Fay Chew Matsuda, Steward of Chinese Immigrant Legacy, Dies at 71 (original) (raw)
New York|Fay Chew Matsuda, Steward of Chinese Immigrant Legacy, Dies at 71
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A social worker turned preservationist, she directed the Museum of Chinese in America. “Sometimes it was literally dumpster-diving,” she said of rescuing artifacts.
Fay Chew Matsuda at the Museum of Chinese in America in 2013. She was a social worker in New York’s Chinatown and a preserver of its history.Credit...via Barnard College
Aug. 10, 2020
Fay Chew Matsuda, a first-generation Chinese-American who devoted her career as an amateur museum curator to preserving the heritage of overlooked generations of immigrants from China, died on July 24 at her home in Sound Beach, N.Y., on Long Island’s North Shore. She was 71.
The cause was endometrial cancer, her daughter, Amy Matsuda, said.
Ms. Matsuda was instrumental in transforming the New York Chinatown History Project, a grass roots campaign to save vanishing artifacts and record eyewitness reminiscences, into a permanent legacy of Chinese immigration.
By 1991, the History Project had morphed into the Museum of Chinese in America, or MoCA. Ms. Matsuda served as the executive director of MoCA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side from 1997 to 2006.
She described the incubation of both the History Project and the museum as an urgent campaign to collect, restore and protect irreplaceable ephemera — including a unique cache of scripts and costumes from early 20th-century Cantonese operas, signage from old storefronts, photographs, diaries and newspaper clippings.
“Sometimes it was literally dumpster-diving,” Ms. Matsuda said in the Barnard College alumni magazine in 2013. (She was a 1971 graduate.) She added, “We were trying to recover history that was quickly being lost.”
The museum’s archives also include interviews with immigrants more concerned about striving for their children than about conserving their past.
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