The UCLA Asian American Studies Center is hosting a book launch event for Him Mark Lai’s (麥禮謙) autobiography at Castelar Elementary School in Chinatown on May 17. Lai, who passed away in 2009, was a self-taught community historian. More on Lai from his biography at the Him Mark Lai Digital Archive:
Photo by Michael Smith (Flickr/Creative Commons).
Visiting LA and want to know more about the history of the city? Here are two resources downtown where you can learn all about the experiences and contributions of Chinese Americans to the Los Angeles region.
Chinese American Museum
The Chinese American Museum is located in the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument across the street from Union Station. It is an accessible, kid-friendly introduction to the history of Chinese settlement in the Los Angeles region. Reflecting the diversity of the local Chinese American population, it also includes the narratives of refugees from Southeast Asia. Since ethnoburban development is a relatively recent phenomenon, most of the exhibits focus on the city’s downtown Chinatown, which has moved several times since the first Chinese immigrants arrived.
Currently, there is an exhibit on Chinese American architects in Los Angeles. Did you know that Chinese American architects had a hand in designing such iconic LA buildings such as Norms Restaurants?
From the New York Times:
Clang cooked up a bit of low-tech wizardry when he made “Beijing New York,” a fine-art project about the Chinese-immigrant experience in New York City that will appear in “I See China,” a group exhibit that opens April 21 at Beijing’s Pekin Fine Arts gallery. He started the project on the streets of Beijing, where he photographed a variety of passers-by. “I purposely selected subjects who look like people you might see in Chinatown,” says Clang, who grew up in Singapore and moved to New York in 1999. Once he shot his cast of characters, he cut out paper dolls from the prints. Back in New York, he placed the paper dolls in various spots around the city — taped to a traffic light, a metal barricade, a concrete curb — and then photographed them.
“Chinese immigrants in New York spend most of their time in Chinatown, or Brooklyn Chinatown, or Flushing,” he says. “So I purposely put them in other places, outside of Chinatown, such Herald Square and Washington Square Park.” The results remind us of how immigrant populations are an integral — yet often unseen — part of the New York fabric.
