Visitors to the museum study a timeline tracing 160 years of Chinese American history.
Growing up, Maya never knew much about her parents’ background. Then, on her twenty-first birthday, she and her family attended a party at the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. Maya’s father spoke with the Chinese ambassador for a long time. Afterward Maya said, “What were you talking about?” And her father began telling her about his family’s history.
It turned out that Maya’s grandfather had been a well-known scholar. And her aunt had been an architect and architectural historian in Beijing. She had come to the United States to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, but she was not admitted because she was a woman. However, within a year she wound up on the faculty. The story fascinated Maya. “All the female Lins are very strong, very independent,” her father said. “All very talented and very determined.”
Maya’s mother also had a remarkable history. She had been smuggled out of Shanghai as a teenager, and friends in America helped her get a scholarship to Smith College. A poet and a teacher, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington when Maya and her brother, Tan, were young children. “She worked on her books and on her teaching career and took care of us,” said Maya. The accomplishments of her mother and aunt were inspiring.
In 1986, when Maya was twenty-seven and doing her graduate work at Yale, her mother took her and Tan to China to meet relatives for the first time. Maya’s father stayed home because he was too ill to travel. But on the trip they visited the place in Fujian Province where he had lived as a boy. Maya was amazed that, unlike traditional Chinese houses, her grandfather’s house was built in a Japanese style. “It was a house overlooking the river, with two or three courtyards,” she said. “Spaces flowed through sliding screens . . . It was just magical. I was blown away. I had an affinity to this place.”
As a result of this trip, Maya became more aware of her heritage and wanted to learn more about the Chinese American experience. So, in 2004, when the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) asked her to lead a design team to expand the museum, she agreed. MOCA had been located in cramped quarters on the second floor of an old school building in lower Manhattan. Maya found a bigger place, a former machine repair shop on the edge of Chinatown. “There was a courtyard there, but they had hidden it away,” she said. “We went poking around the basement, which was pretty rank.” The space reminded her of her grandfather’s house in Fujian Province built around a courtyard. “It’s not that I’m literally trying to re-create that in the museum,” said Maya.
“Going down those stairs is like seeing where you come from.”
Maya designed the exhibition spaces around the courtyard. She left the brick walls bare but added a large skylight overhead. Films about Chinese Americans are projected on windows facing the courtyard. Photographs and other artifacts are presented throughout the museum. Maya’s husband contributed vintage photos, some from his own collection. Also on display are newspapers published in the late nineteenth century with articles about discrimination and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, which prevented Chinese laborers from coming to the United States because of their nationality.
Videos telling personal stories of Chinese Americans are projected on the brick walls of the museum’s interior courtyard.
One area is devoted to Angel Island in San Francisco, a place where Chinese immigrants were held and questioned before being allowed to enter the United States. Many wrote poems on the wooden walls of the detention center expressing their misery, and their words are reproduced in the museum.
It’s been seven weeks since my imprisonment
On this island—and still I do not know when I can land.
There is a re-creation of a successful Chinatown grocery store from nineteenth-century New York City. Glass-fronted cabinets hold the actual tea, spices, and canned goods that were sold in the store. There are also galleries showing American stereotypes of Chinese culture: chewable Chinese checkers called “Fu Man Chews,” a movie poster for Charlie Chan at the Opera, and a glowing neon sign saying “Chop Suey.” Farther on an exhibit tells about “Red China” and the communist scare in the United States in the 1950s.
Although the color red is important in Chinese tradition, Maya remembered the dresses her mother made her wear as a child and detested it. So for the museum’s graphics Maya used celadon green, a soft shade that was the color of a type of glaze used on ancient Chinese ceramics. Green had another meaning for her as well. “The building is completely green,” she said, “in the sense that it uses recycled materials, sustainably harvested woods.” Despite Maya’s objection, the curators still featured red in the museum. For instance, there’s a timeline of major events in the history of the Chinese in America that is printed on red blocks.
In the lobby Maya designed a Journey Wall made of bronze tiles. The tiles are engraved with the names of Chinese families, their place of origin, and their home in America. Maya donated a tile in honor of her parents. It reads: Julia Ming-hui Lin and Henry Huan Lin, Shanghai and Fuchow, Athens, Ohio. A plaque at the end of the permanent exhibition states Maya’s intention. It says,
The museum includes a re-creation of a general store that was located in New York City’s Chinatown in the late nineteenth century.
The museum helps bring the stories of Chinese immigrants alive through multimedia exhibits like “With a Single Step.” Portraits of Chinese immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century dangle from the ceiling.
“I think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present.”
