Museum tackles hate directed at Asians across US
NEW YORK — A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese-American history marked its reopening on Wednesday with an exhibition on Asian Americans and racism. The exhibition was partially curated with submissions gathered during the pandemic and after 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 for over a year, but also because of a fire that ravaged through its space in January last year. Luckily, most of its collection was salvaged.
Looking back, the museum’s president Nancy Yao Maasbach said there was the question of “how were we going to survive, but we kept pivoting”.
This included a lot of virtual programming, including the call for submissions that became part of “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism” that opened to the public on Thursday.
A timeline in the exhibition showcases the racism and bigotry that have been turned toward Asians and Asian Americans in the United States throughout the centuries.
Topics include how the earliest Asian immigrant communities were treated, the long history of stereotypes connecting them and diseases, and on more recent issues like the treatment of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks.
Anti-Asian bias of the pandemic is also explored in the exhibition, with a timeline including top government officials using anti-Asian slurs as names for the coronavirus and blaming China for its existence.
There is also a listing of various attacks that had Asian victims such as the shootings at spa businesses in Georgia in March, where six women of Asian descent were among the eight people killed.
At the center of the show are items collected by the museum showing how Asian Americans have tried to push back against bias in the past year. This includes photographer Mike Keo’s photo series of Asian Americans sharing their identities with the hashtag #IAMNOTAVIRUS.
Another exhibit is a pile of yellow whistles, which visitors are encouraged to take. Agnes HsuTang and Oscar Tang founded the Yellow Whistle Project this year, using the whistles as a security measure when help is needed and making them yellow in reference to how the color has been weaponized as a xenophobic slur against Asian Americans.
Herb Tam, curator and director of exhibits at the museum, said it was important to include both historical and pandemic related material in the exhibition.
He said they wanted to make people aware of how this is not new, the way that Asians have been made to feel foreign, or the way Asians have been scapegoated for a disease.