Tchen received his B.A. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1973. He did his M.A. at New York University in 1987 and finished his Ph.D. at NYU in 1992.^[3] He was the founding director of the A/P/A Studies Program and Institute at New York University. In 1979-1980, Tchen co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America and continues to serve as its senior advisor.^[4] In 2018, Tchen was named the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities at Rutgers University and became Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture & the Modern Experience.^[5]

Tchen received several awards during his academic career: the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities(1991),^[6] and MLK Humanitarian Award from NYU (2012).^[7] His monograph, New York Before Chinatown, was the winner of the History/Social Science Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2001.^[8]

Tchen was featured in the film 9-Man (documentary)^[9] and is a frequently called-upon expert on Chinatown and Asian American topics.^[10][11][12]

• Tchen, John Kuo Wei and Dylan Yeats (2014). Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. New York: Verso.ISBN 9781781681237
• Tchen, John Kuo Wei (1999). New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801867941
• Genthe, Arnold and John Kuo Wei Tchen (1984). Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 9780486140698

• Official website