Inside the Portland Chinatown Museum, Carey Wong’s life has come full circle.
He’s standing at the entrance to the museum’s freshly installed exhibit, “Beyond the Gate: A Tale of Portland’s Historic Chinatowns.” Wong, a scenic designer who’s done work for numerous theater and opera companies, designed the exhibit for its 2016 debut at the Oregon Historical Society. Now he’s reworked it for its permanent home at the museum, trimming it from 3,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet while incorporating new displays and features.
He’s also standing just a block from the site where Norman and Mabel Wong, his grandparents, started the New China Laundry and Dry Cleaners, which they passed down to his father, Gordon Wong. As a child, Carey Wong not only spent time at the laundry but also was a member of a local Chinese American youth group. Then he went off to Jesuit High School and Yale University. “I completely lost touch with it,” he says of Chinatown. Now he’s re-established childhood acquaintances and gained a “new understanding and appreciation of Chinatown’s history.”
Jackie Peterson-Loomis, executive director of the museum, which celebrated its official opening Dec. 15, hopes all of its visitors will leave with a similar understanding and appreciation. A retired historian, she is quick to point out that at the turn of the 20th century, Portland had the second largest Chinese American population in the country, with 10,000 of the city’s 95,000 residents claiming Chinese heritage. Chinese-owned businesses stretched for nearly a mile along Second and Third Avenues from West Burnside Street to Southwest Mill Street. They made up Portland’s first Chinatown; the museum sits at the edge of Portland’s second Chinatown.
Those who step through the exhibit’s entrance gate will learn these facts and more. Here’s a sampling.
Historical context: It’s important to Peterson-Loomis that visitors appreciate the sophistication of the society and culture that Portland’s Chinese immigrants left behind. To that end, the exhibit includes a video installation by Rose Bond, an animator and media artist on the faculty of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, that animates drawings from China’s 300-year Ming Dynasty, celebrated for its literature and arts. Elsewhere, the exhibit explores 19th- and 20th-century U.S. and Oregon laws that excluded and discriminated against Chinese immigrants and residents, spurring the downfall of the first Chinatown.
Businesses: The exhibit includes one of the first photographs of Portland, taken in the 1850s, which Peterson-Loomis gleefully points out includes a Chinese laundry. Chinese entrepreneurs “were here from the beginning,” following the gold rush north from California in search of new opportunities, she says. Also in the exhibit is a re-creation of a Chinatown store, Bow Yuen & Co., with the inventory that was on its shelves when it closed in 1929.
Food: The exhibit pays tribute to Hung Far Low, the longtime Chinatown restaurant, which Peterson-Loomis credits with helping establish early Portland as “Chop Suey USA.” She also says the original Chinatown restaurants helped launch the concept of takeout service in Portland: “The food would come in a basket, with dishes.” One display shows an illustration of a Chinese restaurant from the West Shore, a 19th-century Portland literary magazine.
Culture: Displays and features include the Yat Sing Music Club – visitors can push buttons to hear Chinese opera – and another Rose Bond animation, this one of the Portland Chinese Language School. Also on view: several outfits and the recipe book of the Benson Hotel’s pastry chef, who Peterson-Loomis said was a “paper son” who skirted Chinese exclusion laws with fraudulent immigration documents.
Oral histories: In the latter part of the exhibit, visitors arrive at a sound dome that will project oral histories. “We are trying this time to do a better job of incorporating people who grew up here,” from the 1920s through 1960s, Peterson-Loomis says. She’s hoping visitors with family or personal ties to Portland’s Chinatowns will bring in photos to add to a montage wall.
Chinatown today: The exhibit ends with photographs from Dean Wong’s summer show at the museum, "Made in Chinatown USA: Portland," which documents Chinatown’s remaining businesses and residents.
All told, visitors can get closer than in the previous incarnation of the exhibit to more than 200 historical objects, chosen as part of a mission “to really challenge and complicate” perceptions of Chinatown, in Peterson-Loomis’ words. It’s an ambitious mission, seeing as the museum itself is opening at a challenging and complicated time for Chinatown. Peterson-Loomis notes that when the Chinatown gate was installed at West Burnside Street and Northwest Fourth Avenue in 1986, “it was supposed to be a new beginning.” So, too, is this museum.
***
Portland Chinatown Museum
When: Noon-5 p.m. Thursday-Sunday
Where: 127 N.W. Third Ave.
Admission: $5-$8, free for children under 12, portlandchinatownmuseum.org or 503-224-0008.