Photos: MARSEA Chinatown Tour Highlights Community Pride and Irresistible Taste Treats

_{Above: MARSEA students view artist Jess X. Snow's mural "In the Future Our Asian Community Is Safe" on Mosco Street in Manhattan's Chinatown on April 10, 2026.}

 Lucky members of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute community got to experience Chinese American cultural heritage firsthand earlier this month, when the Institute convened a Friday afternoon walking tour of Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood for students in its Master of Arts in Regional Studies: East Asia (MARSEA) program. 

MARSEA students Ella Choi, Ludovica Duchini, Dazhong Jin, Timothy Meng, Andrew Small, and Zihan Zhang were joined by Rachel Fils-Aime (Columbia ‘28) and Hua Lin Hsu, Weatherhead’s Program Manager of Administration, for a 2-½-hour outing that devoted equal time to local history and mouth-watering snacks.   

_{Above: MARSEA tour group in Manhattan's Chinatown on April 10, 2026.}

New York City tour company Mott Street Girls, which has been featured on the NBC TODAY show, led the excursion. Guides shared stories of the Chinatown community’s resilience throughout more than a century and a half of societal pressures, ranging from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the wave of anti-Asian bigotry triggered by the COVID pandemic earlier this decade. Gentrification was a recurring theme, with attention paid to the threat that ever-rising rents and redevelopment pose to the community’s traditional base of mom-and-pop businesses.

_{Above: Entrance to the Mahayana Temple on Canal Street.} 

The group’s culinary odyssey began at Fong On, a family tofu shop founded in Chinatown nearly a century ago. There they enjoyed tofu milk and tofu pudding before moving on to several other local eateries where they sampled fried dumplings, sticky rice dumplings, mochi donuts, and sponge cakes. In between bouts of gorging, the students learned about mural projects, a onetime gang headquarters, bookstores, and New York City’s largest Buddhist temple — all testifying to the vitality of the surrounding streets.

Enjoy some additional photos of the MARSEA group outing below — and don't be surprised if you start to experience hunger pangs before you're done scrolling. 

Thanks to Rachel Fils-Aime (Columbia ‘28) for her assistance in preparing this article.