By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Seattle’s Chinatown-International District on Sept. 9, 2024 (Photo by Ruth Bayang)
In 2023, Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID) was named one of the nation’s 11 most endangered places. The previous year, it was named as one of Washington state’s most endangered places.
This is part of why this year’s Asians and Pacific Islanders in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP) biennial forum will be held in the CID, Huy Pham, the organization’s executive director, told the Northwest Asian Weekly. It’s a way to address the issue of historic preservation, in real time, in a neighborhood that is yet again facing the very real threat of extinction, again because of governmental planning. This time, he said, it’s due to the current Sound Transit project that has also created a rift in the community.
“And to this day, and by the time the forum happens, we still might not know the fate of that project as it relates to the district,” Pham said.
Pham is one of APIAHiP’s three staffers, the first the organization has been able to hire since its inception 17 years ago. This year, the organization has partnered with a number of Seattle-based organizations, as well as the City of Seattle and King County.
Following his visit to the 2004 National Historic Trust for Preservation’s annual conference, one of the co-founders, Bill Watanabe, realized the need for an emphasis on historic preservation that focused on the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. So, in 2007, Watanabe co-founded APIAHiP alongside fellow historical preservationists Alan Kumamoto, Munson Kwok, and Joseph Quinata.
“Historic preservation is important for us because, historically, we have not always been able to tell our history or to live, move, play, and exist in certain places,” Pham said. “The field of historic preservation allows us to really address the gap between our narrative history and the physical places and cultural resources that embody them. If we save these places, these neighborhoods, these historic sites, these buildings, these cultural symbols, we also believe that we preserve and are able to tell the stories that those places embody for future generations.”
The AAPI community has a deep, rooted presence in United States history that isn’t always recognized, Pham said. There are also so many different cultures who fall under the AAPI umbrella that there are almost countless stories to tell.
One of the first major AAPI settlements in the United States was Saint Malo, where Filipino settlers likely lived in raised-stilt houses over the Louisiana bayou, just a few miles away from the state’s most famous city, New Orleans. Later, in the 19th century, severe labor shortages meant that the country started to accept Chinese and Japanese immigrants to work on the railroads, on farms, and in gold mines—only to turn around and enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively penalizing Chinese immigrants for answering the United States’ call for workers.
Less than a century later, the United States abolished the law—only to throw thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans into mass incarceration camps, following the United States’ entrance into World War II.
But these bigger stories that history textbooks cover, to a certain extent, are not the only ones to be told, Pham said.
“Now we are also beginning to recognize relatively younger histories of Southeast Asians and Vietnamese, Hmong, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, also establishing their roots in America for more than half a century now,” Pham said.
And more histories, more stories, are unfolding all the time.
For instance, Pham said, the federal definition of “historic” begins at the 50-year mark. This means that, in the very near future, the many communities who established themselves here following the Fall of Sài Gòn in 1975 and the migration wave that began in the 1980s will begin to be recognized as historic.
“As a national coalition, we’re beginning to look more into [Seattle’s] Little Sài Gòn, Hmong Town in St. Paul, Minnesota, Eden Center in Virginia—all of these places,” Pham said. “We have to ask the field of historic preservation, ‘Are you ready to accept these established neighborhoods and historic sites into our traditional historic preservation structure … ? Are we ready to tell those stories the same way that we tell the story of Westward Expansion and the Founding Fathers?’”
There are also big stories to tell within communities who are currently more well-known for what the United States put them through. And while it is important for certain audiences to understand what these communities have gone through, stories of suffering are not the only ones to exist.
“Some of our own Japanese American coalition members … say, ‘But also what about the first Japanese business in Ohio? What about the first Korean artists in Virginia? What about the first Vietnamese neighborhood in Oklahoma?’” Pham said. “On one half, we have to get the under told stories of the most impactful or the most undeniable—like the oppressive histories of war, refugeeism, assimilation, violence, discrimination, displacement, erasure. And then we can add these more celebratory histories after that, too.”
What it comes down to, Pham said, is leaning into a version of an expression the National Historic Trust for Preservation uses: Telling the full story.
“So, even for ourselves, telling the whole story is reminding [ourselves] of Chinese exclusion, Japanese incarceration, and Southeast Asian refugee immigration—but it’s also these celebratory histories of the first Pacific Islander elected official, or someone establishing the first Asian American studies program in California,” Pham said. “It is certainly an ambitious mission that we have and the forum is one way that we try to address that.”
APIAHiP’s forum will take place Sept. 12-15 in Seattle’s CID. A full schedule and more information can be found here.