new york
Moose or Caribou?
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | posts | 4 Comments
Two days ago, I started getting hate mail from taxidermists, hunters and self-described animal experts. One e-mail came from as far away as Australia.
When a large animal bust reportedly fell off the wall of a Lower East Side restaurant and struck a woman on the head, many press reports identified it as that of a moose because, well, it had antlers.
The emails were pretty harsh. They attacked me, insulting my intelligence, reporting skills, and one even said I should be ashamed of being Canadian. Well, that did it.
I took to the streets with a camera and began canvassing New Yorkers. I showed them a photo of the animal head in question and asked: “Tell me what this animal is?” Check out the responses below and also surf over to DNAinfo.com and look at our cool interactive.
Museum of Chinese in America finds new home
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | posts | 1 Comment
The skylit courtyard at the center of the new museum space. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
For years, they dreamed of a bigger space to work with.
That dream will come true when their new facility opens Sept. 22.The 14,000-square-foot space, six times bigger than its original home, was designed by Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and touted by some big-name movers and shakers including “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee, architect I.M. Pei, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and playwright David Henry Hwang.
But despite the big names attached to the $8.1 million project, the museum is run by a small staff of nine, including newly appointed director S. Alice Mong.
“We are a very lean organization,” Mong said. “As you can see there’s no fat.”
For nearly 30 years, the museum has been housed in a 2,000-square-foot space at 70 Mulberry St. on the second floor of a 19th-century schoolhouse. There is no way to feature the hundreds of documents and objects collected over the years, sharing the history and culture of Chinese immigrants in America and the role their descendants played in constructing American society.With the new space, there is more room for the vast collection, a bigger staff and a growing fan base. There are nearly 4 million Chinese Americans in the U.S.
“It’s our story,” said Mong, who immigrated with her family from Taiwan in 1973. “There isn’t another national museum for Chinese Americans. We hope to be a cultural anchor not only for the local Chinese in New York but for Chinese across the United States and around the world.”
The Journey Wall - donors receive a plaque with their family name, where they came from, and where they settled in America. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
The new museum, converted from an industrial machine repair shop on Centre Street, features a skylit courtyard reminiscent of courtyards found in the center of a traditional Chinese home. In the front lobby is an art installation called “The Journey Wall,” which consists of bronze tiles that show where Chinese American families came from and where they settled in the United States.
Fundraising for the new space began in 2004, spearheaded by museum co-founder Charles Lai.
“Having this new facility gives us the legitimacy and the credibility we have always sought,” Lai said. “It allows people to realize that together with our wonderful programs and strong content, we are worthy of a higher level of support.”
Lai said one donor had, for years, contributed $100 annually. When the donor recently learned of the museum’s plans to move into a bigger space, he wrote a check for $100,000.
So far, the museum has raised $12 million, and Mong said it is well on the way to reaching its $15 million goal. Mong said the museum is in good financial shape because fundraising began long before the economy went bad. So far, all donors have come through with their promised pledges.
Mong attributes the success to the museum’s niche cause.
One of the new objects that will be featured in the museum’s main exhibit hall is a wooden replica of the carvings found in the Angel Island Barracks in California. Some 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay during the first half of the 1900s. During their internment, many carved poems in the walls in traditional Chinese characters, detailing their fear and despair.
“When people come to Chinatown, they are saying, ‘Oh, look there’s the Buddhist temple, the place where the ducks hang from the window and let me get to the place with knockoff Coach bags,’” Lai said. “There is another part of the story. There are complexities and realities in the Chinese American community and we want them (visitors) to experience and understand that.”
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On the Net:
Cold Shower.
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | posts | No Comments
The news keeps getting worse. Riots in Xinjiang continue. Bloody, bloody fights and brutal killings continue to erupt between Han and Uighur. People are dying on both sides and I think the masses don’t even know why they’re fighting. Issues involving discrimination that range from Han and Uighur competing for good jobs, to restrictions imposed on religious activity have always been a point of contention. But these riots seem to have erupted from a dispute, that originated miles and miles away in the SE province of Guangdong, that was based on false rumor. The NYTimes has reported a lot on Uighur deaths. On today’s front page, a different story about the loss of a young Han Chinese boy and his family that must cope with this tragedy. Read it if you have some time.
I’ve always felt the Western media overlooked the Uighur issue. Now, “Uighur” is splashed onto the front pages of American papers and websites, much like a cold, cold shower.
父母亲常常为子女作出牺牲
Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | posts | 1 Comment
I’m going home this weekend to visit my parents.
The International Herald Tribune published this op-ed today. I often think about how hard my parents worked so my brother and I could have a good life.
Chinatown – 唐人街
By PETER ENG
HONG KONG — She’s an immigrant of the most traditional, stubborn sort, my mother, who recently turned 86 . Although she arrived in the United States from Hong Kong more than 40 years ago, Lai Wau Chiu Eng still speaks little English. Like my father, she had little interest in learning except for the few pidgin phrases they needed to run their “Chinese hand laundry” in New York.
To her, only Chinese mattered; the Americans were the gweilo, the “foreign devils.” Other than Chinatown, the only places she knew in the city were the supermarket and the Chinese take-out places near her apartment. She’s now in an assisted-living home for Asians in Seattle.
Despite our parents’ efforts, I and my six brothers went on a much different path. All I wanted was to fit in with my classmates and not be slotted as “that Chinese boy.” I had to help out in the laundry after school, but I hated it. I had to go to Cantonese school on Sundays, but I hated it. By my teenage years, I had lost most of my native language.
My mother grew up in a little village in Guangdong Province, in southeastern China. I’ve visited those dark, stifling warrens, still without electricity or running water.
Several years ago, my mother went back for the first time. She didn’t talk much about it then. But such things remain in the recesses of the heart and mind, where we preserve, amid all the wanderings of a lifetime, our sense of who we really are. And they surface when we start counting our days.
When my father was dying in a New York hospital in 1977, he told us that he wanted to go back to Hong Kong. A few years ago, my mother had a stroke that left her homebound. Recently over dinner she mentioned that village in Guangdong. “Wai,” she said, as always calling me by my Chinese name, “do you think it would be a good idea for me to go back to live there? I could go back and fix it up.”
Mainland China feels foreign to me, but in Hong Kong I do share a common identity with my mother. My parents fled to Hong Kong in the early 1950’s after the Communists won the civil war. They tended chickens in the New Territories for a living before migrating to the United States so that their children could get a good education.
I visited Red Water Bridge again recently, as I often feel compelled to. The row of family shops on the main road has been razed, replaced by a sanitized central market compound. The government has moved residents to public housing blocks up north so it can redevelop the village. Just off the main road, down a narrow path that snakes along a sewerage canal, our house still stands. It is a one-story, ramshackle structure. The water well, where as a boy I saw big drowned rats, is still there out front.
In my pidgin Cantonese, I spoke with Mrs. Wong, a family friend who ran a tailor shop on the main road when I was growing up. I found the old woman on the 24th floor of the public housing block. She asked how my mother was doing in retirement. “Your mother always worked so hard, tending to the chickens. It was a lot of hardship for her. Oh, your mother…,” Mrs. Wong said, her voice giving way to admiration and pity.
Shame filled me and tears came. I now know that in hating the narrow-mindedness of my parents, I myself was narrow-minded.
I know our old house will be knocked down soon. So I stand before the high metal fence silent and still, preserving sight, sound and smell. In that house I see how simple people struggle, and succeed, in breaking the bonds of their history. I see how far I have come, and what my parents sacrificed to see me through this journey.
Civil war raged in China when my mother was born in 1923. She grew up poor and illiterate, and she hardly knew her own mother, who had gone abroad to find work. (“I was only 15 when she went to Malaysia,” my mother says. “Since then I’ve only seen her in my dreams.”) Then my mother toiled in two lands of exile, Hong Kong and America. But always she thought only of seeing to it that her sons were healthy and successful, with no need to toil as she did.
I thought of the courage it took for her to run that laundry alone for more than a decade after my father died. I walked by the place recently. Inside I saw another Asian immigrant hard at work. A mother, no doubt.
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suzannebma[at]gmail[dot]com
Suzanne Ma is a multimedia reporter
currently based in Hong Kong.
She is the recipient of
the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
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