A New Year, a New Lens: What We Choose to Remember

12 West Court Street | George Lim | 1960s

The start of a new year invites reflection. We set intentions, look back at what shaped us, and imagine what comes next. But a new year is also a moment to ask harder questions: What histories are we carrying forward and which ones have been left behind? As we step into 2026, Cincinnati’s past offers an opportunity not just for remembrance but for reconsideration and reclamation.

Cincinnati’s historical narrative has long been told through a Black-and-white framework. While those histories are essential, they have also shaped what and who has been excluded. Asian and Asian American experiences remain largely absent from the city’s dominant story. This absence is not accidental. As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us in Silencing the Past, power operates not only through what is spoken, but through what is rendered silent.

In researching early Chinese migration to Cincinnati, I encountered this silence repeatedly. Beyond scattered newspaper articles, census entries, and business directories, little remains to tell us who these individuals were beyond racialized labels. The archive records their existence, but rarely their humanity. Chinese migrants appear as laborers, laundries, or curiosities, rarely as people navigating an unfamiliar city with hope, fear, and resilience.

These silences shape how we understand the past. They suggest that Asian Americans were incidental to Cincinnati’s development, rather than active participants in its economic and social life. Yet the evidence, however fragmented, tells another story. By the 1870s, Chinese migrants had begun opening laundries and small businesses along West Sixth Street and nearby corridors. They carved out livelihoods in a city that was overwhelmingly white and often hostile to their presence.

Cincinnati Post, January 22, 1898

The problem is not a lack of history; it is how history has been framed. Official records reduce lives to data points. Newspapers often relied on dehumanizing language, reinforcing stereotypes rather than illuminating experience. This is where historical inquiry must do more than compile facts. It must interrogate the archive itself.

As we enter a new year, we can choose to read these records differently. We can ask not only what is documented, but why certain stories were preserved while others were ignored. We can recognize silence as a product of power, not absence. And we can begin the work of reframing Cincinnati’s history to include those who have long been written out of it.

A new year does not erase the past, but it gives us a chance to tell it more honestly.