In May 2020, as New York City was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Klavier Wang sat down in her apartment to watch over 100 digitized videotapes from Asian CineVision’s archives at NYU’s Tamiment Library. Through hazy footage, she saw scenes of people picketing at a labor rights demonstration in Chinatown, chanting in Cantonese.

This footage was from Chinese Cable Television (CCTV), a public access program that ran from 1976 to 1983 out of a loft on East Broadway in Manhattan. When CCTV first aired on Manhattan Cable’s Channel D, it became the first programming dedicated to the Chinatown community that spoke the neighborhood’s primary languages, and was for its residents.