That "Future Reconciliation Pavilion" Isn't Gonna Build Itself

I took a quick trip to Tacoma yesterday to drop off some stuff at the Washington State Historical Society, and got to reconnect with an 81-year-old archivist there whom I had last seen when he was my age, more or less, and serving as mentor to a start-up LGBTQ history organization I had helped to found. He seemed delighted that I had made my way in the field; when he heard I was working at the Wing Luke Museum he described WSHS’s ongoing effort to collect Asian American materials – easier in some communities than others, apparently – and then told me about Tacoma's former mayor, Harry Cain, who served in the ‘40s and spoke out against the wartime incarceration of the Japanese on the West Coast (Wikipedia tells me he was one of only two public officials who did – and that he went on to a career in the senate, where he supported Joseph McCarthy, among other appalling things).

Before heading home I decided to drive down to the waterfront and visit the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park, which commemorates the forced expulsion of Chinese immigrants from the city in 1885. (I recently learned that my friend Stewart Wong will be designing a public artwork to commemorate a similar event in Seattle, and I was curious to see what Tacoma had created around this theme.) It’s an interesting space: a narrative landscape that leads you from the hopeful fantasy of Gold Mountain (at the center of a spiral path) through the hard work of surviving in a hostile new home, to the forced march to the railyard (a funneled slope crowded with basalt pillars), and eventually along a road to reconciliation (appropriately incomplete). Interpretive panels provide historical info and photos to accompany the evocative space.

 

 

I learned from the “Aftermath” panel that the Chinese of Tacoma did not slink away quietly: they knew they had been wronged and used their networks to seek justice. “With help from Chinese merchants in San Francisco, they persuaded a federal prosecutor to issue indictments against 27 men – including Mayor Weisbach – on charges of conspiracy and insurrection.”

Even though the indictments were “overturned, reinstated, and then overturned again,” I was glad this part of the story – which I had not heard before – was emphasized in the park’s narrative. I thought of Xiao Zhen Xie, the 75-year-old grandmother who was attacked by a white man in San Francisco’s Chinatown last week. Despite having two black eyes and an injured wrist, she whacked her assailant across the mouth with a wooden board, and berated him as he was taken away on a stretcher. A viral GoFundMe campaign to cover her medical costs has raised nearly $1 million, which she has pledged to donate to organizations combating anti-Asian racism. According to her grandson, Xie has said, “We must not submit to racism and we must fight to the death if necessary. This issue is bigger than her.”

Looking at the sepia-toned photo of “Tacoma’s Twenty-Seven” on the panel, I felt a flush of resentment that somehow their it was their faces staring smugly back at me 136 years later, while the people they harmed were portrayed by anonymous bas-relief silhouettes carved in stone. I turned to the next panel, titled “Reconciliation” – and here Gary Locke (who was the U.S.’s first Chinese American governor) addressed this sad irony: “Unfortunately, we know more about the people who drove the Chinese out of Tacoma than we know about the Chinese themselves. So we can only imagine what those 200 Chinese people felt as they boarded the train, or what 500 other Chinese residents felt in the days before the expulsion, as they fled. And saddest of all, we can only imagine how this city might be different if the descendants of those Chinese were part of this community. Our imagination may be an imperfect substitute for a real historical record. But the ability to imagine the pain, the fear, and the anguish that those Chinese felt is truly an important step on the road to reconciliation.”

We don’t have to imagine the anguish Xiao Zhen Xie felt when she was punched in the face on a Chinatown sidewalk – we have cell phone video of her wailing in traumatized rage, jabbing her stick at the attacker with one hand while holding an ice-pack to her face with the other. “This bum, he hit me,” she says, in Chinese. “He bullied me, he bullied me, jerk. He bullies old people so I gave him a punch.”

I don’t know where we are on the road to reconciliation these days. Sometimes it feels like all the twists and turns have taken us right back to that rainy November night at the Tacoma train station in 1885. I am heartened by the stories of courageous Asian Americans in every generation who have stood up and fought back in whatever way they could. And by the occasional white citizens, however flawed, who have supported them in their darkest hours. I sometimes imagine how our country might be different if more of us had mustered up that spirit over the last 400 years. 

 

Or – hell – if we all did, right now.

 

Well, why not? That “Future Reconciliation Pavilion” isn’t gonna build itself.