Moving Sidewalk

The Times reports that the Museum of Chinese in America has moved to a much larger space at 211-215 Centre St in Manhattan. Its new home, designed by Maya Lin, is in a former industrial machine repair shop.

Exhibits are still moving into the building, which is open Thursdays only through the summer. (They also offer walking tours of Chinatown on Saturdays.) The grand opening is set for Sept. 22. Until then, you can read a lot more about it in the Times. It sounds terrific!

Dan Ziskie has taken some nice photos in Chinatown. The New York Times has put up a slideshow, Neighborhood Faces.

Today’s Times City section has three stories of Moving Sidewalk interest:

Caroline Dworin writes about the men at a Serbian-American social club in Glendale, Queens, and their displeasure with impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich;

Sophia Hollander writes about a project to define the boundaries of Manhattan’s Chinatown, whose Chinese population is decreasing and which faces the threat of high-rise development due to a recent rezoning that protects large swaths of nearby neighborhoods;

and Joseph Huff-Hannon interviews Marcos Silva de Paula, a Brazilian immigrant who was making a decent living as a shoeshine man until the economic collapse, and whose family now plans to return to Brazil.

The Museum of Chinese in America will give a walking tour, with shopping and tasting, from 1  to 2:30 pm Saturday, Jan. 17, to show Chinatown’s preparations for the Year of the Ox, which begins January 26. Tickets are $15 ($12 for seniors and students), and the tour meets on the second floor of the museum at 70 Mulberry St. If you can’t make it, they’ll also have walking tours on Jan. 24 and 31.

Farther south, on Sunday, Jan. 18, the Staten Island Zoo gears up for the holiday with “unique crafts and special feeding and presentations showcasing the zoo’s Chinese horoscope animals.” That’s a cool idea, and it’s a nice little zoo with a great batch of rattlesnakes. Activities run from 1:30 to 3:30 pm, and admission is $7 for adults, $4 for children. The zoo is at 614 Broadway on Staten Island. You can get there on the S53 bus from Bay Ridge or by taking the S48 bus at the ferry terminal; see their website for directions.

Back in October, Steven Kurutz of the Times interviewed writer Henry Chang, who was born and raised in Chinatown, about his detective novels Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog. This is a great opportunity to get a peek inside a Chinatown that’s not open to tourists, to say the least. “I tried to make the atmosphere as real as possible,” Chang says.

Chang will read from Year of the Dog, published this month by Soho Press, at 7 pm Thursday, Nov. 20, at the Museum of Chinese in America, 70 Mulberry St, 2nd floor. Free.

I don’t like fairy tales; they tend to be told in broad strokes, and I like details & complexity. But Year of the Fish, a film by David Kaplan now showing in Manhattan, completely won me over. It’s a Cinderella story set in Chinatown and done in Rotoscope animation, where the movie is shot with actors and then traced frame by frame.

The layer of animation is crucial, because otherwise you’d be looking at the reality and alert to any break in plausibility. But the animation (and the narration by the fish) allows the story not only to indulge in supernatural elements but to make use of many details of the here and now.

What really makes it work for me are the faces of the people—they all look like people I know or I’ve seen. I see that some reviewers feel there’s too much of a conflict between gritty modern detail and fairy tale sentimentality. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what’s great about it. And, in the end, it shows a moving generosity to all its main characters, even the rotten ones.

Plus, it’s persistently beautiful.