In the 1980s, new Chinese immigrants to New York began to settle on 8th Avenue in Brooklyn rather than the already established Manhattan Chinatown. This community slowly grew throughout the ’80s and ’90s and is now seen as one of the three major Chinatowns in the five boroughs. In 1999, MOCA worked with the Brooklyn Historical Society to explore the growth of this new community. Together, the two institutions put up the show A Good Place to Land One’s Feet: Brooklyn’s New Chinese Community.

While the exhibition happened in 1999, the two institutions had their eyes on the blossoming new Chinatown of Sunset Park in Brooklyn. In 1993, the two organizations began jointly documenting the neighborhood by conducting a series of oral histories with the residents. A selection of those oral histories can be found in MOCA’s online database.