Asia In Seattle: Chinatown and Covid-19

The streets of Chinatown were empty on a bright Saturday afternoon in April.  I was the only person on Jackson Street as I walked through the overpass that serves as an informal gate to the community. Years ago a woman launched a campaign to paint its supporting pillars in bright colors that are now tarnished with basic grafifti. Every year Chinatown repaints the columns and within a month they’re defaced once more. Still the spirit behind the obscured colors announces that the Chinatown-International District in Seattle refuses to be erased.

As I drew near Saeteun’s Garage, I began to smile beneath my mask and my steps quickened. There was the Rottweiler who has presided over that part of Jackson Street since he was a puppy. At our first meeting he thought my fur jacket was one of his close relatives and immediately began to nuzzle and nip at it. I’ve loved him ever since and he graciously acknowledges that truth. “He’s a gentle giant,” one of the men standing nearby said as I scratched the top of JuJu’s mammoth head, happy to have been welcomed, if not remembered. 

Chinatown has suffered an onslaught of smashed windows since the Stay Home edict was announced and many businesses have plywood shields set in place as protection. Bahtoh, a place that offers floral arrangements and hairstyling for weddings, has turned their plywood into an art installation with two large paintings--one showing a cluster of green plants arranged near a framed painting that said “I LIVE EACH DAY WITH THE INTENT TO BE______” and the other a defiant manifesto in bright pink cursive script. “Curve dat box dye like its Ms. Rona.” 

The next block was one I used to live on and at the end of that was Momo, a shop that has always been a delightful refuge for me. As I peered in its windows, I saw its owner, Lei Ann Shiramizu, an unflickering, steadfast flame of energy and creativity who became my friend soon after she opened the doors of her “hapa shop,” as she calls her small boutique. 

She let me inside and we bumped elbows, in the absurd gesture that’s the only one allowed to us now. The floor was covered with stacks of bright tissue and joss paper and her display table was half emptied to serve a production line of two, Lei Ann and her husband Tom, who construct “Momo-to-Go” packages that can be picked up, mailed, or delivered. Give Lei Ann a theme and she uses her imagination and flair to fill the package with the beautiful little objects that fill her shop, wrapping it in colorful paper and string that’s adorned with an antique Japanese button or two.

Wrapped gifts from Momo have always been works of art and now they’ve become therapy for anybody lucky enough to receive one. “I’m working ten times as hard,” Lei Ann told me but her vibrant spirit prevails. 

At the end of Chinatown stands a branch of Bartell Drugs, as essential to the neighborhood as Momo, but for more utilitarian reasons. I went in to buy cellophane tape and sticky putty so I can brighten my room with fabric and pictures. I left with those things, a magazine, and a bag of chocolate Easter eggs that were marked down to 25 cents a bag. The man in front of me had a half-rack of Rolling Rock--we all have our needs met at Bartell Drugs, which is like an old-fashioned variety store that sells basic groceries and fills prescriptions too. Its clientele is rough around the edges and a policeman stands guard at the door but more than ever, it’s an essential business.

So is the next place I stopped. Tai Tung has stood in place for 85 years. Its wooden swinging doors are now sheltered behind a more modern entryway but its long counter and its dining room booths are unchanged from its opening just a couple years after the Great Depression. In this current depression, its owner, Harry Chan, stands behind the counter with his incandescent smile, and when I saw him, I knew my world was still in place. “You can wait here. Your food will be ready in ten minutes,” and it was. I left with the noodles I’d longed for during the past six months and with the warmth that comes from a brief chat with Harry. 

Up the street at the Louisa Hotel, which first opened in 1909, had been consumed by a fire on Christmas of 2013 and was recently rebuilt, a bakery had just opened in the jaws of the pandemic. Tempting desserts lured me to its window but what kept me there was a sign saying they had Rojak. “Yes,” the young owner told me, “our cook is from Singapore.” I watched as she put slices of pineapple, jicama, cucumber, and apple in a bowl, sprinkled it with chunks of you tiao or “Chinese doughnut,” and mixed it with a sauce. Susu is open only on Wednesday through Sunday from 11-3 and sells gift cards to be used when happy days are here again. Since it’s in the same building as Chinatown’s first bakery, Mon Hei, which was destroyed in the Christmas fire, it’s carrying on an honorable tradition with a different culinary vocabulary, but it’s suffused with the same indomitable spirit. 

Seattle’s Chinatown-International District has survived rioters who tried to displace its residents, the Spanish Flu of 1918, the incarceration of its Japanese residents during WWII, a long series of economic upheavals that turned it into what more affluent residents called a slum. But it has prevailed. And if we all put on our face masks, bring our money, and walk its streets today in search of good food, it will be here for centuries to come. Don’t let it die.~Janet Brown