Chinese American Museum:
A Personal Journey

By Howard Ho
AAJA-LA.org

LOS ANGELES, March 2004 ?Often when my mother tells me to do something she believes is worthwhile, I will give her the shrug of indifference, as if her ideas are quaint and out of touch with my interests.

I gave her the shrug when she told me to sit with her on a float in Chinatown’s Chinese New Year’s parade. I gave her the shrug when she told me to apply for an internship at the Chinese American Museum. I failed to act when I was an assistant editor of UCLA’s Daily Bruin and she suggested I write a story about the museum. My mother knew about these events because she works at El Pueblo de Los Angeles, a modest city department that runs Olvera Street and now the Chinese American Museum.

Finally, while attending my mom’s office Christmas party the day before the museum’s grand opening, I caved in and joined my mother on a preview tour. After spending $35 to become a lifelong charter member, and then deciding to become a museum volunteer, I have been on a journey of self-discovery.

But don’t tell my mother.

I was drawn in by the “Chinese American?part of the museum’s name. This was a place that was about my experience as an American-born Chinese, a so-called “ABC?(my parents emigrated from Taiwan). This wasn’t going to be another place to display precious jade, gold and bronze wares. Here I could talk about my feelings of growing up fragmented between cultures, between acculturation and assimilation.

Howard Ho at the Chinese American Museum

Since the museum opened Dec. 18, patrons have had to meander through the exhibitions without docents. My work as a gallery “sitter?means that I get to play honorary docent and encourage their questions and insights (I often learn as much as I divulge). The museum won’t start its docent program until July at the earliest, and in the meantime sitters are scarce for delicate exhibits. (By the way, anyone can sign up at www.camla.org. Though mandated by city ordinance, the museum is funded primarily through its independent fundraising arm, the Friends of the Chinese American Museum, not taxes, and can always use volunteers.).

Because the museum is about the Chinese American experience, only a few of the items displayed are more than 100 years old, and the building itself dates to 1890. Patrons occasionally make the mistake of assuming that the Chinese American Museum is some kind of antique depository. I witnessed one visitor who asked whether the museum furnished anything concerning the Peking Man.

This museum isn’t about China; it’s about America.

The wall-filling Sung Dynasty-inspired horse painting in the museum’s mezzanine is not an ancient antique; it’s the half-century-old work of former Disney animator Tyrus Wong, who came to America in the 1920s.

Meeting Wong was empowering, because not only had he learned to master and combine Western and Eastern art forms, but he also had learned to parlay that into a successful career for Disney (“Bambi? and later Warner Bros. (“The Wild Bunch?. As a writer and musician, I see his work as a model for my own.

So when he arrived at an opening gala for his exhibition, I had no qualms about fetching his water and snacks. He looked at me with astonishment as I treated him as a star. At 93 years old, he was long overdue for recognition, but without a Chinese American Museum to provide a suitable venue, I wonder whether I could have met him, let alone known about his work.

The museum’s 7,200-square-foot space is special to me as a breeding ground for connections in a community. I began learning the two-string Chinese violin, or erhu, with a Chinese music group after I heard the musicians play at the museum’s gala celebration, the day after the grand opening. I read Lisa See’s Chinese American historical narrative “On Gold Mountain?after I met her at an exhibition she curated. I joined the Chinese American Service Alliance after meeting members of the organization there. My first AAJA function was a guided tour of the museum Feb. 26. I met the girl I’m dating through the museum.

So it was a no-brainer when the museum asked me to support it at City Hall, where the City Council was to vote on a motion to expand the facility. Attending the proceedings was the least I could do to give back. In the council’s hallowed marble chambers, I could see museum Director Suellen Cheng moving around with a digital camera like a documentary filmmaker, and I could see fellow AAJA member and TV newscaster Ted Chen also supporting the museum with his powers of persuasion.

With nearly 200 others in attendance, I stood up as museum spokeswoman Carol Baca, wife of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, motioned for us to rise in a statement of unity. The vote of the council was a unanimous “yes.?

Cheng and company have overcome initial opposition to the museum’s most obvious challenge: its location in the 114-year-old Garnier Building, in what was once Old Chinatown. The area has since become associated with the venders of Olvera Street, a Catholic church across the street and its Latino denizens. The Chinese American Museum is all that remains of a community driven away by the anvil of Union Station, which condemned much of the Chinese district in 1933. (The current Chinatown rose a few blocks away, and much of the history was literally buried until the museum’s opening.)

The museum is acutely aware of its own location. The walls and floors expose the original brick and wood of the first Chinese-run stores in Los Angeles. The museum’s Sun Wing Wo display is a replica of an early Chinese American superstore, an original Garnier tenant, complete with pharmacy and postal service. Vintage photographs show the bustle of a perpetual farmer’s market, long since overlain with train tracks. The wall panels are trilingual ?in Chinese, English and Spanish ?so as not to limit its audience from Olvera Street.

Just as the museum preserves the struggles of the past, its expansion will provide a hopeful future. The rest of the Garnier Building is an empty shell in need of renovation. With the freedom afforded by 16,000 square feet of additional space, Cheng and colleagues can start planning for new displays of artifacts and exhibitions on Chinese Americans in Hollywood and other significant occupations. An expanded museum can also do more to forge a dialogue between the Chinese American and Latino communities.

Indeed, when I volunteer on Sundays, I eat taquitos and drink horchata for lunch on Olvera Street and enjoy the ambience of an indigenous dance in the courtyard.

I think about how the Mexican laborers immigrating here are an issue today just as the Chinese workers were before the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The landscape may have changed, but the issues are the same. Wen Ho Lee’s detention is just the most recent rallying cry in a long history I’m just discovering.

The Chinese American Museum, opening the day after the 60th anniversary of the Exclusion Act, hopes to be a fresh start in Los Angeles?often-fragmented landscape, and I will be a part of it.

Now if only my mom could get me to vacuum her carpet.

Howard Ho is a freelance writer and composer and 2003 graduate of UCLA. He was an assistant editor at the Daily Bruin and has written for Entertainment Weekly. This is his first article for AAJA-LA.org.