New Museum – IDEAS CITY

Tour of Multiethnic Chinatown

Date: Friday, May 3, 2013

Time: 10:30AM to 12PM

Place: 214 Centre Street, Manhattan
(Across the Street from Museum of Chinese in America)

Free Admission

New York City is one of the most diverse metropolises in the world. With its abundance of cultural, social, and historical resources, it is a great place for learning. Each year, millions of students and tourists from all over the United States and the world visit the Big Apple. A great variety of informational sight-seeing tours are organized to serve them. Traditionally, historical tours in the city lionize those that have prevailed—the wealthy, as well as war heroes. Rarely seen are emblems of the endurance and creativity of minorities who struggled against the establishment, pushing for their niche in a particular corner of the city. Most tours focus on the past. They seldom incorporate recent vibrant changes in the city where they could celebrate racial and ethnic boundary crossings or even boundary breaking. AAARI is delighted to produce and implement a new, exciting tour of Chinatown.

The tour has two major foci: 1) tracing the multiethnic past of historical Chinatown through grassroots community agencies and businesses and 2) encouraging the exploration and recording of the new emerging Chinatown in Manhattan to share among educators and community leaders.

Tour designer Carol Huang, PhD, is a professor at City College. She is a historian who worked as a crime reporter for Central Daily, a Chinese language newspaper, in the 1980s, with Chinatown as her main beat. She is a board member of Asian American and Asian Research Institute.

Part of New Museum IDEAS CITY festival: www.newmuseum.org/ideascity