From China to Chinatown: Poy Gum Lee and the Politics of Self-Representation, 1945-1960

Abstract

The search for a national architectural identity in China during the Republican era (1911-1949) is well documented, in particular the emergence of hybrid styles blending essentialized Chinese forms with Western materials and typologies. This paper explores how ideas of architectural nationalism originating in China during the 1920s and 1930s were transferred to New York’s Chinatown during the 1940s and 1950s in service of the Republic of China (ROC) and its Kuomintang (KMT) political party. Chinese American architect Poy Gum Lee (1900-1968), unique as an American-born member of the first generation of professional Chinese architects, aided in this transfer. After twenty years in China, Lee’s repatriation to New York in 1945 placed him in Chinatown at a critical moment of ROC/KMT cultural and political claim-staking as well as Chinese American identity formation. In 1946, Lee was engaged to lead the Chinatown Building Project (CBP), an ROC-backed effort to promote itself as the legitimate Chinese government through displays of Chinese culture. Rather than aiding the ROC, the CBP and a concurrent ROC-backed slum clearance effort, the China Village Plan, unfolding against the backdrop of American immigration reform and anti-Communist paranoia, paradoxically helped affirm Chinese American identity.