A new permanent exhibition at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles has been nine years in the making, as old as the museum itself.
Origins is the third permanent museum at CAM and looks at the role Chinese Americans have played in the community in the last decade.
“It is to be the next installment in the story told by the museum,” Museum Executive Director Michael Duchemin told LA Downtown News. “It began with the Journeys exhibition, which looks at where people came from as they arrived in the United States. Then came the Sun Wing Wo Store, an immersion environment that shows what life was like in historic Chinatown from the turn of the century to the 1950s. The next step is to look at what has been the culture and the community of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles.”
The exhibition has three parts–historic Chinatown, New Chinatown and the first Chinese American suburb, Monterey Park. Additional material can be found on the museum’s web site.