Chinese art and Japanese food collide in Manhattan’s Lower East Side

For first-time visitors to New York, a trip down to Canal Street to haggle with vendors over $4 sunglasses is a must. But the truth is, nobody makes the trek to Chinatown because they’re guaranteed bang for their buck. Chinatown is pseudo-exotic and transporting. It takes New Yorkers to a time and place where a Chinese immigrant community moved in, took over, and made it their own. There are restaurant and shop signs written in Chinese characters and cramped tenement-like buildings. 

There is also a sleek wooden and glass facade that gives way to the Museum of Chinese in America, a former industrial machine repair shop designed by Maya Lin (the architect who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington) that celebrates Chinatown as a dynamic, diverse, and important section of New York.
Lin preserved the history of the space by maintaining a feel of New York industrial chic with exposed brick walls and dirty mortar, yet with a distinctly Asian muted elegance.

The current exhibit, celebrating the museum’s new location on Centre Street, addresses the difficulty of adaptation and cultural heritage maintenance that Chinese immigrants experienced in New York—how some exploited fetishized Western concepts of orientalism, while others tried and often failed to assimilate.

The “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America” exhibit begins in a small room called “Open Threads,” where one wall is covered by a world map on which strings connect places in China to places of emigration. Below the map are individual cards with individual stories, and the table next to it has clipboards that say, “We’d like to hear your story.” The ones left by visitors include a suggestion to see the first Chinese immigrant to Baltimore displayed on the map. Another entry suggests that the museum do a piece on the heroic Chinese villagers who hid Americans from Japanese soldiers during World War II. 

The open rooms, with varying types of multimedia and changing materials—from brick, to wood, to limestone, to fabric—engage the visitor in a journey across time and space with the Chinese immigrants of the area. Everything is constantly changing. Everything seems to integrate well at first, but still feels unable to connect completely—possibly a metaphor of the people the exhibit depicts.  

The museum both glorifies and pokes fun at different immigrant paths. Some joined the army while others opened “Chop Suey Circuit” restaurants in the ’40s and ’50s or Chinese laundry shops. 

Another exhibit, titled “Here & Now: Chinese Artists in New York,” is currently displaying modern Chinese art, which can be seen as both a return to and a departure from traditional Chinese culture. The artists—Xu Bing, Lin Yan, and Cui Fei, among others—are all New Yorkers, but they make use of ink and mineral pigments on Xuan paper and utilize themes central to Chinese understanding. 

Somehow, the Japanese transition to New York restaurant life seems smoother than that of the Chinese, possibly due to restaurants like Nobu, that offer an American twist on Japanese cuisine. In fact, Masa, a high-end traditional Japanese omakase restaurant, is again ranked among the five restaurants rated with three Michelin stars in New York for 2010. In fact, the disclosure of the new list prompted my visit to Kajitsu, a vegetarian kaiseki restaurant with a tasting menu of five to seven courses on the Lower East Side, bordering Alphabet City. 

While most of the meal was tasty at the time, it was not particularly resonant—except for the wheat gluten product of all wheat gluten products: Nama-fu (better known as seitan). Kajitsu, using the Shojin cuisine of Asian Buddhists, found an infinite number of ways to cook this mass of glutinous rice flower and millet. It was at first given to us in SPAM-like strips with steamed taro and then presented in green shiso-infused blocks. The strips were camouflaged by a sea of steamed and fried vegetables piled abundantly on the plate, in a mass so large that most Japanese would refuse to finish the entire portion.

To be honest, the food was not that impressive save for the nama-fu, which reminded me so much of mochi that I got excited anticipating the next course that would feature it. The visit was memorable, though, as we saw Natalie Portman at the restaurant.

The meal lacked the heart and character of the Museum, and seemed lukewarm by comparison to the matcha tea we had for dessert. Maybe Japanese food novelty wears off. Maybe the answer lies in attempted integration. Domo arigato, Alphabet City. I’d rather spend my time in Chinatown.

Elyssa Goldberg is a Columbia College sophomore. Gallereat runs alternate Fridays.