NYC Chinatown museum reopens with anti-Asian racism exhibit

A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese American history is reopening to the public with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism that it curated partially during the pandemic and a surge of anti-Asian bias incidents around the country

NEW YORK -- A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese American history marked its reopening to the public on Wednesday, with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism that it curated partially through submissions gathered during the pandemic and a surge of anti-Asian bias incidents around the country. The opening was a long time coming for the Museum of Chinese in America, not only because of the pandemic shutdown of over a year but because of a fire that ravaged though the space where its collection was housed in January 2020. Luckily, most of the collection was salvaged. Looking back, there was a question of “how were we going to survive, but we kept pivoting," said Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum's president. That included a lot of virtual programming, including the call for submissions that became part of “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism," opening to the public on Thursday.