NYC Chinese museum faces another test of survival

The deepening coronavirus crisis in New York has thrown into jeopardy the very existence of the Manhattan-based Museum of Chinese in America.

It also has created great uncertainty about the majority of the museum's precious collection that had previously sustained severe water damage during a fire in January.

"We are facing a triple-whammy crisis," said Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the museum. "At a time when we need money to pay for the treatment and conservation of our damaged collection, we are also foreseeing a 30 to 40 percent drop in total revenue for the museum."

On Jan 23, a fire broke out on the fourth floor of a five-story building at 70 Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Chinatown. The fire was put down before it reached the second floor, where MOCA's Collections and Research Center had been housed since 1985.

But the water pumped by firefighters into the building was at first believed to have destroyed the 85,000 items within the cherished collection.

The effort to retrieve artifacts from the ravaged site has proven to be protracted. The first batch of 200 boxes were taken out on Jan 29, followed by another batch on March 8, and then by the remainders on March 11, one day before the museum's closure due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

"By now, we were able to get pretty much everything out, but all of that is still sort of in limbo," said Yao Maasbach.

The museum has sent 85 percent of that collection to two companies specializing in assessing and stabilizing water-damaged materials: TERS in Nanuet, New York, and Polygon in Allentown, Pennsylvania. But due to the pandemic, both businesses have been shuttered and are likely to remain so for at least weeks if not months.

Keeping in mind that the treatments are essential to getting the damaged items ready for further conservation efforts, the sudden halt to the work has rendered ever more unpredictable the future of the collection.

"These items are now in freezers. Although we have started to pay the two places, we can't physically see them because of the closure," said Yao Maasbach.

"Another thing is we don't know how expensive it will be. And how can we make a decision about money to spend on that when we're not even sure whether we can financially survive this or not?"

"Every decision we make right now may or may not end up closing the museum," she continued. "This is a challenging time for everyone, and especially for us — a small cultural museum housed in a relatively large space and with funding coming down from different avenues."

According to the president, the museum is trying to apply for grants offered by various foundations to help cultural institutions like MOCA to stay afloat. Meanwhile, she and her team have wasted no time moving the museum into the virtual space.

"Right now, we are extremely busy, given all the opportunities for us to reach the public online. And we only have 13 full-time staff," she said. "So we're trying our best to remain with all our staff while getting through it," said Yao Maasbach.

That number was 20 as of June last year.

"Because we wanted to try to improve our financial numbers, we didn't replace the seven people who had left," she said.

On March 8, four days before the museum's closure, a temporary exhibit was put up displaying images from the fire, its aftermath and the efforts to rescue a collection that holds the memory for generations of Chinese immigrants.

"A lot of these early immigrants didn't have command of the English language, and their oral history, recorded in whatever local dialect they spoke back in China, now forms an invaluable part of the MOCA collection. "Their stories are still waiting to be transcribed and handed down," said Yao Maasbach, born in the US to Chinese immigrant parents.

"As a Chinese American, I kind of look at all these different things that have happened within the past months and how they are falling into place," she continued. "I feel that MOCA would be in an even worse place right now if the fire hadn't happened.

"Extremely unfortunate as it is, there was something around the fire that galvanized the Chinese American community to preserve their own history," she said. "We don't want to let it go."