Events

Join author Jerry Zhang and illustrator Trisha Hautéa for a meet & greet at MOCA!

The Lantern Festival marks the official end of Lunar New Year festivities. To celebrate this special day, create your own colorful paper lantern to light up the night sky. Attach a clever riddle to your lantern—or write your own!

Go hog wild with a Year of the Pig craft! Create your own wearable pig ears and snout using simple materials. Dress up in your oink-tacular accessories to meet the NY Teacup Piggies!

Usher in the Year of the Pig with a piggy party! Join NY Teacup Piggies for a unique opportunity. Safely pet and hold a real piglet (or three), and ask a friendly handler any questions you have about these tiny pen pals.

Do you have what it takes to be a lion dancer? Lion dance is a mix of martial arts, dance, and creativity. It requires coordination and LOTS of energy! Join a MOCA educator to learn just a few of the many moves that make up a Southern lion dance. Then shoo away bad luck by creating your very own lion mask from cardstock, metallic foil paper, pom poms, and more. Move its eyes and mouth just like a lion dancer!  

Authors Joanna C. Lee and Ken Smith joins us to translate and decode the almanacs predictions with daily listings for 2019, the Year of the Pig.  

Dumplings bring good fortune all year long! Eating them is a traditional way to celebrate the New Year! Fill your own lucky dumplings with shredded veggies and practice several ways of folding them. Will your dumplings impress? At home, use what you’ve learned to make dumplings for the whole family.

Join a MOCA educator for a festive New Year’s storytime!

Cookbook author Diana Zheng joins us to talk about her book Jia! The Food of Swatow and the Teochew Diaspora, an exploration of her roots and the global Teoswa community.

How do you create a typewriter for a language with no alphabet? Look to Radical Machines for inspiring answers to this question. As you learn about the product design process, come up with your own linguistic invention made of cardboard, duct tape, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and more. Display your one-of-a-kind invention side by side with others!

In 2016, photographer Katie Salisbury began capturing the lives of Chinese restaurant workers in New York. The project was inspired by a simple question: If Chinese takeout is so popular in America, why do we know so little about the people who work in the industry? In the process of bringing the project to life she also discovered a forgotten piece of her own family’s history.

Keep your family and community memories for posterity! Sign up for a timeslot where the MOCA Collections team will scan and digitize your most beloved photos, paper documents, and/or 2-D mementos 11" x 17" or smaller.   为后代留下您对家庭和社区的记忆！注册一个时间段，美国华人博物馆馆藏部将数字化扫描您最喜爱的照片、文件、或者其它二维纪念品，尺寸限制在不超过11"x17"。分享您数字化物品背后的故事，并带走一份数字化的副本，发个朋友圈炫耀一下吧！

There are as many ways to organize archival information as ancestors in our family tree— and most find that they improve their methods as their records grow. Michelle D. Novak will explore organizational methods for digitizing, naming, and organizing your paper and digital files, discuss common technology pitfalls to avoid, and present ideas on to help your research live beyond today’s technology.

How do you create a typewriter for a language with no alphabet? Look to Radical Machines for inspiring answers to this question. As you learn about the product design process, come up with your own linguistic invention made of cardboard, duct tape, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and more. Display your one-of-a-kind invention side by side with others!

Painter Si Yan Wong joins us to talk about her paintings of the canners (people who pick up cans and bottles to live) in our communities. She came to notice the canners when she started jogging in her neighborhood in 2015. From her observations, these canners are generally seniors, the indigents and the working poor. They weather extreme conditions by working in the sweltering heat in the summers and braving bone-chilling winds during the winters. Who are they? Where do they come from? What does it say about this affluent city when more and more people are rummaging through rat-infested garbage to locate cans and bottles to survive?

The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America.

Join us as professor Danielle Seid introduces and provide crucial context surrounding the "orphan" documentary film Forever Chinatown (1960) produced and directed by her grandparents. She will also share exciting discoveries uncovered in her research on the film such as the film's surprising intersections with Hollywood and the Hong Kong New Wave. The presentation will include short film clips containing rare footage of NYC's Chinatown and Chinese American life at mid-century.