Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon

Preface

preface my interest in researching Chinese American history and Chinatowns began in earnest in 1988, seven years after the death of my father. I left my Midwest home for the West Coast many years before he died, partially to find employment as a city planner and also to continue postgraduate work in urban history. I had grown up in a small Iowa town with strong Germanic roots—there were only two Chinese families, including ours—and I loved moving to a large, active city with a significant population of Chinese people. It was so different from what I had known, but I felt as if I belonged there. I was thrilled to be part of a dense and busy urban environment where I could get lost in a crowd of people who looked like me: almond-shaped eyes, darker skin, and black hair. Chinatown felt like a familiar place. It was filled with the same smells and sights of meats and vegetables that I remembered from our kitchen at home, and those endless red and gold decorative lanterns and trinkets were like the ones Dad lit at Christmas. When my father died, we could supply very little information to the local newspaper, and so his obituary simply read “Jim Wong, aged 76, died in his home on Monday after a brief illness. He is survived by six children.” The newspaper listed our names and the date of the memorial service—that was all. We didn’t know what else to say about him. My siblings and I were still deciding what to do with my father’s few belongings as we prepared to sell the family house. After all, none of us lived in that town anymore, and we couldn’t justify keeping the house. My eldest brother phoned and asked me to “send the steamer trunk . . . you know, the old one that was left in the attic closet. It will make a great coffee table and conversation piece after I refinish it.” No one had even thought of that old trunk since the funeral. At the time, we were so busy sorting out Dad’s many business affairs that moving a bulky old piece of ship’s passenger luggage wasn’t a priority for us. The trunk was nothing special, and I had seen at least a hundred of them in deluxe junk shops: brown and plain, with oxidized metal-tipped edges, the surfaces scarred, scratched, and dented from years of careless and excessive handling. “And make sure to clean the thing before you send it to me,” my brother added. The trunk was easy to open, as the lock had been broken long ago, and the billow of musty air from inside made me sorry that, as the youngest child, I had inherited another messy job. There wasn’t much inside: a couple of old shirts, shabby and stained and similar to the trunk lining in color, a rusty clothes bar with no hangers, and three vertical drawers on the left side. All the drawers were empty and were lined with the same faded, diamond-patterned paper. I was taking each one out to turn it over and tap out the dust when I noticed that the bottom lining of one drawer had come unglued and fallen out along with a small ivory-colored booklet, neatly folded and bound with a still handsome, handmade paper braid. The document was written entirely in Chinese and held four photographs of people I had never seen before, one of whom appeared to be my father as a very young man. Like most children, even adult children, I was shocked to see that my father had ever been so very young. The calligraphy was beautiful, with small, graceful characters tightly drawn in evenly spaced rows. On one page, twelve neat boxes enclosed blocks of writing and were surrounded by the arcs and swirls of still more lettering. I sat and stared at the papers, wondering what this document was and what I should do with the material. My curiosity and imagination were racing. What if my dad had once been involved in some kind of criminal activity? I couldn’t risk taking this to one of his friends for a translation. If it was important enough to hide, it was probably something that ought to remain a private family matter. I was afraid the document would reveal something that would be embarrassing to all of us, and at the same...