An old museum is getting a new home to display the rich heritage and history of Chinese Americans. NY1's Shazia Khan filed the following report.

With traditional fanfare, the Museum of the Chinese in America, or MOCA, unveiled its new home Tuesday in Soho.

Maya Lin, the artist and architect behind the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C., designed the museum located on 215 Centre Street. The second generation Chinese-American says the project was a labor of love.

"I'm from Ohio and people would go, 'Ohio!, what are you doing in Ohio?' because they always assume you're east coast or west coast and again I think an important thing about a narrative history museum is to really change preconceptions, change stereotypes ask a lot of questions," Lin said.

Lin's friend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was on hand for Tuesday's grand opening as were MOCA's two founders. Thirty years ago, Charles Lai and John Kuo Wei Tchen established the museum on the second floor of a building in Chinatown to preserve a history that they say had started to erode.

"Thirty years ago we were dumpster diving," Tchen said. "Chinatown was going through a dramatic change at that time in which some of the leases for the buildings in Chatham Square for example had 99-year leases and they were just ending, so people were just tossing out things left and right photographs documents artifacts so we were just trying to gather this."

Today, MOCA houses the history of Chinese Americans from the 1850s through the present day and now with its new space it can be better displayed. The new home is five times that of the original location and features a skylit courtyard and two entrances -- one on Centre Street and the other on Lafayette. Lin says the design is both functional and symbolic.

"If you think about Chinese Americans we're from the east and we've made our home in the west," Lin said.

One section of the museum encourages all visitors of Chinese descent to share their journey.

"Our most recent story was a man from Chinese descent who came from Cuba before he came to New York and we're really excited about it because it's a story that's very common but isn't told very often," said Alexis Perlmutter of MOCA.

For more information on the museum, go to MOCANYC.org.