I visited the exhibit at MOCA, the Museum of Chinese in America. It was no surprise that the museum was located in Chinatown, but it was not as eye-catching as I expected. Inside, there were many documents of Chinese culture and the struggles that they faced in America.
When you entered the first room of the exhibit, you are greeted with three different components: crystal clear cylinder displays with hanging notes, a wall of significant people at that time with luminous backlit pop-outs, and a wall of different primary sources at the time explaining Chinese roles in American expansionism and the Gold Rush. I was attracted to the crystal-clear display of an opium ball that caused the opium war. This was a reproduction made by the artist, Arlan Huang, made in 2009. At first glance, it just looked like a ball that rolled in a pile of dried rose petals, but up close you can see the intricate details of the opium ball. Forty of these were packed and stored in wooden chests to be sent to the market. This seemingly insignificant object marked the start of the era of unequal treaties with China in which they were forced to concede many of its territorial and sovereignty rights.
In the second room, the relevant theme there was the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the wooden wall, words filled up the middle column, describing the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On both sides of the words were a bunch of art portraying the fear and struggles of that period. Beneath those images were drawers filled with writing and small paper-made objects, like the trade cards from the late 1800s. They had an image on one side and business information on the other. The images used frequently illustrated the anti-Chinese imagery in commercial culture. From this specific drawer, I could feel the racism towards the Chinese people. Five cards each one showing weeks one through five laid on the drawer, each one with a Chinese man holding plates. On the first week, he was not holding much and as the weeks progressed, the number of plates he had increased, and by week four, his hands and head were loaded with plates. By the fifth week, the Chinese man is buried under plates. This piece of display demonstrates the social status that Chinese people had and the hatred against them. Something else that I found intriguing in this section was the display of immigration documents. The rejected applications were printed out on red paper while the ones that passed were printed on green. There was more red paper than the green ones. Compared to the red ones, the green papers had examples of some well-written appeals in close-to-perfect English.
Moving on, the next part of the exhibit walks through “The Eight-Pound Livelihood”, which is when Chinese people were excluded from entering skilled trades so they could only do “traditional women work” which is work in the service trades, especially in the hand laundries industry. On the wall were inscribed verses from “Chinaman, Laundryman” by songwriter Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1932 in both English and Chinese. The verses cry out the voices of Chinese people and how they were cleaning these clothes, but they live in an unclean world where there is hatred and exclusion. On the counter below the poem, there was an actual iron used during the time. When I tried to lift it, I felt how heavy the iron was, I could not imagine how tiring it would be for someone to be lifting this and using it all day long.
In the last room of the exhibit, more recent events were shown, like the case study of the neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It described how Chinatown in Manhattan was over-packed with immigrants in the 1980s due to the Immigration Reform Act and the end of China’s isolation. A part of it was “Little Fuzhou” which was filled with people from the Fuzhou province. But soon, demand for affordable housing was increasing at a rapid pace, while supply was at its limit with the increasing amount of Fujianese immigrants. This is when they found another place with more spacious and affordable housing in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was also convenient because of the subway lines to Manhattan. I can personally relate to this because I am from Fuzhou and the neighborhood of Sunset Park is a big part of daily life. Even though it is a big Chinese community, we still experience a lot of anti-Chinese crimes, racism, and stereotypes.
I like the approach you took for this response. The use of imagery really brings me back to when I visited the museum, and you described the layout of the museum perfectly. I love how you talk about the deep meaning and issues behind these different documents and artifacts in your response.