Tracing the evolution of CSA to CSSA at Poly

Section 1 What did “Chinese” mean at Poly?

This exhibit traces the changing meaning of Chinese student organizing at Polytechnic’s Brooklyn campus, now NYU Tandon School of Engineering. It began with a simple archival question: when did a Chinese student organization first appear in the Polywog yearbooks, and how did that organization relate to the later CSSA-style model of Chinese student organizing?

The yearbooks complicated that question. They do not show a clean, linear transition from one organization to another. Instead, they show a shifting story of visibility, naming, and belonging. A “Chinese Club” appeared in Polywog in 1967. A year later, a “Chinese Student Association” appeared with Traditional Chinese characters on the page. The 1970s record then becomes quiet, even though a 1970 Poly Reporter budget report suggests that CSA still had some administrative presence. In the 1980s, Chinese New Year became highly visible as a campus cultural event. By the 2000s, the yearbooks no longer present “Chinese” as one stable umbrella category: they show Chinese Student Society, Taiwan Student Club / Taiwanese Student Club, Chinese Engineering Organization, and Chinese Student Scholar Association as related but distinct forms.

My argument is that Chinese student organizing at Poly developed through three overlapping shifts: visibility, political naming, and cultural framing. In the late 1960s, Chinese student organizing became visible during a period when the United States still recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the legal government of China. In the 1980s, CSA appeared not only as a student support group, but also as a producer of campus-facing cultural events like Chinese New Year. In the 2000s, “Chinese” became more fragmented in the yearbook record, as Taiwanese, Chinese, and scholar/professional identities appear in separate organizations.

This history matters as a student organization is not just a club. A club name, a yearbook caption, a budget line, a group photo, or a cultural performance can reveal how students made community, how the school represented student life, and how global politics shaped local campus identity. Di Luo’s study of Chinese students in the United States shows that Chinese overseas education developed through different historical waves, especially the post-1978 wave of mainland Chinese students (Luo 1–2). Xiaoan Li’s study of CSSA organizations shows that Chinese student organizations often create belonging, social support, cultural connection, and adjustment for Chinese students at U.S. universities (Li 94–97, 111). Those sources help me read Poly’s yearbooks not simply as pictures of clubs, but as evidence of how belonging was organized and remembered.

Useful terms list

Poly / Polytechnic / Tandon: Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn later became Polytechnic University, then affiliated with NYU in 2008. The merger with NYU became official in 2014, and the school was renamed NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2015 (“Our History: Roots of Greatness”).

CSA: In this exhibit, CSA refers to the Chinese Student Association, the student organization appearing in Poly’s yearbook record beginning in the late 1960s.

CSSA: CSSA refers to the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (“NYU Engage”). In this exhibit, I use “CSSA-style” to describe a later model of Chinese student organizing that often includes students and scholars, graduate students, professional networking, and usually broader external connections for profit.

ROC / PRC / Taiwan: ROC means Republic of China, the government that relocated to Taiwan after 1949. PRC means People’s Republic of China, founded in mainland China in 1949. The United States did not establish formal diplomatic relations with the PRC until 1979, when it recognized the PRC as the sole legal government of China while maintaining unofficial relations with Taiwan (Office of the Historian, “China Policy”).

Section 2 China, Taiwan, and the Problem of Names

One of the hardest parts of this project is that “Chinese” is not a simple word in the archive.

When the 1968 yearbook labels a club “Chinese Student Association,” the word “Chinese” may look obvious at first. But it was not politically simple. After 1949, the People’s Republic of China governed mainland China, while the Republic of China government remained on Taiwan. The United States continued to recognize the ROC on Taiwan for decades. The Office of the Historian explains that in 1978 the United States and the PRC announced that they would recognize one another, and that as part of the 1979 agreement, the United States recognized the PRC government as the sole legal government of China and withdrew diplomatic recognition from Taiwan/ROC (“China Policy”).

This matters because a U.S. yearbook category from the late 1960s may reflect more than student identity. It may reflect diplomatic language, Chinese-language practice, immigration patterns, and the way American institutions understood “China” at the time.

Table 1 in Luo’s thesis helps show that Chinese student mobility to the United States existed before 1949, but at a much smaller scale than the post-1978 wave (16). The number of Chinese students studying in the United States rose from 2,770 in 1980/81 to 194,029 in 2011/12 (Luo 19).

Left: Numbers of Chinese Students Studying in America from 1850 to 1949 (Luo, 16). Right: Numbers of Chinese Students Studying in America from 1980 to 2012 (Luo, 19)

A longer policy timeline helps explain why “Chinese” was unstable before the 2000s. In 1943, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion laws, but the repeal did not create equal immigration access. The Office of the Historian notes that the new quota for Chinese immigration was only about 105 visas per year, and that the quota was still defined ethnically: Chinese immigrants from anywhere in the world could be counted against the Chinese quota (“Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act”). The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 changed this older structure more dramatically. The House History page explains that Hart-Celler ended the national-origins quota system, prioritized family reunification and skilled immigration, and created new opportunities for immigrants from Asian countries (“Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965”). For this project, that matters because the CSA appears only a few years after the 1965 law. The club’s first yearbook visibility should therefore be read alongside a changing immigration system, not only alongside campus life.

At the same time, mainland China was not producing the same kind of U.S.-bound student migration that became familiar after 1978. Huang, Phillips, Yang, and Zhang argue that the Cultural Revolution deprived Chinese students of higher education opportunities for ten years, when colleges and universities were closed from 1966 to 1976 (Huang et al.). That does not directly explain every student at Poly, but it helps frame the absence of mainland-PRC student mobility in the late 1960s and 1970s. In other words, U.S. immigration law was open in limited ways after 1965, but mainland China’s own political and educational conditions made PRC student migration unlikely before the post-1978 reforms.

Besides the 1979 agreement, the student migration data also pictures the background. The Institute of International Education’s Open Doors project is a major source for international student data in the United States, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and supported by IIE (“Open Doors”). An IIE China fact sheet notes that China sent no students to the United States from the 1950s until 1974/75, while Chinese student numbers grew dramatically in the 1980s (“Open Doors Fact Sheet: China”). Luo uses this historical pattern to argue that the post-1978 wave of Chinese students was distinct from earlier waves of Chinese study abroad (Luo 1–2).

This means that the 1967 and 1968 yearbook pages probably should not be read as early evidence of PRC student organizing. It is more likely that they reflect students connected to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Chinatown networks, overseas Chinese families, or Chinese American communities. I cannot prove every member’s background from a yearbook photo alone, and I do not want to overclaim. But the language and timing suggest that the early CSA belonged to a ROC-era and overseas-Chinese context more than a mainland-PRC one.

Later, in the 2000s, the archive began to separate what the earlier record had left together. Taiwan Student Club appeared in 2003. The Chinese Student Scholar Association appeared in 2006. Taiwanese Student Club appeared in 2009. These names are not just administrative changes. They show that by the 2000s, “Chinese,” “Taiwanese,” “student,” “scholar,” “engineering,” and “culture” could become different organizational identities. With the respect to the original titles of primary and secondary sources, as the title itself also preserves archrival information, I will not draw a distinct line with language using “Chinese” or “Taiwanese”.

This is one reason I use the phrase “from CSA to CSSA” carefully. The archive does not prove one direct line from CSA to CSSA. What it does show is a field of changing names. Those names tell us how students and the yearbook made identity legible at different moments. At the same time, it brings a question ——

How I read Polywog in this exhibit

Yearbooks are strange sources. They look familiar, and that can make them feel transparent. A club photo seems to say: this group existed, these students were there, this is how they looked. But a yearbook is not a neutral record of campus life.

Polywog was a curated object. It had editors, photographers, page limits, captions, visual priorities, and probably uneven participation from different student groups. A club may have existed without appearing in the yearbook. An event may have happened without being photographed. A page may show what the editors thought was interesting, attractive, or representative, not everything students experienced.

This matters most in the quiet years. From 1971 through the late 1970s, I found very little CSA evidence in Polywog. It would be easy to say that CSA disappeared. But a 1970 Poly Reporter budget line suggests that the club still had some official presence just as the yearbook record became thin (“Student Council Re-Budget Report.”).

Other non-yearbook sources also show that Chinese and Chinese American networks around Poly were larger than student club pages alone can capture. An undated archival page titled “Polytechnic University & CIE-USA” describes connections between Polytechnic University and the Chinese Institute of Engineers, or CIE (CHINESE AT POLY, undated). This organization was not the same as CSA. CIE-USA describes itself as a nonprofit professional organization of Chinese American engineers, scientists, and other professionals, founded in 1917 (“About CIE-USA”). Its own history says that the original 1917 members were Chinese engineers and students who were studying or receiving practical training in the United States (“About CIE-USA”). The Greater New York chapter history adds that CIE was reactivated in New York in 1953 and later became part of the national CIE-USA structure (“History, Chinese Institute of Engineers - Greater New York Chapter CIEUSA-GNYC.”). In other words, CIE was more professional, alumni-based, and scholar-centered than a regular student club.

That difference is exactly why the source matters. The CIE page connects Poly to Chinese engineers, professors, alumni, and transnational scientific networks, including figures connected to Taiwan, the Republic of China, and Chinese engineering institutions (“Polytechnic University & CIE-USA”). Saxenian and Hsu’s work on the Silicon Valley–Hsinchu connection helps explain the significance of these networks. They argue that U.S.-educated Taiwanese engineers helped create a transnational technical community that moved capital, skill, know-how, and professional contacts between the United States and Taiwan (Saxenian and Hsu 893–94). They also describe CIE as the “grandfather” of Chinese professional organizations in Silicon Valley and explain that CIE helped Chinese and Taiwanese engineers build communication, cooperation, mentoring, job support, and business knowledge (Saxenian and Hsu 902). Later in the same article, they point to CIE-USA achievement awards as evidence of a wider U.S.-Taiwan network of Chinese technologists (Saxenian and Hsu 905). This helps me read the Poly-CIE source not just as a list of accomplished individuals, but as evidence of a wider professional world around Poly.

If Polywog makes Chinese-identifying student life visible mainly through clubs and cultural events, the CIE page points to another layer of Chinese presence at Poly: a world of scholars, engineers, alumni, professional associations, and scientific exchange. That matters for the larger story from CSA to CSSA because the later “students and scholars” model did not appear in an empty space. Even before CSSA appears by name in the yearbook, Poly already had connections to Chinese and Chinese American engineering communities beyond ordinary student life.

So in this exhibit I treat yearbook silence as a question, not an answer. Silence may mean disappearance. It may also mean small membership, weak leadership continuity, editorial neglect, lack of submitted photographs, or events that happened outside the visual memory of the yearbook. The point is not to force the archive to say more than it can. The point is to read its limits honestly.

Section 3 First Visibility: Chinese Club and Chinese Student Association, 1967–1969

Before the late 1960s, the yearbooks I reviewed show little evidence of ethnicity- or nationality-based student organizations. The earlier pages are dominated by technical societies and professional groups. In 1965, a German Club appeared, but it seems more like a language or culture club than an identity-based organization. That makes the 1967 “Chinese Club” page stand out.

The 1967 page is important because it is the first clear yearbook trace I found of a Chinese student group at Poly. It does not tell the whole story. It does not explain why the group formed, who joined, or what it did. But it gives the group a public place in the yearbook.

Caption: Chinese Club, 1967. This is the first clear yearbook trace I found of a Chinese student group at Poly. The page is a starting point, not a full explanation. It shows that by 1967 a Chinese student group was visible enough to be included in Polywog (Polywog 1967, 215).

The next year, the group appeared more formally as the Chinese Student Association. The 1968 page is one of the most important sources in this exhibit because the name appears in English and in Chinese characters. The board reads 中國學生會, written in Traditional Chinese. This detail matters because Traditional Chinese was widely used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many overseas Chinese communities. And given the time of the late 1960s, it also fit a U.S. institutional world that still recognized the ROC rather than the PRC.

I do not want to treat the characters as simple proof of where every student came from. A yearbook page cannot tell us that. But the language does give us a clue. It suggests that the early CSA was being represented through a Chinese-language world different from the simplified-script PRC context many people might think of today.

Caption: Chinese Student Association, 1968. (Polywog 1968, 132). The full page shows CSA as a formal student group. The classroom board, the group portrait, and the English/Chinese naming together make the organization legible inside Poly’s public student-life record.

The 1968 senior index adds an unusually personal trace. It identifies Mei Ho, a mathematics student, as “president, founder, Chinese Student’s Association,” and lists an address on Bayard Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown area. That small line changes the page for me. It turns CSA from a group portrait into a story with a founder, a field of study, and a possible connection to Chinese New York.

Caption: The founder appears in the index. The senior index identifies Mei Ho as “president, founder, Chinese Student’s Association” (Polywog 1968, 245). This small entry is powerful because it connects the club page to a named student leader and to New York City’s Chinese geography.

By 1969, CSA appeared not only as a club with a much larger group photo of 18 people but as an event organizer. The yearbook includes a “Chinese Students Mixer,” which is the first documented activity I found in Polywog. This changes the evidence. A club portrait tells us that the group existed. A mixer tells us that the group created social space.

Caption: Chinese Students Association, 1969. This page shows a CSA group photo of 18 people (Polywog 1969, 92).

Caption: Chinese Students Mixer, 1969. (Polywog 1969, 114). This page shows CSA as an active maker of campus life. The mixer suggests that Chinese student organizing was not only about being represented in a group photo; it was also about gathering, meeting, and building community.

Together, the 1967–1969 sources show the first visible phase of Chinese student organizing at Poly. A club appears. A student association is named. A founder is identified. A mixer is held. The archive gives only fragments, but the fragments point toward community formation.

Section 4 The Quiet Years: What Does Absence Mean?

After 1969, the yearbook record became much quieter.

In my review of the 1970s Polywog yearbooks, I did not find consistent CSA club pages or Chinese New Year activity pages. In some years, I found no clear reference at all. This kind of absence can be frustrating. It creates a gap right after the club first becomes visible.

But one non-yearbook source complicates the gap. A 1970 Poly Reporter Student Council Re-Budget Report lists CSA with budgeted funds, actual spending, a funding request, and a re-budgeted amount. That line suggests that CSA still had some official presence in 1970, even if it was not being visually featured in the yearbook.

Caption: CSA in the budget, 1970. (“Student Council Re-Budget Report.”) This budget line gives non-yearbook evidence of CSA’s presence. It shows why the project cannot rely on Polywog alone: the yearbook may be quiet even when the organization still exists administratively.

The quiet years also sit inside a larger historical silence. According to the IIE China fact sheet, China sent no students to the United States from the 1950s until 1974/75, and Chinese student numbers grew dramatically in the 1980s (“Open Doors Fact Sheet: China”). Luo uses this pattern to explain why the post-1978 student wave was different from earlier Chinese study-abroad patterns (Luo 1–2). At the same time, Taiwan-origin and overseas Chinese students were already present in the United States, so the absence of mainland-PRC students does not mean there were no Chinese-speaking or Chinese-identified students at Poly.

This is why I describe the 1970s as a period of archival quiet, not confirmed disappearance. The yearbook goes quiet, but the archive is not completely silent. The budget line, the broader student-mobility context, and the earlier ROC/Taiwan background all suggest that the story was more complicated than a simple rise and fall.

This section also shows one limit of the project. I still need more evidence from student newspapers, club records, or the “Chinese at Poly” reference file to understand what happened between 1970 and the early 1980s. For now, the responsible claim is modest: CSA became harder to see in Polywog, but it should not be erased from history just because the yearbook stopped showing it.

Section 5 Chinese New Year and Public Culture in the 1980s

By the early and mid-1980s, CSA became visible again in the yearbooks. The group appears in club photos, and Chinese New Year becomes a major visual event.

This is one of the most important changes in the archive. In the late 1960s, the evidence is mostly about the formation of a group: names, faces, a founder, and a mixer. In the 1980s, the evidence shifts toward performance and public culture. Chinese New Year is not just a private gathering. It is photographed, arranged across yearbook pages, and remembered as part of campus life.

The 1985 Chinese New Year pages are especially strong because they show scale and performance. They show that Chinese culture was not only being maintained among Chinese students; it was being presented to the campus. That matters because culture, once placed on a yearbook spread, becomes part of how the institution remembers itself.

Caption: Chinese New Year gala, 1985. This spread presents Chinese New Year as a major campus event. The photos show performance, gathering, and public celebration (Polywog 1985, 49-51). CSA is not only a club here; it is helping produce campus culture.

One detail from the 1985 yearbook complicates the story even more: CSA was open to students of non-Chinese origin. That line changes how I understand the organization. CSA was not only an ethnic or national home for Chinese students. It was also a place where non-Chinese students could participate in Chinese cultural life.

This does not make CSA less meaningful as a Chinese student organization. It makes it more interesting. It suggests that “Chinese” has become a campus cultural category as well as a student identity. Chinese culture could be preserved, shared, performed, and experienced by a wider community.

Caption: Non-Chinese name joins club, 1985. This page preserves the idea that the CSA was not a closed ethnic group. By noting that the organization was open to students of non-Chinese origin, the yearbook suggests CSA as both a student community and a campus-facing cultural space (Polywog 1985, 66).

This is also where research on belonging helps. Gopalan and Brady argue that belonging is connected to persistence, engagement, and mental health in college, and that belonging varies by student background and institution (Gopalan and Brady 134–37). For international and minority students, affinity organizations can therefore matter in ways that are both social and academic. They create rooms where students can recognize one another. They also create public moments where the larger campus is asked to recognize them.

The 1986 yearbook shows Chinese New Year again. That repetition matters because it suggests continuity. Chinese New Year was not a one-time event; it had become part of how Chinese student life could appear in Poly’s public memory.

Caption: Chinese New Year, 1986. (Polywog 1986, 44) The second year of event coverage suggests that Chinese New Year had become a recurring public expression of Chinese student life at Poly.

Section 6 The 1990s: Small Traces, Continued Celebrations

The 1990s are not as visually full as the mid-1980s. In 1992, CSA appears in the yearbook, but my notes show a much smaller group photo with four men. That could mean the group was smaller. It could mean the yearbook gave the group less space. It could also mean that the photographed membership does not represent the full community.

Caption: CSA, 1992. Compared with the large 1980s event spreads, the 1992 CSA photo looks much smaller. This may suggest a smaller visible club presence, but it may also reflect yearbook selection or uneven participation in the yearbook process (Polywog 1992, 69).

The 1990s also belong to a changing New York. Chinese communities in New York City were growing, and Chinese-speaking communities were becoming more geographically diverse. Hsiang-shui Chen’s Chinatown No More focuses on Taiwan immigrants in Queens and argues that post-1965 Taiwan immigration helped create Chinese communities beyond the older Manhattan Chinatown model (Chen). This local context helps explain why “Chinese” and “Taiwanese” might later appear as separate but related identities in Poly’s student organizations.

This does not mean the 1995 event was “Taiwanese” or “mainland Chinese” by default. The photograph alone cannot answer that. But the city context reminds us that Chinese student life at Poly was surrounded by changing Chinese-speaking communities in New York.

Section 7 Divergence in the 2000s: Chinese, Taiwanese, Scholar, Engineering

The 2000s are where the archive changes most clearly. The story is no longer simply “CSA appears” or “CSA disappears.” Instead, the yearbook begins to show several related organizations with different names.

In 2001, Polywog listed the Chinese Student Society. This name is close to CSA, but not identical. “Society” sounds more social and flexible than “association.” The page’s emphasis on friendship, connection, and networking suggests a group that is not only about identity, but also about building relationships on campus.

Caption: Chinese Student Society, 2001. (Polywog 2001, 51) This page marks a naming shift from “association” to “society”, and a long list of people associated. The language suggests friendship, social connection, and networking, pointing to a broader campus role.

In 2003, the Taiwan Student Club appeared. This is one of the clearest turning points in the exhibit. Earlier yearbook pages used “Chinese” as a general label. By 2003, Taiwanese identity was named separately. That separate naming matters because it shows that the archive no longer treats “Chinese” as one simple umbrella.

Caption: Taiwan Student Club, 2003. (Polywog 2003, 31) This page is key evidence for divergence. Taiwanese identity appears as its own student organization rather than being folded into a general Chinese category.

By 2006, the yearbook shows both a Chinese Engineering Organization and a Chinese Student Scholar Association. These names point in another direction: professionalization. The word “engineering” connects identity to field and discipline. The word “scholar” connects the group to the CSSA model, where students, graduate students, researchers, and visiting scholars may all belong to the same organizational world.

Caption: Chinese Engineering Organization, 2006. (Polywog 2006, 35) This page might suggest another form of Chinese student organizing: not only culture or ethnicity, but engineering identity and professional connection.

Caption: Chinese Student Scholar Association, 2006. (Polywog 2006, 36) The word “scholar” is important. It appears for the first time in the yearbook with the acronym of CSSA, where Chinese student organizing may include graduate students, researchers, professional networks, and adjustment support.

The 2009 yearbook brings these threads together. It shows the Taiwanese Student Club and Chinese New Year in neighboring pages. The Taiwanese Student Club page frames the organization around helping incoming Taiwanese students adjust to NYU-Poly and America. That language strongly echoes Li’s discussion of CSSA as a support structure for adjustment and belonging, even though the organization here is Taiwanese rather than a general Chinese association (Li 94–111).

At the same time, Chinese New Year remains visible as a public cultural celebration. That pairing is the clearest evidence for the exhibit’s final argument. Taiwanese student identity becomes separately named, while Chinese culture remains available as a broader campus event.

Caption: Taiwanese Student Club, 2009. The page describes a club that helps Taiwanese students adjust to NYU-Poly and America. It shows Taiwanese identity as a distinct student category with its own support function (Polywog 2009, 115).

Caption: Chinese New Year, 2009. (Polywog 2009, 116-117) These pages show that even as Taiwanese identity became separately named, Chinese New Year Party continued to work as a public campus celebration. The yearbook presents “Chinese” here less as one organization and more as a cultural event shared with the campus.

This is why I call the 2000s a period of divergence rather than simple replacement. CSA did not simply become CSSA in a straight line. Instead, the yearbook shows Chinese-related organizing splitting into several forms: social, cultural, Taiwanese, scholarly, and professional.

Section 8 At the Time When Poly Becomes NYU-Poly, Then Tandon

The yearbook record ended in 2009, but the institutional story continued. In 2008, Polytechnic and NYU formed an affiliation. In 2014, the merger became official, and the school became NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. In 2015, after a major donation from Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon, the school was renamed NYU Tandon School of Engineering (“Engineering Transformed and Story of Renaming”).

This institutional change also changed the environment in which Chinese student organizing existed. By the time Poly became NYU-Poly and then Tandon, the archive had already shown a more complicated history than a direct handoff from CSA to CSSA. In the 2000s yearbooks, “Chinese” student organizing was already divided across several names and purposes: Chinese Student Society, Taiwan Student Club / Taiwanese Student Club, Chinese Engineering Organization, and Chinese Student Scholar Association. The Tandon period should therefore not be read as the simple replacement of CSA by CSSA. Instead, it is better understood as a later stage in a longer history of shifting identity, institutional scale, and student needs.

An interview with current Tandon CSSA leadership helps show what this later stage looks like from inside the organization. When I asked who usually participates in Tandon CSSA activities, the interviewee explained that participants include mainland Chinese students, but also Hong Kong students, ethnic Chinese students, and non-Chinese students. This answer echoes something that appeared much earlier in the archive. In 1985, CSA was described as open to students of non-Chinese origin (Polywog 1985). The current CSSA therefore still has a Chinese-centered identity, but it is not a completely closed ethnic or national space.

The interviewee described the most important function of Tandon CSSA as a “cultural bond.” CSSA does help with practical needs such as airport pickup, new student orientation, social events, and career resources. But these services are connected to a deeper purpose as interviewee said: giving Chinese students a community in an unfamiliar environment. The interviewee explained that as a minority group abroad, Chinese students can experience loneliness, especially during holidays, and may struggle with belonging. In this sense, CSSA functions as both a support network and an emotional home.

Language also shows how CSSA moves between audiences. The interviewee noted that for events such as airport pickup and new student meetings, CSSA asks the school to send bilingual Chinese-English invitations. This bilingual practice may suggest CSSA working as a mediator between Chinese students and the university. Chinese is useful for reaching new students directly and emotionally; English is necessary for official communication, institutional recognition, and wider campus access.

The platforms used by Tandon CSSA also show how student organizing has moved beyond the yearbook model. Earlier CSA visibility depended heavily on whether Polywog photographed a club or event. Today, visibility is spread across digital platforms: WeChat groups, the CSSA WeChat public account, NYU Engage, email, RedNote (Xiaohongshu), and sometimes Eventbrite or AXS. Each platform imagines a slightly different audience. WeChat speaks most directly to Chinese-speaking students. NYU Engage and email connect the organization to the university’s official student life system. RedNote extends the organization into a broader Chinese-language digital public. Eventbrite or AXS can make events more legible to a wider public beyond the immediate club network.

The interview also shows that Tandon CSSA is not separate from the university administration. The interviewee described CSSA’s relationship with offices such as Student Life and OGS as very good and regularly maintained. The school supports CSSA activities, but the organization is mainly operated by students.

For this exhibit, the interview does not “solve” the archival gaps after 2009 given respondents’ direct interest with Tandon CSSA. Instead, it means to help frame them. The yearbook archive showed a changing field of names: CSA (Chinese Student Association), CSS (Chinese Student Society), TSC (Taiwanese Student Club), CEO (Chinese Engineering Organization), and CSSA (Chinese Students & Scholars Association). The interview shows that in the Tandon period, Chinese student organizing continues to be flexible, multilingual, service-oriented, and culturally meaningful. CSSA is not simply the same organization as the 1960s CSA under a new name, but at least from the documentation, it continues some of the same historical functions: making Chinese student life visible, creating community, organizing cultural events, and helping students feel that they belong at Poly/Tandon.

Section 9 Conclusion: A Shifting Archive of Belonging

The story of Chinese students organizing at Poly is not a simple story of one club becoming another club.

It is a story of changing visibility. In 1967 and 1968, Chinese student organizing became visible in the yearbook. In the 1970s, it became harder to see. In the 1980s, it returned through group photos and Chinese New Year celebrations. In the 1990s, the yearbook record became uneven again, but other archival photographs show continued activity. In the 2000s, the yearbook no longer shows one stable Chinese student organization. It shows multiple related identities.

It is also a story of changing names. Chinese Club. Chinese Student Association. Chinese Student Society. Taiwan Student Club. Chinese Engineering Organization. Chinese Student Scholar Association. Taiwanese Student Club. Each name carries a slightly different idea of who belongs, what the group does, and how the campus should understand it.

And it is a story of changing meanings. In 1968, “Chinese” appeared in a ROC-era context, written in Traditional Chinese characters. In the 1980s, “Chinese” became a public cultural experience through Chinese New Year. By the 2000s, “Chinese” and “Taiwanese” appear as separate but connected categories, while “scholar” and “engineering” point toward professional and academic forms of identity.

This exhibit therefore argues that “Chinese” at Poly was never a fixed category. It changed with immigration policy, student migration, U.S.-China-Taiwan politics, New York’s Chinese-speaking communities, and Poly’s own institutional transformation.

The yearbook pages are small sources. Some are just club portraits. Some are event spreads. Some are a single line in an index. But together they show how students made themselves visible and how the school chose to remember them. They also show what the archive cannot fully answer. Who felt included? Who was left out? Who joined for cultural interest rather than identity? What happened in the years when Polywog went quiet?

Those unanswered questions are not failures of the project. They are part of history. The archive gives fragments, and from those fragments a larger pattern emerges: Chinese student life at Poly was a changing field of belonging, not a fixed identity written once and carried unchanged into the present.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

CHINESE AT POLY, undated; Ready Reference Collection; RG 040; Drawer 1; Folder 58; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

“Student Council Re-Budget Report.” The Polytechnic Reporter, Volume 62 (bound), 1969-1970, inclusive; no. 19, 20 Mar. 1970, p. 5; The Polytechnic Reporter; RG 025; item: Shelf 36/3F; volume: 43; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1967, 1967, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/2E; Item 70; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1968, 1968, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/2E; Item 71; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1969, 1969, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/2E; Item 72; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1985, 1985, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 88; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1986, 1986, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 89; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 1992, 1992, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 93; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 2001, 2001, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 94; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 2003, 2003, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 95; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polgwog 2006, 2006, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 97; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Polywog 2008/2009, 2008-2009, inclusive; Poly Archives Serial Publications Collection; RG 030; Shelf 37/4E; Item 97; Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University.

Secondary Sources

Asian/American Center, Queens College. “Census 2000 – New York City.” Queens College, City University of New York, www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/aac/demographic-shifts-from-1990-to-2000/. Accessed 28 Apr. 2026.

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Future Works

There are still gaps in this research that are interesting and a lot of observations not yet turned into insights. A few points are:

• The current Tandon CSSA was solely from active members with direct interests, further work should include more options coming from diverse backgrounds.
• There is a period of no record in the yearbook around 1970, further work should look for sources about the political change in China mainland starting 1966, links to the ten-year culture revolution that happened in China starting 1966.
• As the Senior Directory of the yearbook contains the addresses of students, it might be worthwhile to check the home address history of CSA members.
• Last names also matter, as people from mainland China have different spelling of last name with people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.
• I have mentioned Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese, it will be interesting to research when mainland China implemented Simplified Chinese and how this nationwide adoption impacts immigrants.