Asia In America: Seattle

Asia in America—Seattle

Until two years ago, I lived in what was the most overlooked neighborhood in the booming city of Seattle. Although Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market are where tourists flock to see the original Seattle of the 1800s, the Chinatown-International District is the place where residents still live, shop, and go out to eat in the buildings from that era. Too poor to have excited commercial interest for over a hundred years, now this section of town has become a Mecca for developers and soon hotels and condos will dwarf whatever is allowed to remain.

Many of the old buildings here still sport “ghost signs,” a precursor to billboards, from a time when advertisements were painted directly on their walls. “Dancing, Chow Mein, Chop Suey” continues to invite passersby to a business that few can now remember. The building I used to live in still proclaims “U.S. Hotel, Rooms 50 Cents,” although now the rooms are billed as Mayne Suites and rent for over a thousand dollars a month. These brick buildings have stood solidly in place since the 1900s and some perhaps even before that, through fire, earthquakes, economic depressions, boom times. But they aren’t “retrofitted” soon, threaded with steel girders to conform to contemporary reinforcements against seismic activity, they will come down and with them will go a significant part of Seattle’s history.

In November of 1885 a mob of 500 Tacoma citizens forced the (approximately) 700 Chinese residents of that city to leave by burning their homes and businesses to the ground. A few months later in February of 1886, martial law was declared in Seattle to stop mobs from forcing the Chinese residents, who were at that time ten percent of the population, onto steamships that would remove them from the city. Although officially Seattle’s municipal leaders repudiated the attempted expulsion, the number of Chinese soon dwindled from over 900 people to a handful, “a few dozen, at most” says historylink.org 

But those remaining residents kept Seattle’s Chinatown alive, allowing it to become a place for people from all over the world, as well as a refuge for artists, writers, and musicians. It has flowered into to the creation of Little Saigon with its bounty of Vietnamese businesses, and encompasses a corner that’s still Nihonmachi, Japantown. Elderly Chinese ladies and colorfully dressed women from African countries fill the streets every morning, taking their children to the school bus, buying groceries, meeting to chat with friends and play cards in Hing Hay Park. It’s a community of pedestrians who walk to the library, the post office, the neighborhood health center, and to one of the many restaurants. Lion dancers bring their drums and gongs to announce the Lunar New Year and the sidewalks are carpeted with the scarlet petals of exploded firecrackers for days afterward. Tai Tung has fed the community and visitors Chinese-American food since 1935. A more recent arrival, the Eastern Cafe, serves espresso and crepes in the Eastern Hotel building, a place dating from 1911 that once housed the Atlas movie theater (which closed as the Kokusai Theater forty years ago). Floating through it all is the smell of roast pork from whole pigs cooked in gigantic, ferociously hot ovens at Asia Barbeque, the light sweetness of fortune cookies baked at Tsue Chong’s factory on Eighth Avenue, and the fragrance of elaborately frosted layer cakes that drifts down the street from Yummy House Bakery. 

Chinatown-International District is more than a neighborhood. It’s a triumph of culture and history. It’s an example of what an urban village can be. And it’s possibly doomed, definitely threatened.

We all claim milestones based upon our own personal experience, where we were when Kennedy was shot, what we were doing when the Twin Towers fell on September 11. We measure change with alterations in our own private worlds, so for each one of us, Seattle’s turning point will be an individual opinion. For me, it came in 1985 when Martin Selig’s towering skyscraper, the Columbia Center, overtook the historic Smith Tower as the primary landmark of Chinatown’s city view, its long shadow falling on what is now seen as under-utilized real estate, ripe for development.

Someday perhaps, this will all have been worth it, although I doubt it. But then I have skin in this game. The home where I lived happily for many years is being sacrificed to the gentrification of a pan-Asian community that has survived against all odds until now. Goodbye, Chinatown-Little Saigon-Nihonmachi. Hello, Generic Metropolis.~Janet Brown