In the 1970s, John Kuo Wei Tchen left his graduate program in Wisconsin and moved to New York City to become involved in the Asian American movement. He soon became engaged with the Basement Workshop, running its Asian American Resource Center. Unable to find any archives housing the documents, photographs, and personal stories needed to write the history of New York’s Chinatown, Tchen realized that the history of the largest Chinatown outside of Asia had been ignored. In 1980, he and fellow Basement Workshop member Charlie Lai built off of the materials housed in the Basement Workshop’s Asian American Resource Center to cofound the New York Chinatown History Project. Tchen and the rest of the Project’s staff took to salvaging physical evidence of Manhattan Chinatown’s history from the streets and dumpsters. His research on Chinatown hand laundries would become the basis for the Project’s first exhibition, Eight Pound Livelihood. As the Project evolved into the Museum of Chinese in America over the next few decades, Tchen stayed on as a senior historian while founding the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and Studies programat New York University, where he taught as a professor until 2018. Last year, he assumed the role of director of the Rutgers University Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience.
20世纪70年代，陈国维（John Kuo Wei Tchen）从威斯康星州的研究生院毕业，搬到纽约市，开始参与亚裔美国人运动。他很快就加入了地下室工作坊（Basement Workshop），负责管理亚裔美国人资源中心（Asian American Resource Center）。由于找不到任何关于纽约唐人街历史的文件、照片和个人故事档案，陈先生意识到这个亚洲以外最大的华人社区的历史被忽略了。1980年，他和地下室工作坊的同事黎重旺（Charlie Lai）利用亚裔美国人资源中心（Asian American Resource Center）中的材料，共同创立了纽约唐人街历史项目（New York Chinatown History Project）。陈先生和该项目的其他工作人员一起从街道和垃圾箱中拯救了曼哈顿唐人街的历史物件。他对唐人街洗衣店的研究成为了该项目的第一个展览“八磅生涯”（Eight Pound Livelihood）的基础。在接下来的几十年里，该项目逐渐发展成为美国华人博物馆，陈先生继续为MOCA担任资深历史学家，同时在纽约大学（New York University）创立了亚太美国研究所和研究专业（Asian/Pacific/American Institute and Studies program），并在那里担任教授，直到2018年，也就是去年，他去了罗格斯大学（Rutgers University），并接受了该大学专注于民族、文化与现代经验的克莱蒙特研究所 （Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience）所长的职位。
Countdown to the TCS NYC Marathon on November 3, 2019: 216 Days.
2019年是美国第一条横贯大陆铁路建成150周年，为了纪念第一批华人来美建设这条铁路所做出的巨大贡献， MOCA将其2019 TCS NYC Marathon的活动命名为 MOCA Spike 150 – Running Forward With Our Stories！ 鼓励大家通过马拉松公益跑，全国线上接力，以及一天一个故事的方式讲述150个华人的历史故事，敬请大家持续关注， 讲出华人自己的故事，回顾过去，立足现在，展望未来，共同书写美国历史，使之更加充实完整。