As the story goes, it was the late seventies, and Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai began noticing all the old junk left out on the curb in New York’s Chinatown. It was left behind by the neighborhood’s old-timers as they passed away: luggage, clothing, personal papers, mementos. Many of them had come to America for work in the first half of the twentieth century, only to never make their way back home. They never imagined themselves as part of a history here; some were in denial that you could call this new place a home at all.

Tchen, a historian, and Lai, a community organizer, had met in the early seventies at the Basement Workshop, a Chinatown hub for activists and artists. Tchen was often frustrated by how hard it was to find the documents, photographs, and letters necessary to write a history of Chinatown. It turns out that many of these materials weren’t in libraries but in dumpsters. Tchen, Lai, and others began salvaging as much stuff as they could. The New York Chinatown History Project began at 44 East Broadway in 1980. Four years later, it moved to 70 Mulberry Street, taking up the second floor of a rickety old schoolhouse. In 2009, the newly renamed Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) relocated to a large, custom-designed space on Centre Street. The bulk of its collections stayed behind at the schoolhouse.

Last Thursday night, 70 Mulberry Street caught on fire, likely destroying much of the museum’s collection of some eighty-five thousand items. Besides the collection, the building, which was owned by the city, also houses a dance center, a senior citizens’ center, a vocational training office, and an athletics association. As of now, the cause of the fire remains unknown. Firefighters worked through the night to contain the damage. There were a few injuries, but nobody died. MOCA staffers kept a vigil, watching water pour through the building. They won’t be allowed back in for weeks, at which point most of the materials will likely be unsalvageable. Only about forty thousand items had been catalogued and digitized. Among the objects in danger of being lost: paper fans, books and magazines, photographs, printing blocks; old records, recital programs, and musical instruments; flyers announcing social services and open jobs; restaurant menus and signage; suitcases, cigarette cartons, old newspapers, immigration documents, and passports; film reels and lobby posters from legendary Chinatown theatres; irons, washboards, spool holders, and laundry tickets; wooden dolls, a plastic toy of a man being pulled in a rickshaw, opera costumes, silk jackets, embroidered slippers; a hand-painted T-shirt from a comedy troupe that only ever performed once.

As Nancy Bulalacao, who formerly worked as the museum’s director of public programs, wrote on Instagram, the heart of MOCA has always been its collection. The museum’s name changes and the staff turns over, the mandate evolves. Even the meaning of who is centered in the “Chinese in America” part shifts over time. These immigrants came for the railroads, or to run laundries and restaurants, and now they’re engineers. Now they’re from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and not the mainland. Now they’re from Fujian. Now they’re young, middle-class college students, not old laundry workers. Now they settle first in Sunset Park or Flushing or Elmhurst, not Manhattan. Now to call it Chinese sounds monolithic and strange. Every new generation contributes to the collection in their own way.

I co-curated “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a show about music and the Chinese-immigrant experience, at MOCA last year, and, when we were gathering materials, I was genuinely shocked at how difficult it was to locate good ephemera—family photos of recitals, old mixtapes or concert T-shirts, ticket stubs. Admittedly, I am a pack rat who, until recently, kept a folder of my family’s old phone bills from 1985. (I liked the typefaces.) But, at a time when there’s no greater social currency than a photo of you as a power-clashing twelve-year-old holding up your favorite CD, I found it odd that very few people still had those physical photographs, let alone any of the items in them. (Admittedly, I also still have my favorite jacket from when I was three.) When I asked my parents and their friends, I often heard the same answer: nothing seemed worth keeping. Perhaps, as I wrote in a piece last August, it was simply a part of the immigrant mentality. You might save soap by fusing together old bars, or sheath your remote control in plastic to protect it from dust and wear. But you view yourself as marginal, and self-archiving can feel like a waste of time, or a bit too hubristic.

All that remains of MOCA’s archive might be what is currently on premises at the museum. Somewhat ironically, its current show, “Gathering: Collecting and Documenting Chinese American History,” is about the very nature of preservation and collection. The curators Herb Tam and Andrew Rebatta, assisted by Sojin Kim and David Lei, asked Chinese historical societies and museums across the country to lend them a single item from their respective collections. Some of these artifacts vibrate more than others. There’s an old clothing iron, a horseshoe modified by Chinese workers to help their horses trudge through mud, a calendar from a local herbalist. And there are event calendars and commemorative T-shirts of more recent vintage. As a whole, one gets a sense of the collective spirit uniting these organizations. For some, it’s about the mystical bonds of history. For others, in far-away locales, it’s just about having a space for people to come together.

“Gathering” hints at some of the challenges of keeping historically minded organizations viable at a time when people seem uninterested in the past. We live in a moment when minimalism is a virtue, when it’s become a mantra to keep around only things that, in the words of the tidying guru Marie Kondo, “spark joy.” The past is joy, but it also consists of struggle, confusion, moments that evade easy emotional categorization. Places like MOCA stand a bit outside of the rhythms and currents of our present, in order to point at unfollowed paths of possibility. American life, the Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong remarked, is about looking forward. He visited the United States in the forties and was especially bemused by Superman, the human embodiment of possibility, hurtling ever forward. Americans believed in superheroes, but not in ghosts. Ghosts draw you into the past. They are history.

The fire comes at a particularly odd time for MOCA. It moved from Mulberry to its current location, which was designed by the architect Maya Lin, in 2009. Over the past decade, institutions and nonprofit spaces throughout New York have felt the pinch of development and rising rents, and MOCA, which leases its current location, is no exception. For decades, those who lived outside of Chinatown regarded it as an exotic enclave, and it was largely left alone. It certainly didn’t represent opportunity. Outside of the Financial District, few neighborhoods were hit as hard by 9/11 than Chinatown.

Things change. The cafeteria that once sold impossibly cheap Chinese food becomes an upscale diner. Chinatown is transforming, occasionally at the hands of people with roots in the neighborhood, and the museum has been a part of debates about who is benefitting. In October, city officials went against local sentiment and moved forward with plans for a new jail in Chinatown. To soften the blow, the city, often seen as a half-hearted supporter of Chinatown arts and culture, pledged to improve nearby housing developments and parks. MOCA would receive a substantial grant toward finding a permanent home.