Our Family Treasures at the Museum of Chinese in America

FAIN: PY-234576-16

Museum of Chinese in America (New York, NY 10013-3601)
Yue Ma (Project Director: June 2015 to April 2017)

A project by the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), in the heart of historic Chinatown, New York City, to document Chinese American history by providing members of the public opportunities to learn how to store, preserve, and share family objects and stories. This project would offer a day-long event for attendees to digitize personal items and to participate in presentations and workshops on Chinese American history and on ways to research and preserve their family heritage. Digital images and object stories would be accessible on MOCA’s Mapping Our Heritage Project, an online repository hosted by the museum. Following the digitization event, MOCA would offer a series of four workshops focused on training youth and their families in techniques for researching family histories and conducting oral history interviews. MOCA would also combine digitization opportunities at their regularly scheduled public programs, which spotlight first-person stories by authors, filmmakers, historians, and community members, who present behind-the-scenes perspectives into how they have researched their own family histories. Overall, the aim of the project is to highlight the untold stories and the living histories of Chinese immigrant communities in New York City.

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) seeks a grant to support Our Family Treasures - a public program and education initiative aimed at preserving, digitizing and showcasing family and community history and culture through a day-long Our Family Treasures preservation and digital archiving program; an introductory workshop series for youth; and public programs at the Museum and Queens Public Library. Working on the premise that American history and experience is shaped by the material culture and memories of those who interact intimately with them over time, Our Family Treasures spotlights the untold stories and living histories of immigrant communities in New York City and their heirlooms. This project is part of a larger, ongoing museum effort to more fully capture the richness of the City’s growing immigrant population with multifaceted neighborhoods of working families, diverse cultural heritages, and industries, as well as the diversity of the Chinese diaspora across America.