As Museum Of Chinese In America Reopens Doors, Protesters Say Chinatown Deserves Better

A raucous protest set against the long-awaited reopening of the Museum of Chinese in America Wednesday was a glimpse into how Chinatown’s future may depend on more than recovery from the pandemic, but also bringing together a divided community.

After being closed for more than a year, the museum’s reopening was the backdrop of a protest by activist and community groups against the museum’s board co-chair Jonathan Chu, a prominent Chinatown landlord who is being blamed for the closure of a beloved dim sum restaurant that employed more than 100 workers.

Dancers performed inside MOCA’s lobby to open a new exhibit called “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting The Tides Of Racism" while inches away on the other side of the museum’s glass walls protestors chanted “Boycott MOCA” through a bullhorn and pressed posters against the windows.

“Destroying Chinatown is Anti-Asian Violence,” one poster read, while others depicted Chu’s head on Godzilla’s body.

“They have totally sold out the community for their own benefit and that's exactly what we don't need now,” said Nelson Mar, the president of 318 Restaurant Workers Union which represents the Jing Fong workers. “And that's exactly what divides this community.”

MOCA President Nancy Yao Maasbach said to reporters at the museum press preview that she blamed both a political agenda by the protestors as well as “an aftermath of exclusion, because there's so much divisiveness that was created by former administrations, by legislation.”

Chu owns the Elizabeth Street building that had housed the famous 800-seat Jing Fong banquet hall for many years. Earlier this year, Jing Fong’s owners the Lam family announced on Instagram they were closing the restaurant because of the pandemic’s impact on revenue, after more than four decades of operating in Chu's building. A spokesperson for the Chu family has said the restaurant hadn’t paid rent since the pandemic started.

One of the few unionized restaurants in the city, the Jing Fong workers’ union and other supporters have called on Chu to allow the restaurant owners more time pay back rent, to bring back the enormously popular banquet hall which served an estimated 10,000 customers weekly before the pandemic, and save the jobs of the workers.

In May, the Lam family filed an application to transfer Jing Fong’s liquor license to a much smaller 125-seat space at 202 Centre Street, the former home of Red Egg, Bowery Boogie reported.

“Jing Fong’s owners made the decision to leave the space and relocate to another location in Chinatown. That was their right and the Chus wish them luck,” said Eric Phillips of Edelman PR, a spokesperson for the Chu family, in a statement Wednesday.

The protestors also called upon MOCA to return $35 million the museum received from the de Blasio administration as part of the city’s efforts to build a new jail at the site of the Manhattan Detention Complex a few blocks away on White Street. The proposed new jail is part of de Blasio’s $9 billion plan to shut down Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex, and replace it with four borough-based jails.

The protestors call the MOCA funding a “bribe” to support the controversial plan, which the de Blasio administration said was to fund the museum’s permanent home as part of $391 million in “neighborhood investments” to “support communities surrounding the borough-based jails through new affordable housing, youth programming, community and cultural centers.”

“MOCA and its board chair, Jonathan Chu, have taken huge steps to accelerate the displacement in Chinatown— MOCA through its complicit support of the jail that is being proposed to be built here, and Jonathan Chu in his closure of the Jing Fong restaurant,” said Mar, the president of the 318 Restaurant Workers Union. “So we're here to say that it's criminal that they're reopening MOCA and not reopening Jing Fong, when Jing Fong is clearly the engine of this community.”

Maasbach said the protestors are conflating unrelated issues. “Jing Fong has nothing to do with MOCA,” she said, adding that she spoke to some of the elderly protestors who told her they were paid by City Council candidate Christopher Marte who is a vocal opponent to the new jail.

In a phone interview, Marte denied that protestors were paid by his campaign, noting the hard-fought primary for the Council seat has already concluded with him in the lead.

Maasbach said the museum has steadfastly supported its community and called the protest “divisive” and “unfair.”

“The mayor had an agenda with Rikers Island and the borough-based jails. We have no information or knowledge about mass incarceration or criminal reform. We're a social history museum about Chinese Americans. So for them to conflate the two together—it's unfair,” Maasbach said.

She added that the museum has never received any other capital funding from the city and will not survive without the money: “We're gonna die. MOCA cannot sustain itself. We pay $600,000 in rent here. We have a $2.8 million budget,” Maasbach said, and called the city funding “money that MOCA does deserve.”

Even before the pandemic hit New York City, the museum was struggling from a devastating January 2020 fire at its archival space in a community building at 70 Mulberry Street, where the museum’s 85,000-item archives were imperiled.

Then the rise of xenophobia and anti-Asian violent attacks, combined with the city’s shutdown, made the past year and a half incredibly difficult for the museum’s mission, she said. Only recently have the museum’s fortunes turned, with a $5 million surprise donation from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“We value voice in protest, because sometimes you need voice in protest to create change,” Maasbach added. “But what they're voicing and protesting is all based on false information and conflating different issues.”

MOCA's reopening exhibit, "Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism," which runs through September 19th, incorporates a timeline of "historic lowlights in the treatment of Asians and Asian Americans" as well as multimedia elements—posters, videos, art, music, oral histories—from Asian Americans persevering during the pandemic. Details on tickets and hours here.