Image 1: A 1/2 inch open-reel videotape from the Asian CineVision records (Photo by Klavier J. Wang). 

This post is authored by Klavier J. Wang, PhD, who recently finished an internship in the audiovisual archives of NYU Special Collections. A scholar of Hong Kong cultural history, Wang is currently a graduate student in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program. 

Image 2: Cover of Hong Kong Popular Culture (2019) written by this post’s author, Klavier J. Wang.

Being Hong Kongese, I am proud of the multi-cultural character of my hometown, a free port city for over a century, one that welcomes sojourners of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Some of them make their homes in this tropical city of Hong Kong, while others sail off to different parts of the world, among which the United States of America has been a popular destination. As a scholar, the history of Chinese migration has been my academic interest. In 2020, I published the monograph Hong Kong Popular Culture: Worlding Film, Television, Pop Music which delineates how the evolution of these three cultural formats intersects with geopolitical dynamics and Chinese migration history. 

In New York City, which hosts the country’s most vibrant Chinese American community, and at NYU Special Collections where I recently completed an internship working on an archive closely related to Chinese immigrants and media culture, my scholarly interest converged with real-life experience. 

This magical journey of rediscovery commences with a class visit to NYU Libraries’ Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department in the summer of 2019. In the media preservation lab, a video on a television monitor, from a U-Matic tape in the middle of digitization, caught my attention. Within the fuzzy images, I saw scenes of Chinatown which were nostalgic yet intriguing to me. People were dressed in 1980s fashions, speaking Cantonese, my mother tongue, and the lingua franca in Chinatowns across the world. I was amazed to see scenes of Chinese people in a picket-line during a labor rights demonstration, bringing forth a hidden face of Chinese Americans who were usually portrayed as “hardworking”, “book-smart” and “model minority”, but rarely as politically active. 

Image 3: A screen capture from a CCTV broadcast on February 3rd, 1980. Participants in a nighttime labor strike wear signs outside the House of Chan restaurant. (Asian Cinevision Records, TAM 416, Video 226, Cuid9272, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University)

Image 4: A box of U-Matic tapes from the Asian Cinevision collection with the CCTV logo on them (Photo by Klavier J. Wang).

Very soon, I learned that the video was from a collection called Asian CineVision Records (call no. TAM.416), part of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Archives at NYU Special Collections. Asian CineVision originated in Manhattan’s Chinatown as a  grassroots media arts collective which presented community television programs, organized Asian American film festivals, and published art magazines. The video I saw in the preservation lab stems from its community television production – Chinese Cable Television (CCTV). 

The Asian CineVision Records consist of 314.25 linear feet of material,  which includes over 500 videotapes of different formats (mostly 1/2 inch open-reel and U-Matic) originating from CCTV. However, after its transfer to NYU from Asian CineVision in 2007, the collection was thinly described due to the spoken language in most of the media productions – Cantonese – which is a different system from the official language of China, Mandarin. Being a native Cantonese speaker, a Chinese migration history scholar, and an in-training audiovisual archivist, I was granted the opportunity to enhance the discoverability of this collection, privileged to glimpse into these vivid moving image records of Chinese Americans’ social, cultural, and political life in the 1970s-80s. 

It is presumed that CCTV represents the first community-based television station in the United States to serve the Chinese American community’s social and cultural needs. Social service programs that helped new immigrants adapt to the new host country were broadcast on CCTV, namely information about free English lessons, vocational training schools, daycare centers, and so on. 

Image 5: Screen capture from a CCTV broadcast, February 24th, 1980. Participants cooking vegetables and meat in a culinary class provided to Chinese immigrants by the China Institute (Asian Cinevision Records, TAM 416, Video 229, Cuid9275, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University).

Unlike other ethnic media outfits that focused on news from the emigrants’ hometown and their own cultural life, CCTV strived to lead Chinese Americans into America’s mainstream political life through broadcasting international and national news, and to strengthen the political dimension of Chinese American through extensive news coverage on civil rights movements (e.g. labor strikes, tenants’ right movements) and inviting Chinese Americans from different backgrounds to voice their opinions on public issues. 

Milestone events extensively covered by CCTV include but not limited to: the visit of First Lady Rosalynn Carter to Chinatown to have fundraising for President Carter’s presidential reelection – an event epitomizing the inclusion of Chinese Americans in mainstream American politics; the 1980 labor strike at Silver Palace – then the largest Chinese restaurant (which received First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s visit); the half-year-long demonstration in 1980-1981 that opposed the gentrification-oriented Special Manhattan Bridge Project.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Movements which stormed the country since the 1960s, Asian Americans joined forces to make their voices heard. The establishment of Asian CineVision and CCTV were results of this movement. Even though the population size of the Chinese dominated other Asian ethnicities, Asian CineVision strived to reflect the growth of an overarching, self-actualizing Asian American identity and met the increasing need for an Asian American media organization based in New York (more on “History of Asian CineVision” at https://www.asiancinevision.org/history/).  CCTV broadcasted news about the Asian American experience and showcased programs on Asian American history and culture, such as the English-language drama plays penned by prominent Asian American playwright Henry David Hwang and performed by Asian American actors (e.g. John Lone), namely FOB, The Dance and The Railroad, which were featured in CCTV programs in 1980. 

Image 6: Screen capture from a CCTV broadcast, March 09th 1980. First Lady, Rosalynn Carter gives a speech in a Chinatown restaurant (Asian Cinevision Records, TAM 416, Video 231, Cuid9277, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University).

Image 7: Screen capture from a CCTV broadcast, April 4th, 1982. Anti-Eviction protestors hang a sign that opposes the Special Manhattan Bridge Project (Asian Cinevision Records, TAM 416, Video 324, Cuid15089, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University).

While one can easily tell the historical and cultural value just by glimpsing the contents of the Asian CineVision Records, only around 100 CCTV broadcast tapes have been digitized and made accessible to researchers in need. Challenges to increase discoverability of the audiovisual materials from Asian CineVision Records include a shortage of resources to facilitate digitization, absence of a continuous supply of archivists/student workers who have enough Cantonese competence to unearth the content, and lack of outreach activities to spread the words about this collection. Funding sources are being sought, and community collaborative forces are needed to enhance the accessibility of this hidden gem. 

During my internship, I completed writing file-level descriptions for 109 episodes of CCTV tapes. The episodes are broadcast programs aired during 1980-1982. The descriptions will be ingested to the archival management system and made available on finding aids before Fall 2020. Researchers and students interested in Chinatown history, community media, and social movements are welcomed to access them through the finding aids of Asian CineVision records, and users are also encouraged to check out digitized broadcast tapes by making a request to NYU Special Collections. 

Can’t wait to taste a bit of the nostalgic Chinatown? Check this out for a compilation of CCTV highlights!