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>> Newcomers to Seattle might never walk around that experience the International District.
Later arrivals might view it more as a place to develop vertically and attract new tech workers.
But the ID is a neighborhood with a rich history, interesting characters, and an important collective story to tell about the role this region's diverse Asian American population has played in leadership, business, and education.
Tonight, journalist, activist, and author, Ron Chew.
He grew up in the International District and tells his story and the story of the ID in his book; My Unforgotten Seattle.
[ Music ] Ron Chew is hard to describe in a few paragraphs because after reading his 603 page book, you know a lot about him and the International District and the Beacon Hill neighborhood where he spent his life.
The highlights however are that Ron is known for his work running the International Examiner, running the campaign to bring the Wing Luke Museum to national prominence and just plain running, which he does for two hours every day.
The book is, My Unforgotten Seattle, and Ron Chew is our guest on Northwest Now.
Ron Chew, thanks so much for coming to Northwest Now.
I read your book, My Unforgotten Seattle.
It is an interesting tale with a lot of detail in it of course, but I want to ask you a broad question to start; the International District, its people and its history, is it in danger actually of being forgotten?
>> Well, I think it'll always be there, Tom, but there are a lot of aspects of its history that have vanished and so I worry about that in this period of the pandemic, the area has suffered greatly you know, the businesses were boarded up following with George Floyd murder, you know, it became very unsafe, there was rioting and violence, and during the pandemic period there was a lot of anti-Asian violence, so it's there but its history is buried and it's at peril.
>> I don't want to sound skeptical, you describe such a community, such a tight knit community in this book.
I'm wondering, is that kind of community even possible anymore do you think, with the new generation and the social media and social fragmentation?
I read this and I think this is so nice, I don't know if it's possible anymore.
>> Well, Seattle has changed a lot and that was one of the drivers of why I chose to write this memoir.
In this post Amazon era, Seattle is no longer the place I grew up knowing, the International District isn't the same, Beacon Hill, where I grew up, isn't the same.
All of Seattle isn't the same.
So, we're living in a new time now and the intimacy, the small town that once was, is no longer.
>> It's going to feel like I'm picking on you in this question and I'm not at all, this baby is 600 plus pages long, so many squares are covered, it's a story but also a record and a chronicling too, how did you weigh, I'm sure with a commercial book editor would have told you, which is this needs to be very readable and punchy and sparky and have interesting anecdotes every other page, versus trying to document something and really creating in my humble opinion, an important historical document.
Those two things are in tension, how did you try to get it right?
>> Well, I didn't think about length when I produced this 600-something page book, I thought about stories and within those 600 plus pages, there are 72 chapters so it's relatively readable if you look at it in the context of stories.
Again, the title, My Unforgotten Seattle, is not so much about the Seattle in general but about people who populated Seattle, who made Seattle what it was, and so for example, I write about the restaurant where I grew up working, where my father was a waiter because who ever hears from people who serve you food?
My mother who worked in the sewing factories in Pioneer Square, who ever hears from those women who make the ski jackets that you wear.
So it's really about trying to find what it was that was important that would create the content for this book.
>> And that's what I think's amazing about it, there's all these little stories in there but they paint a picture and create such a community and such a comprehensive look of what that community was, and the people in it, it's interesting to be able to kind of go samples and to get into a place you may otherwise only have had maybe just sort of tangential contact with, at a restaurant.
You mentioned restaurants, one of the things that I found in here too, which is interesting, is you think of restaurants, yes they're a business, you go there to eat, but they were such a touch point of the community.
A lot of, it seems like some part of this book you're basically going from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant to talk to people, to communicate with family, to communicate with friends.
Yes you're at a restaurant, but they're almost drop-in centers or living rooms in some ways.
>> Yeah, these restaurants, these small shops, and they still continue to be sort of an important place that knits people together.
Because ultimately community is about some spaces that you can share with folks outside the home and I think even in this time period that you know, has sped up with the internet and social media and all this stuff, people are still looking for a sense of community, that sense of intimacy, and you know, if nothing else, I wanted to mine my store of memories to find what pieces I wanted to share with that next generation coming up.
>> This is a very American story in my opinion, many of the elements about it.
But it's also very much too about straddling two cultures.
Does this ever really end for immigrant families and I would also ask the follow-up to that, should it end for immigrant families when we talk about preserving culture, respecting culture, preserving traditions?
>> Yeah, it's always a struggle, Tom, it's you know, we do straddle many worlds.
I shared my experience of being a child of illegal immigrants who were discriminated against in this pre-Civil Rights era.
The struggle of being an immigrant child and learning the language, trying to fit in, and then sort of living in the shadows, much like many of the immigrants who come here today, I worry about how they will survive given some of that xenophobia that's infused our society.
So it will always be a struggle, learning the language, culture, feeling like you have a place, feeling like you're not some, in some foreign place that you'll always be a foreigner.
And I tried to provide some historical context for that as well.
>> Yeah, and I think the history of that, how some of this immigration happened, some of the documents and some of the ways the immigration authorities handled it back in the early part of the century were really interesting and I'll invite people to dig into that and into this book.
But I will say one of the other broader themes that I, that struck me by this, and the parallel I can make is it's like families who lived through the Great Depression; if you lived it or grew up hearing about it, it never leaves you.
You are always afraid.
I think the same thing sounds like to be a very common experience with first and second generation immigrants in your experience, your parents and a lot of the people in your group, remained afraid for years; your mom and [inaudible] were afraid of the authorities coming and taking them.
Does that ever go away or is that just a part of the experience too?
>> It never goes away, Tom.
You're always worrying about whether the government will deport you.
And so your parent's fear infuses your own life, you know, they're afraid for their children, you're afraid for your parents, and being separated and that's a harrowing experience to live through.
But I wanted to share what that really feels like, because you know, I grew up under the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from coming here, so many folks were here illegally and so they lived these shadow lives, and I wanted to bring them out of the shadows and humanize what that experience was like.
>> Want to talk to you a little bit about present day Seattle.
You gestured at this briefly in one of your previous answers; what's your view of Seattle today?
Is it painful to see some of the disorder and some of the things happening in Seattle or do you see it as a natural part of the evolution of a city?
How do you view it?
>> Mixed feelings about Seattle and where it's at today.
The political divide distresses me.
There was a lot of cooperation between the different communities of color in Seattle once upon a time, that I grew up knowing.
There was less of the highly charged political divide, I mean there were conflicts, people dealing with discrimination, trying to move towards a more equitable society, but at least there was some measure of civil dialog, now things have become just highly charged in a way that makes me feel a little bit pessimistic.
But ultimately again, it's about creating a new community and I have faith that the generation coming up will hopefully learn from some of the stories, because I wanted to share some of those stories of cooperation, even in the midst of all this economic poverty and discrimination and so forth, I remain hopeful that we can solve this together, hopefully.
>> In my experience over a lot of years in interfacing with the Asian American community, it's always struck me, there's a very interesting mix between conservative and progressive.
Many Asian immigrants came here wanting the safety, security, stability, economic opportunity that America, that America offered, but also saw the importance of labor rights and racial equity and a lot of those other things.
Is the Asian American community, and I know this is a big broad brush, but is it conservative or progressive?
Because I see both.
>> Yeah, I would say it's very diverse, you know, I think what I was trying to do is also move people past stereotypes and you know, the Chinese community I grew up in was fairly homogeneous, it's now very, very diverse.
People came post-Civil Rights era who know nothing of the struggles people had, the poverty, the discrimination, so I wanted to share some of that.
You know, we hear now about you know, the Asian whiz kids, the model minority and so forth, but you know, I grew up in poverty.
My parents didn't have an education, you know, the things that we are striving for that made for success, were not things that were taken for granted and so it's very diverse, there are people conservative, there are people liberal, progressive, you name it.
>> Is there a generational piece to that though as well?
I think a lot of older Asian Americans who came out of communist and socialist regimes, who had a lot taken from them, whose families suffered greatly under those regimes, have one view possibly, of America and capitalism, and some of those things, and the newer generation maybe not so much.
When we see you know, very progressive agendas or even socialism starting to emerge in a place like Seattle politically.
The older generation you know, they've see that movie before and a lot of times to me, have been some of the most flag waving crowd you're going to run into because of that.
Interpret that a little bit for me.
>> Well, so it really depends on your experience.
What your values are and what your political perspective is.
You know, my parents, particularly my mother, escaping from Mao's cultural revolution and you know, sharp political agenda, was very anticommunist, and you know, when people of my generation were pushing this Maoist political agenda, you know, they totally different worlds.
At the same time, she also was struggling with some of the issues of economic poverty and discrimination in America, but then it didn't mean that she'd embraced communism.
>> Right, right.
>> And then of course you've got kids, you know, the Baby Boom Generation and my contemporaries who were anti-Vietnam War, pushing on the civil rights front, so it's a much more nuanced, textured, experience that I think again, my book tried to explore.
>> Yes, and that's one of the reasons I got that question out the best that I could in my limited ability, but I wanted to hit on that because this, it emerges several times in this book.
And it's interesting.
The reaction to Governor Inslee's recent order to rescind banning affirmative action in the state for hiring and contracting, do you see those things as positive steps?
Where do you think we are right now, you know, we just went through a period, hopefully it's calmed down a little bit about Asian, anti-Asian violence.
What's, if I take your temperature on that issue, where are you?
>> Well, on the whole issue of affirmative action, you know, that's yoyoed back and forth you know, back when I was first you know, active at the University of Washington back in the 1970s, affirmative action was this new thing, you know, that begin emerging to allow opportunities for minority students to get an education, to get jobs and so forth, so I witnessed and described a lot of the movement to open up jobs in the trades, to get scholarships and financial support and so forth, and so that was on the ascendency, then you had, which I also described, the reverse discrimination movement.
Which was principally pushed by white candidates for various positions.
>> But the Asian community has stepped in very strongly, a piece of it, in terms of that as well.
>> Right, and so more recently now you've got Asian Americans saying well wait, you set these quotas then where do we stand?
>> Right.
>> So it's began again, as with all these issues, become highly nuanced and how do you balance the needs of trying to rectify continuing discrimination with, you know, groups who may have succeeded somewhat but then also don't necessarily support these kind of limitations.
>> Couple of historic pieces that you have in your book as well; the Wah Mee massacre and the death of Donnie Chin, it seems those crimes to me, sucked a little magic out of the community.
Is that going to be that way forever?
Is that something I'm just perceiving out of your writing?
Guide me.
>> Yeah, so Donnie Chin was a medic in Chinatown International District area, who I essentially grew up with.
Very active in pushing for improvement of the area.
He was murdered in 2015, his murder has never fully been solved, nobody's been brought to justice, so that hangs over all of us and it's really what prompted my writing the book, the passing of Donnie Chin, Charles Z. Smith, former Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Woo, Asian American political activist, a lot of these folks were just passing away that older generation, as well as people of my own generation, so I wanted to kind of document that.
The Wah Mee murders which happened in 1983, cast also a shadow over the neighborhood.
And that lingered for a long, long time, suppressing visitors to the area business and so forth.
That was finally brought to some measure of closure with the prosecution of the perpetrators and so forth, but there is in the book, a little bit of this shadow of what the neighborhood and community used to be and how we moved past that to a new era and a new Seattle.
>> Yeah, and I thought that was interesting in there as well.
A question I have to ask you, I know you dabble a little in politics as an advisor, it seems to me you were well-primed and well-positioned to run for office.
Why did you yourself never run for office?
>> I don't have the appetite or the kind of stamina I think for that.
My background actually in training [inaudible] to Washington was as a journalist and I always like to observe things but I also like to stay back and maintain a measure of independence and at the end of the day, I was just fascinated by people's stories and being able to document those.
>> One of the things that leaps out at me in this book too is the importance of what we commonly refer to, no pun intended, as the commons; libraries, community centers, community gardens, are you optimistic about the future of the commons as a concept or are we in sort of a, I got mine, thing in this country right now?
How do you feel about that?
>> Well, I certainly hope we are able to retain some sense of a commons, because society is at peril unless we have some common ground and we've seen that with again, the political divide, you know, the presidential election and so forth, so I've always believed that we should try to support the development of that.
I'm a trustee on the Seattle Public Library Board of Trustees, and so I support libraries, it's where I learned much of what I've learned and kept me out of trouble and you know, so libraries are part of it, museums, where I worked as director of a museum, that's part of it.
So that's really the arena I operate in and not necessarily the political arena.
>> One of the other things about this book that I find interesting is this continual tension between journalism and activism, you came up as a journalist, then you like you said, you went into running the Wing Luke and all kinds of different tracts, but at your heart, as you said, at your core, journalist and author.
How do you balance that tension between activism and journalism?
The two don't always go together and we have seen in recent years, some abuses of that, where activism has gone too far.
That is not journalism.
And, where maybe journalism is too, who, what, when, and where, he said, she said, who cares?
How do you get that right?
>> Yeah, so a little bit of my background, you know back in the early '70s when I was at the University of Washington and studying communications, that was the year of Watergate and so you had these journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, you know, uncovering corruption, you know, you had Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and these advocacy journalists, a new kind of journalism emerging.
So I was born out of that era, went back to my community and worked as a community, neighborhood journalist.
Which is very different because there's that balance, that tension again, because you know, you've got to support your community businesses and you know folks in the neighborhood so you're a bit of an advocate, otherwise your voice just vanishes.
But at the same time, you want a measure of independence and objectivity and fairness, otherwise you know, you might as well just be screaming into the storm and add your voice there.
Now, you know, we've seen the emergence of this again, highly charged polarized, not so much journalism but maybe it's advocacy journalism, I'm not sure what it is.
>> [inaudible] or even propaganda.
>> Right, right, and so there's this, there used to be a more clear line between opinion versus straight news and now you wonder what's what and you know, there's a whole question of you know, legitimacy of sources and so forth, it's a bit mess.
>> Well Ron, thanks so much for coming to Northwest Now, the book is My Unforgotten Seattle.
Interesting read and I appreciate you coming to share some of those stories.
>> My pleasure, thanks Tom.
>> Another part of Seattle where there's a lot of concern about gentrification and social justice is the Central District and one of the relatively new voices working at the intersection of media and activism is Omari Salisbury.
>> My name is Omari Salisbury, I'm the founder of Converge Media.
We create culturally relevant content for Seattle's Black community and beyond.
We're here right now at our Black Media Matters studios in downtown Seattle.
It's important to have this here in the community because at the end of the day, we can have no expectation for mainstream media to tell important stories about the Black community.
Henry Yesler sold William Grose twelve acres of land, right over by Madison area, 23rd and Madison, and that's what became the Central District, nearly 140 years ago.
Black people have been here in the Central District of Seattle longer than Washington has been a state.
And so Black people have a claim here in the Central District going back a very long time, over years it grew and blossomed; one, because Black people wanted to be around Black people, but two, also because racist housing covenants and red lining, Black people couldn't live nowhere else basically but the Central District.
My family arrived here in Seattle when I was just 6 months old.
I always tell people born and raised, you know, it's a technicality to it, but you know, and that was in 1975.
Grew up in the Central District of Seattle, went to James A. Garfield High School.
Almost every business there was Black owned, so you go to the dry cleaners, you go to the restaurant, and you go to the corner store.
You go to the drug store, you know, all these things were Black owned.
This was a thriving economic enterprise, it was a true sense of community where you know, the next, your friend's mom was also your mom, you know what I'm saying?
And in Garfield High School, being that epicenter, the same Garfield High School that Quincy Jones went to and Ernestine Anderson went to you know, and Jimmy Hendrix went to.
You went to a library named after Black people.
We swam in a swimming pool named after Black people.
And then some years later, we're living in a county named after Martin Luther King Jr. Every corner of it represented an uplifted blackness and represented an uplift of our culture.
As the City of Seattle grew, people kind of realized this is actually a great location these Black people got.
This is a prime place, and through government action, like Operation Weed and Seed, which a lot of houses were abated by the federal government through just overall gentrification, you know, systemic displacement, then you've seen the loss of the Black population there in the Central District.
This thriving economic district that Black people had and owned, it's no more.
Some of our grandparents and aunties and uncles who bought houses years ago, but because of this real estate boom here, now their taxes are like through the roof.
They end up selling the property and basically losing an asset, in some apartment building somewhere.
How can they up zone it, how can they put as many people there with no regard to the history, the tradition, the culture and everything else in the neighborhood?
No one has waved a white flag, people ain't giving up; there's the Liberty Bank Building, there's Jackson Heights, Africa Town Plaza is on its way up, these are all affordable housing developments that their first priority are for people who are displaced from the neighborhood.
And they're bringing Black people back.
We're rebuilding our community and it's active and we're not go to stop.
No, we're fighting every single day to reclaim the history, the legacy of the Central District and put as many Black people back into the Central District as possible.
>> Many of the old Seattle neighborhoods are undergoing continued gentrification, which has the effect of pricing out members of the community that made those neighborhoods what they were and gave them their unique cultures.
The bottom line; the only sure thing is change and while people certainly have varied opinions about the march of progress and the role policy might have in preserving the people and places of the city's older neighborhoods, just about everybody can agree that documenting the area's history and people is a worthwhile endeavor.
And in the International District, that has been an ongoing project for decades with the collection of oral histories, the expansion of the Wing Luke Museum, and now, Ron Chew's book, My Unforgotten Seattle.
I hope this program got you thinking and talking.
To which this program again or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at KBTC.org and be sure to follow us on Twitter @NorthwestNow.
Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now.
Until next time, I'm Tom Layson, thanks for watching.
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