Every "Once Upon A Time" was once a "Day to Day"
Hello there! I hope you’ve been doing well.
This weekend, Megan and I were able to go to an event here at the University of Puget Sound called the “Empowering Asian-Americans Open Forum” with three panel speakers:
Chevi Chung, an actor and director based in Tacoma and founding artistic director of the Empathos Company
Daniel Nguyễn, a Lake Oswego City Councillor as well and candidate for Oregon State Legislature (House District 38)
Lia Shigemara, a DEI consultant, activist, community volunteer and member of multiple non-profit boards.
Being able to hear from and even meet these incredible people was very inspiring. There was a particular focus on something I care deeply about - our history as Asian-Americans in the States, but especially in the Pacific Northwest.
Local history generally is something we are not taught in America. We are so caught up in the stories of our own day to day lives, not realizing our day to days are built off the day to days of people who walked the same soil as us sometimes long before and sometimes just very recently.
I have grown up in the Northwest even though I was not born here and I consider myself a Northwesterner to the core. I moved from Oregon to Washington very recently, and I have lived in Portland, Corvallis, Eugene and now Tacoma. Everything I’ve learnt about our history I have had to go out of my way to find out. I learnt almost nothing about the history of the Northwest in my education.
I am a proud Indian-American and part of the Asian community. Asian history in the Americas stretches back far, much further than most people realize.
There is a scenic park in Tacoma. It is a gorgeous place with a waterfront view. It is incredibly easy to drive by. But once you park and walk through it, there’s a story there - just beneath the surface.
Belonging
The fundamental truth is this - Asians have been in America for centuries. Filipino sailors have been traveling to and setting in the Americas since the 16th century. There were East Indians in Jamestown, Virginia in 1622, brought over as laborers and slaves. Many, many Asians have been part of the mosaic of American life from the very beginning. Once upon a time, their day to days were those of people who travelled far from their homes by choice or force and lived in a strange land, and their children were born into that land as their home.
In the 1800s, Asian immigration really picked up speed. Thousands of immigrants came from India, China and the Philippines to the West Coast at the same time that white settlers were moving ever westward and claiming it for their own. Many of them settled in towns in the Northwest, working as farmhands, laborers and of course - working on the railroads which connected the continent from east to west. In a very real way without the labour of Asians, there would not be a United States of America as we know it. There would not have been a way to communicate and trade across the continent without rail. As an enthusiast of rail and transit, this history is so important to remember and recognize.
Despite the contribution Asians made to American society from the beginning, they were always alienated and “othered” for political reasons. They became a convenient scapegoat. Immigration from Asia was severely restricted multiple times - sometimes only men could come over. Sometimes nobody from Asia could come over at all. Sometimes it would be limited quotas from only certain countries. Over and over again, barriers would rise and fall. In the 1880s, Chinese immigration was banned while Japanese immigration could go on, and then in the 1910s Japanese immigration became severely curtailed. And so it goes…
Asians concentrated primarily along the West Coast. And their position was always precarious. The 1,000 members of the Chinese community of Tacoma learnt this in 1885.
Violence
In 1885, prominent businessmen, politicians and police descended upon the Chinese community in Tacoma, Washington and savagely beat them. At 9:30 am, a mob of 200 to 300 white citizens marched to the house of each Chinese residence to tell them to be ready to be on a wagon to Portland by 1:30 pm that day. These threats and demands were emphasized by violence - by forcibly breaking into houses, smashing in the doors, breaking the windows, dragging women out into the street. At 1:30, hundreds of Chinese people were marched 8 miles in torrential Northwestern rainfall to Lake View train station. They were then forced to buy their own train tickets to Portland. Those who could not afford tickets rode in boxcars of a freight train, or were forced to walk 140 miles along a rail grade.
Two men died of exposure waiting for transport.
In the following days, Chinese businesses were looted and razed. Tacoma’s formerly vibrant Chinatown was set on fire. No attempt was made by the Tacoma Fire Department to save any of the buildings.
Within four days, every trace of Tacoma’s formerly vibrant Chinese community had been erased.
Everything except the railroads they built. News travelled fast over those railroads. Across the country, the “bloodless” removal of the Chinese became praised as the “Tacoma Method”.
Twenty years later in Bellingham and Everett, two cities in Washington State, the Tacoma Method was emulated on Indian immigrants when a mob of 400 to 500 white men drove hundreds of South Asian laborers out of town, making them flee to British Columbia.
Amnesia
When I listened to Chevi Chung speak on Saturday, one thing that stood out to me was when she spoke about growing up in Tacoma and asking her Chinese grandfather “Why isn’t there a Chinatown in Tacoma?” Her grandfather always deflected and changed the subject, saying “We have to go to Portland or Seattle for Chinatown. There’s just not one here.”
Over time, the Chinese expulsion went from history to rumor. In interviews to the Seattle Times, Chinese Americans talked about how they simply accepted there was no Chinatown in Tacoma.
Nearly a century later, Theresa Pan Hosley arrived from Taiwan in 1979. She helped run a small Chinese cultural association and remembers showing up excitedly at Wung’s door to welcome him when he arrived years later.
With just a small circle of Chinese immigrants in Tacoma, people talked a lot. But in all her conversations, Hosley only heard about the expulsion once.
“Somebody just mentioned it briefly… I did not believe that it actually happened,” Hosley said.
George Lim couldn’t believe the stories either, and he grew up in one of the few Chinese families who’d been in Tacoma long enough to hear them. Lim’s parents fled Guangdong province at the end of the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s and opened several Chinese restaurants in Tacoma. As they grew the family business, they told him stories of the Chinese expulsion like it was an urban legend.
“We just thought it was a hard luck story,” Lim said. “Where most parents tell you like, ‘Oh, you think you have it hard?’”
A mix of nationalist propaganda, whitewashing of history and the desire amongst many Asian-Americans to move on and continue growing and not dwell on their trauma means many stories simply fade.
Once upon a time, on that train platform in 1885, many people wept, cried and screamed in the pouring rain. Over time, those screams and cries faded into muffled whispers of day to day lives.
Remembrance
But even though the screams faded to whispers, they could still be heard - if someone took the time to hear them.
One day, urban planner Lihuang Wung was living his day to day life. And he learnt about something that happened once upon a time.
From The Seattle Times:
Just a few months after Wung arrived in Tacoma in 1991, a coworker approached his desk with a sheet of paper with a simple Chinese character: 和, a word that can mean peace.
Wung, an urban planner for the city, was the only Chinese person working in his office. His colleague asked if the character would be appropriate for a city memorial.
He was confused. A memorial for what?
That’s when Wung first learned about the Tacoma expulsion — and that the city was looking to apologize.
George Lim and Theresa Pan Hosley heard it too. They both joined in on the effort, with Lim’s father trimphantly sending his son a newspaper article and saying “See? I wasn’t lying to you. It is true.””
Lim went door to door amongst the Chinese community, gaining support from an apprehensive community about how to best acknowledge the trauma of the Tacoma Method.
You may be wondering who originated the idea for Tacoma to apologize for the expulsion. The answer is surprising, but inspiring:
The push for the city to address its past didn’t come from a Chinese person, or even a Tacoma native. Dr. David Murdoch, a pastor from Edmonton, Canada, who moved to Tacoma in the ’80s, requested the city honor the victims of the expulsion as part of its plans to develop the waterfront along Ruston Way. He’d learned about the expulsion from a librarian, Lorraine Hildebrand, who’d written one of the few histories of anti-Chinese violence in Washington.
It wasn’t lost on Wung that it had taken people outside of the Chinese community to unearth Tacoma’s expulsion and put it on the city’s agenda. But ultimately, he was grateful.
“I was like, ‘Hey… a white guy is saying this? Why not a Chinese?’” Wung said. “And then I thought, wait, I really appreciate Dr. Murdoch. He, himself, sensed something was wrong.”
Anybody can raise an injustice. If you see a deep unrecognized injustice, anybody can be respectful and come forward with humility and ask for it to be acknowledged and remedied.
David Murdoch could have lived his day to day life. He could have learnt about it from Lorraine Hildebrand and then decided to forget about it like everyone else had.
David Murdoch chose to hear the whispers from once upon a time and he disrupted his life to do the right thing.
Lim, Murdoch, Hosley and Wung stepped up and decided to buy a stretch of land on the Ruston Waterfront. They wanted the history to come alive, but they didn’t just want posters. They wanted something one could experience.
Reconciliation
The Chinese Reconciliation Park on Ruston Way is situated by the railroads the laborers once helped build.
A friend and I drove out there today and found parking easily. We walked out of his car to the waterfront.
The park is a wonderful and beautiful public space with a scenic view. While it was a chilly day today, I saw people walking their dogs, sitting at the benches, reading books, and simply enjoying the view of the Sound. The park is also used as a site for Tacoma’s Chinese community to gather and hold events, and is also used as a rallying point as anti-Asian violence rises.
On March 27 [2021], about a week after the murder of six Asian spa workers in an Atlanta shooting spree, the foundation organized a rally at the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park. After an impromptu call on social media, over 300 people crowded around the Fuzhou Ting to hear Hosley and other community leaders speak against the violence. [Seattle Times]
As I walked through the park, the history was present all across me.
The trail tells the story of the expulsion - at the entrance, a millstone used by Chinese laborers to grind wheat. Afterwards, a narrowing border of rocks, which represent the horses the mob used to rigidly keep the Chinese in a straight line as they marched out of town.
At the end of the trail, there is the Fozhou Ting, which was donated by Tacoma’s Chinese sister city Fozhou.
Across the park, there are plaques explaining the expulsion, the involvement of the police, politicians, businessmen and the fire department in expelling the Chinese.
This park only came into existence because David Murdoch did the right thing by seeing an injustice and speaking up about it. Lim, Hosley and Wung acted on it and built something incredible.
As soon as the Chinese Reconciliation Park stands, the Chinese expulsion remains history. It can never be considered a rumor. The contributions of the Chinese Tacomans are etched into the stone, their pain remembered. There is an answer to the question “Why is there no Chinatown in Tacoma?”
Nothing will bring back the people who lost their homes, their livelihoods, their lives. Nothing will bring back the original Chinatown destroyed in fire.
But now those things are a fact. Now when anti-Asian hatred rises, there is a place. And before some people did the right thing once upon a time, that wasn’t there.
We are all exhausted living our day to days. But there is never a bad time to do the right thing. Because one day, all our good and bad - it will all be once upon a time.