated in 2022, it’s taking down the painting with no plans to reinstall it. Gamiel and his family began looking for a new home, and when they consulted with Elaine Kingman, the artist’s widow, about where the work should go, she recommended MOCA.
“It’s a monumental work by an American artist so important that we felt we had to take it on, and that meant committing to putting it on display,” Herb Tam, the museum’s executive director and senior director of programming, told the Observer. East Meets West he came to MOCA at a time of change in this institution, which acquired its building at 215 Center Street, on the border of Chinatown and Soho, in 2024, and is now undergoing renovations in the center, looking for the best way to use the five floors we have not yet occupied.
The museum was founded as the Center for Community Studies (or the New York Chinatown History Project) in 1980 by Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, not as a philanthropic project with major institutional funding, but as part of a community effort to preserve its history during the transition period. Chen and Lai had watched a generation of Chinatown immigrants retire, close their businesses or leave, and instead of passing anything down, “a lot of people just closed and closed,” according to MOCA president Michael Lee. Signs, personal effects and business records were being removed along with everything else, and inventors began collecting what they could.
Two years later, they staged their first exhibition, a Chinese clothing exhibition, at a public library. Handicrafts were Chinatown’s first real economic engine—a way to bring money into the community before restaurants took over that role. “Chinese Americans in 1982 had never seen any kind of show where their lives were shown,” Lee said. “People were talking about how the grandmothers used to climb the stairs with their canes and see their lives and their contributions to the country.”
Initially there were no plans to convert the Community Studies Center into a permanent museum. Instead, the plan was to collect materials and eventually transfer everything to a major institution like the New York Historical Society or the Museum of the City of New York. The organization established meetings with those institutions, but nothing has been collected. “Nobody wanted to tell these stories because they didn’t think they were part of a bigger story,” said Tam. “I think that’s when the attitude of the center changed from being a temporary program to something they wanted to establish as a permanent center for that area.”
In 1986, the Center for Community Studies found a permanent home in the old PS23 schoolhouse at 70 Mulberry Street, next to other local organizations. A changing show schedule began to take shape, and the long-running show “Where Is Home?” And then for a long time after that, the collection just grew. According to Tam, for several decades, the answer to any donation from the community was almost always yes: “People living in the area started thinking about MOCA as a place where they could bring their relatives’ belongings or businesses they were involved in, but whether there was enough space to take care of everything and enough staff to document everything started to really worry them.”
Today, MOCA holds more than 80,000 cataloged artifacts, and according to Tam’s calculations, the actual number is much higher. About 30,000 of those have been digitized and keyword-checked on the museum’s online database, including oral histories in English, Taiwanese, Cantonese and Mandarin since the 1980s. And the collection keeps revealing new surprises.
A member of the public once salvaged decades of negative photos taken by a local newspaper photographer who covered Chinatown almost daily from 1975 to 1985. “We’ve had a photo of Chinatown every day for ten years,” Lee said, adding that a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is funding the slow work of cataloging and digitizing those photos. A visiting costume designer, who is looking after the museum’s textile collection, told the staff that they are sitting in one of the country’s most important collections of clothing, linked to certain, prominent families whose stories the museum has not yet researched. There are also sculptures made by Chinese Americans who were imprisoned during the Clinton administration. “A boat carrying a number of undocumented Chinese immigrants from China—known as the Golden Venture—arrived in New York and immigration officials refused to allow it to stop,” Lee explained. “One of the prisoners was an artist, and later, he taught all the other prisoners how to make sculptures out of tissue paper and whatever materials could be found… It’s very common now to detain immigrants, but at the time it was shocking.”
Then there is the matter of the Moy family. A museum archivist photographed the grave, and a relative of the person buried there found the photo on MOCA’s website and reached out. That connection led to a book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolutionpublished in March 2026, tells the story of a family whose history includes a member who worked as a broadcaster in Nazi Germany. “It’s very important that any object that we bring to the collection has these stories behind it,” Lee said, “so that we can show the broader landscape of how Chinese people lived in this country.”
MOCA’s acquisition of the building in 2024 began what the museum calls MOCA Rising. “We are renovating the entire building, but the first three floors are open to the public,” said a member of the board of trustees Minyi Su told the Observer. “That project starts in the fall, and then there’s a long-term project to do a complete renovation.” McKinsey & Company is currently helping to define how the space is divided between permanent exhibitions, rotating exhibitions, public events and education. Su stressed, however, that he and MOCA advisory board member Jessica Wang are not waiting for future plans to come to fruition to position the museum as it is urgently needed at this time.
The expansion occurs as MOCA’s history aligns, in a literal sense, with current events. In June, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Naturalization Clause guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, a constitutional protection that exists because of a lawsuit brought by a Chinese American man who was denied re-entry to the country of his birth. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as anti-Asian violence and rhetoric spread, the museum responded by “collecting hurtful stories,” timing and matching a long timeline of anti-Asian policy and violence going back generations. “What we wanted to do was create a safe space for people to show and share,” said Tam.
Along with its physical expansion, MOCA has filled its board with people who have a passion for meeting people where they already are. Wang, who has a background in fashion, digital media and experiential events, said she was drawn to the museum because “there are a lot of people who might not think they go to a museum but who care deeply about identity, culture and community.” Su, who joined the board at the same time, explained that he wants “a home for all different kinds of Chinese Americans, depending on what generation, whether they are recent immigrants or have been here for five or six generations, whatever dialects they speak or speak in their family.”
The museum, in recent years, has developed a multi-faceted social strategy. “We brought in a lot of powerful people and cultural leaders who have been involved in the museum naturally, because they love the experience,” Wang said, though he was careful to align the institution’s ambitions with innovation. “The goal is not to make MOCA fashionable but to give the museum a new platform to connect with people and help people understand why this is important.”
MOCA’s easy-to-use Instagram timelines, along with programs like the annual program with nearby PS 124 Yung Wing School and the museum’s searchable database of artifacts, are another way to get people engaged with the museum’s vast collection. “We did a story about a menu from a New York Chinatown restaurant about 60 or 70 years ago, and young people found that really interesting,” says Su, describing the museum’s approach to community storytelling as taking things from the past and “packaging them in a way that’s digestible, appealing to a new generation” without losing what made them worth preserving in the first place. He cited growing relationships among Gen Z audiences both online and at events as proof that the approach is working.
Underlying it all is the argument that Chinese American history is not interesting. The issue of immigration, the issue of civil rights, the issue of labor and the issue of who becomes an American and under what conditions—topics that affect many people in our time. “We want to be a center, nationally, where people can come and discover our history,” said Lee. “Chinese Americans are more than one story; there are a variety of paths that people took to get here.”
“Many of the experiences of Chinese Americans have been simplified or marginalized or left out of the broader American narrative,” Su said. “MOCA gives us a place where our history can be told with depth and humanity. And it brings generations together, honoring the sacrifices made by immigrants of the past while also giving us a place to tell a modern story about who we are and what we belong to.”
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