Discovering the Chinese American Community Press in Mid-Century New York City – The Library of Congress (.gov)

Discovering the Chinese American Community Press in Mid-Century New York City  The Library of Congress (.gov)

Youth magazines from New York City’s Chinatown in the 1940s-60s reveal how young Chinese American New Yorkers navigated identity, forged Chinatown's community, and established a unique sense of place. (The following is a post by Zoe Wennerholm, Junior Fellow, Asian Division, Summer 2026) The Asian Division at the Library of Congress holds a collection of over 8,000 titles of 20th-century Chinese magazines and serials. These publications encompass a huge range of subjects, including science and technology, politics and propaganda, literature and the arts, women’s issues, history and religion, and more. While much of this collection has been catalogued for researcher access, a large subset has not yet been integrated into the Library’s online catalog.

As a Junior Fellow for 10 weeks in the summer of 2026, I recorded bibliographic information in Chinese, pinyin romanization, and English for over 1,000 uncatalogued items. This information will help catalogers add these titles to the catalog, where researchers can discover the collection’s breadth and richness and request items for access in the Asian Reading Room. Chinese-language journalism in the United States began shortly after the first wave of Chinese immigration to California in the mid-19th century. The first few Chinese-language newspapers, the Golden Hills News (Jin shan ri xin lu 金山日新錄), The Oriental (Dong ya xin lu 東涯新錄), and the Sacramento Daily News (Sha