New US museum’s goal: show how Chinese-Americans are woven into the nation’s fabric
- Chinese-Americans have contributed to the United States’ construction, fought in its wars and built communities from coast to coast
- ‘Chinese are not recent arrivals. We see ourselves as an American history museum,’ says executive director
Walking into the yet unopened Chinese-American Museum in Washington, visitors are greeted with a simple message on the wall: “The Chinese-American story is an American story.”
Located in a five-storey Beaux Arts mansion four blocks north of the White House, the museum hopes to tell the story of the Chinese-American “experience”, beginning with the first four recorded Chinese visitors who sailed to the port of Baltimore aboard a merchant ship from Guangzhou in 1785.
“Chinese are not recent arrivals,” said the museum’s executive director David Uy, himself a first-generation Chinese-American. “We see ourselves as an American history museum. That’s one of the main points we’re trying to get across.”
In the 235 years since those first arrivals set foot in the nascent United States, Chinese-Americans had been, in Uy’s words, an “indelible part” of US history, contributing to the country’s construction, fighting in its wars and becoming bedrocks of communities from New York City and San Francisco to Glenwillow, Ohio, and many places in between.
According to the Pew Research Centre, as of 2015 about 24 per cent of Asian-Americans were of Chinese origin, totalling about 4.9 million people. Many have risen to prominence, such as US Representatives Judy Chu and Grace Meng, entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang and Zoom Video Communications founder Eric Yuan.
These days, however, the Chinese-American experience is one that is sometimes marred by a rising tide of discrimination, driven by both the Trump administration’s combative relationship with China and the Covid-19 pandemic.
