During the late 1970s, Charles Lai and John Kuo Wei Tchen started to collect the abandoned belongings of Chinese Americans in New York's Chinatown, a historical neighborhood dating back to the 1870s. Eager to learn more about the community's history, they collected items from Chinese elderly "bachelors", "men who went to the US when exclusionary laws still prevented women and family members from joining them", as well as items from old businesses that were closing down due to the expiring of the city's 99-year leases. Items ranged from photographs, costumes, and typewriters to art, most notably pieces of sculpture. These items, although simply considered trash by most, even by the inhabitants of Chinatown, were in fact essential in painting the picture of historical Chinese American culture. As more and more items were collected over the years, some notable items being the "papers and possessions of Hazel Ying Lee, a WWII pilot and the first Chinese-American woman to fly for the US military" and "a Pan Am Airlines bag from Richard Nixon's historic 1972 China trip", many began to see the historical and cultural significance of the collection, which eventually led to the creation of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). In January of this year, however, a fire broke out in the building where the museum is located. While nothing was damaged by the fire, the subsequent firefighting efforts left the collection drenched. A rescue was made to recover the pieces, and the community, as well as other organizations, helped raise $23,000 for MOCA and their recovery efforts. Luckily, the collection was transported to freezing facilities (to prevent water damage and mold) just in time, as the city was put on lockdown due to COVID-19. The museum and its efforts are intensely important, perhaps now more than ever "amid rising xenophobia, tensions between the US and China and increasing American nationalism" as a result of the virus. The museum's president, Nancy Yao Maasbach, remains hopeful, intent on seeing the museum expand even further, stating "Nothing can replace looking at real artifacts, at family albums, hearing oral histories, seeing the documents from all these milestones in Asian history...That's the importance of this collection".
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