#MOCA CUISINE FREE#

“Thirty-five million dollars says that’s bullshit!” a protester yelled. “They’re using you,” she said to them in Mandarin before walking back indoors. “They didn’t give us any money!” She turned to a cluster of middle-aged immigrant women. “That’s not true, and that’s not true, nothing’s true,” Maasbach said, jabbing her finger at the signs. Maasbach, dressed in a silky butter-yellow gown and cream-colored heels, exited the building and faced the protesters. Fresh-faced high-school students and Chinese grandmas with sensible haircuts hoisted signs that read MUSEUM OF CORRUPT ASIANS and THE MUSEUM OF CORPORATE ARTWASHING and HEY MOCA! RETURN THE $35 MILLION TO THE COMMUNITY! “ Sanqian wubai wan,” they yelled - 35 million.

#MOCA CUISINE FREE#

With free admission and a new show called “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tide of Racism” that includes murals depicting events like the murder of Vincent Chin, it might have seemed ready to meet the political moment, too.īut as MOCA president Nancy Yao Maasbach prepared to welcome journalists and luminaries to the show’s opening in July, about two dozen protesters gathered on the sidewalk. The money will allow MOCA to buy the building it has been renting for more than a decade, construct a theater there, and expand its operations. The biggest windfall of all, though, has been a $35 million grant from the city. Then came millions in grants from the Ford Foundation and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. In early 2020, it got hundreds of thousands of dollars in recovery aid after its archives suffered a fire. MOCA closed to the public when New York locked down - and by the time it reopened its doors this past summer, the usually cash-strapped nonprofit was in its best financial shape in years.

Somewhat perversely, though, it has been a good time for the bottom line at what has become one of Chinatown’s most contentious institutions: the Museum of Chinese in America. And soon residents were dealing with other anxieties as the news filled with stories of Asian New Yorkers who were attacked on the street, incidents fueled in no small part by a president who delighted in blaming China for the pandemic. As the city went into lockdown, businesses shuttered. Weeks before the first case of COVID-19 was found in New York, local shopkeepers saw their traffic plummet - a disturbing indication of what was to come for a neighborhood where many survive on the slimmest of margins. No one would argue that the past two years have been good for Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Moca cuisine