MOCA TALKS with Charlotte Brooks – The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
March 25, 2026, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
$10 General Admission (museum admission included) | $5 Student & Senior | Free for MOCA Members
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to an engaging conversation with historian Charlotte Brooks, Professor of History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, on her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution. Through the remarkable story of the Moy family, Brooks traces the lives of Chinese Americans who moved back and forth across the Pacific during the first half of the twentieth century, navigating racism in the United States, political upheaval in China, and shifting ideas of citizenship, belonging, and home.
Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings came of age in an America that questioned their rights and constrained their futures. Ambitious, cosmopolitan, and often daring, they sought opportunity in China’s Republican era cities while remaining deeply entangled with family and community networks in the United States. Their choices, sometimes visionary and sometimes reckless, unfolded against the backdrop of Japanese occupation, revolution, global war, and the Cold War, with consequences that reverberated across borders and generations.
Drawing on archival research and family narratives, Brooks offers a transnational portrait of Chinese American life that connects personal ambition to global history. The program will explore themes of migration, modernity, and the enduring ties that link Chinese American communities across oceans and ideologies, illustrating a generation’s struggle for dignity, acceptance, and self-determination.
About Charlotte Brooks
Charlotte Brooks is Professor of History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, she has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history.
In addition to The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution (University of California Press, 2026), she is the author of three other books. American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949 (University of California Press, 2019) explores the lives and choices of the thousands of Chinese American citizens who left the United States for China to escape racism and build careers. Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a comparative study of Chinese American political activism in New York and San Francisco between World War Two and the late 1960s. Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009) uses Asian Americans’ experiences with housing discrimination to explore the startlingly rapid racial transformation of mid-century urban California.
Prof. Brooks’ articles have also appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of Urban History, and her work has been reprinted in The Best American History Essays.
About The Moys of New York and Shanghai
Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings grew up in an America that questioned their citizenship and denied their equality. Sophisticated and self-consciously modern, they challenged limitations and stereotypes in the United States and sought new opportunities in China’s tumultuous republic. Sometimes the risks they took paid off, but their occasional recklessness also led to infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, and worse. Those in China faced pressure to collaborate with Japanese occupiers, making choices that had serious consequences for their siblings in the United States.
Charlotte Brooks’s gripping tale follows the family back and forth across the Pacific and through two world wars, China’s Nationalist and Communist revolutions, and the Cold War—events that the siblings and their spouses helped shape. The Moys’ incredible story offers a kaleidoscopic view of an entire generation’s struggle for acceptance and belonging.