A View from Canton Alley

It’s the end of a long Thursday and you’re taking a quick break from the relentless firehose of incoming material for the new exhibit you’ll start installing next week, in order to pop in and say hello to the folks from Tsuru for Solidarity who have come to see the old exhibit before it closes on Sunday. You’re standing in the front of the theater looking out at these lovely human beings, some born in US incarceration camps during WWII, others descended from survivors of those camps; all of them have channeled the moral authority inherent in their family histories into an unyielding stand against injustice of any kind. You’re so grateful for the chance to tell them to their faces that the spirit of Tsuru is the beating heart of the Resisters exhibit, that it was one of the deepest honors of your career to work with the many people in this room who contributed to it, and how much it means to you that they have come to close out the show’s run with this special tour.

Just when you’re done saying all this, and you're handing the group over to the folks who will lead the tour, there’s a shuddering boom in the alley below the windows at the back of the theater – and then another, and another, and another. Someone asks if there’s some kind of construction project going on. Another person wonders if it's a bomb. Someone else looks out the window and says there’s a guy with a sledgehammer down in the alley. A couple of your colleagues run out the door, presumably to confront him. You’re not sure if you should follow them out, or stay in the theater to try to reassure your guests, or maybe (you think for a wild, wistful split-second) you should just go home and have dinner with your niece and nephews like you’ve been looking forward to all week. In the end you find yourself standing in the alley next to Tsuru leader Stan Shikuma, who is nearing 70 and maybe five feet tall, joining his solemn, silent face-off against an old white man who has been relieved of his sledgehammer by the museum's fearless, quick-thinking security guard, and who is now telling anyone who asks that “the Chinese ruined my life,” and that he came to Chinatown to smash some windows because “Something has to be done.”
 

And indeed, nine huge plate glass windows in Canton Alley have been shattered. Behind them you can see artwork by teenagers, photos of Donnie Chin, and a historic apartment that was home to generations of Chinese immigrants and their descendants during the Exclusion Era, and is now part of the museum’s immersion tours. Several coworkers and neighbors are here too, all trying to make sense of the situation, which has calmed down considerably but is still pretty volatile. At least one person has called 9-1-1, but she is apparently being told that the cops are all busy covering the Beyoncé concert and nobody is available to stop by and arrest this guy – who keeps saying he’s not leaving until they come.
 

You still can’t quite believe the ghastly turn that the Tsuru for Solidarity tour has taken, and at one point you blurt out, “I wish I could convey to you what was happening in that room when we heard that awful noise,” and the guy says, “I wish I could convey to you what’s been happening to me for years.” Your curiosity flares up over your shock and you say, “I’ll listen if you want to tell me.” He says that "the Chinese" kicked him out of his home, twice, and tortured him for fourteen years. Then he shrugs: “You’ll never understand.” This doesn’t feel like a fruitful line of conversation, so you go back to standing silently next to Stan, trying to radiate peace and calm, as more and more people arrive in the alley – from the apartments next door, from the offices upstairs, from sister organizations all over the neighborhood. They have come to find out what’s going on, to yell at the guy, to offer assistance, and to wonder together, with escalating outrage, what the hell is taking the cops so long. Showers of broken glass keep tinkling down onto the pavement as the hanging display panels behind the glass get caught by the breeze and knocked against the jagged edges of the gaping holes.

After a bit, the guy slides down to a seated position against the wall of the alley. Now, you have been manipulated before by a right-wing white guy who made himself seem pitiful in order to elicit your sympathy and distract you from the harm he was inflicting – but right now, to you, this man seems genuinely pathetic, radiating defeat. "My life is over," he says, several times. Certainly whatever cathartic triumph he thought this brutal act might bring has failed to materialize. Now it seems he just wants the cops to come and put him out of his misery.

But they keep on not coming, for another forty minutes. He himself begins to ask what is taking them so long. People laugh bitterly at this: “They never come. It’s Chinatown.” Welcome to our world, buddy. And so he keeps on sitting there, as people bustle around him, talking to each other about how angry they are, how much it will cost to fix these windows, how tired they are of this sh*t, how miraculous it is that nobody was physically hurt, how grateful they are for the quick response by your colleagues, and where the f*ck are the f*cking cops?? A crew of museum staff and volunteers – including several Tsuru for Solidarity folks – start carrying plywood panels out from the exhibit shop so the broken windows can be boarded up once the police have documented the damage. Nearly an hour after the first 9-1-1 call, a patrol car pulls up at the entrance to the alley. The guy struggles to his feet and holds out his arms for the handcuffs.

When you finally walk away from the scene and head out on your bike, your Quaker calm quickly ebbs away and a rush of belated adrenaline fuels your furious pedaling. You pass a couple of people smoking meth on the sidewalk, a bevy of silver-clad Beyoncé fans in cowboy hats, and a car wreck on the Jose Rizal Bridge. You make your way up over Beacon Hill, chanting under your ragged breath: Are. You. F*cking. Kidding. Me. It’s only after you have told the whole story to your partner on the phone and repeated it to your sister’s family over a bowl of cold-but-delicious corn chowder, and made your way home in the soft late-summer dusk to find your cat waiting patiently by the back door, that the tears come.

The next morning there will be stories in the paper about the shattered windows, the traumatized museum guests, another hate crime in a neighborhood that has been under attack for years. All of that is true, of course. But the image that stays with you – the story you tried to convey to your wide-eyed nine-year-old niece – is of a weak, isolated old man slumped against a brick wall, surrounded on all sides by a strong, connected community full of love and rage and energy. 

You hope he saw this too. He may never understand the long history of discrimination, exploitation, and violence that has made this community what it is. But you want to believe it's possible that one day he might learn to reject the poisonous ideas he has been fed, take responsibility for the trauma he has caused, and find a place somewhere in a line of people shouldering plywood boards, working together to repair the damage – and maybe find real answers to the problems that affect us all. 

But whatever happens to (or within) him, you know that here in the Chinatown-International District, the power of connection and community will prevail. And maybe at some point we'll be able to start building something new, instead of always fixing broken sh*t. This is the hard kernel of hope you decide to carry with you into the days and weeks ahead.