In 2014, Kevin Chu was going through the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America when he came upon boxes of curled-up black and white photos of Chinese New Yorkers, many of them taken in Chinatown. The museum, based in Chinatown and known as MOCA, had recently undergone an archival effort, and Chu was curious about some of the items.
A boxing fan, he initially fixated on a 1974 photo of Muhammad Ali taken with a man later identified as M.B. Lee, the former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.
"It was like one of these things I never expected. To see Muhammad Ali in a Chinese American archive," recalled Chu, who now works as an assistant director at MOCA.
The more he looked, the more the snapshots intrigued him. Some were of popular Chinatown spectacles like holiday parades and street festivals, and dignitaries and celebrities ranging from Ali to Mayor Ed Koch to Big Bird. But there were also casual shots of everyday life—teenage girls preening on a building stoop, seniors eating at a communal kitchen, a tai chi group, young men casually posing against a row of bikes. The photos were not the work of a professional photographer, but by their sheer volume suggested a dedicated and entrenched documentarian.
All told, there were over 50,000 photos in all, dating from between 1976 and 1985. It is the largest photo collection MOCA owns.
Relying on the personal letters he found, Chu made cold calls and wrote letters and eventually connected with the relatives of Emile Bocian, the photographer.
Listen to Elizabeth Kim's report on WNYC:
Bocian, a public relations expert and photo enthusiast, moved to Chinatown during the latter part of his life. Although he did not speak Chinese, he earned a job freelancing for the China Post, a now defunct Chinese-language daily newspaper based in New York City.
A lifelong bachelor, he died at age 78 in 1990. After his death, the story goes, a friend took his photos from his apartment and donated them to MOCA, where they had languished in boxes for years.
In a fortunate turn of events, a portion of the collection was put on virtual display last month. The exhibit, titled "An Unlikely Photojournalist: Emile Bocian in Chinatown" represents a collaboration between MOCA and the Center for Jewish History. Through his research, Chu learned that Bocian had grown up in Brooklyn as the youngest of six in a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Some of the photos had been featured by MOCA over the years, but hoping to bring the photos to a wider audience, museum officials pitched the idea of a joint exhibit.
Although planned prior to the pandemic, the exhibit has landed at a precipitous moment for Chinatown and Chinese New Yorkers. From the earliest weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinatown suffered greatly, initially as the target of racially motivated fears about the virus and later because of restrictions that hobbled restaurants and thwarted tourists.
Old photo tours of New York City are well-mined territory. But the nostalgia kindled by Bocian's black and white photos of old storefronts, like that of Hop Shing, a coffee shop and dim sum restaurant known for its pork and coconut buns, has only intensified in light of COVID. Hop Shing closed finally in September, one of many Chinatown businesses felled by the crisis.
Protest against the building of a jail in Chinatown November 18, 1982
Meanwhile, Bocian's photos of activism, like those of the 1975 protests against the police beating of Peter Yew, a 27‐year‐old engineer from Brooklyn, during the the height of the Yellow Power movement, and of the 1982 protests against the building of a new jail in Chinatown, are just as relevant today.
They are also a reminder of an often forgotten history of Chinese American protest in New York City.
Counter to their stereotype as "docile," Chu said, Asian Americans "are very vocal when it comes to things that affect their community. And they always have been."
As if to punctuate that point, the contest for New York City mayor this year will potentially include two Asian Americans: Art Chang, a Korean American originally from Ohio who officially announced his bid last week; and Andrew Yang, the Chinese American former presidential hopeful who grew up in Westchester County and is exploring a possible run.
Ironically, even as Bocian meticulously documented the story of Chinese New Yorkers, his own life was somewhat of a mystery, even to his own family. According to Chu, he was a recognized presence in Chinatown, but few in the community knew him personally.
"Quintessential outsider is the perfect description of Emile," Chu wrote in a 2016 essay published as part of a CUNY forum.
Jocelyn Kaplan, the photographer's grandniece, recalled seeing her granduncle for Passover dinners and other holidays. A tall man, he wore round glasses and, almost invariably, a camera around his neck.
Now 68, Kaplan splits her time between Delaware and Florida, but she was involved in helping the museum piece together Bocian's life. After he died, some of his cameras fell into her possession and she loaned them to the museum as part of the exhibit.
Of the photos, only a couple hundred have been digitized. More funding is needed to finish the process.
As an adult, Kaplan said she once visited Bocian in Chinatown, where he took her to a restaurant. She noticed how all the shopkeepers and residents nodded at him. "He was like the Jewish mayor of Chinatown," she said.
Update, August 27th, 2021: The exhibit is now open through December at 15 W. 16th St. More details here.
