By Quinn Summers
Our experience at the Wing Luke museum didn’t start as we walked through its doors. Instead, it was just a continuation of our experience in Seattle’s international District. We got off the light rail together only to be immediately greeted by Asian-inspired architecture and landscaping. Entering the international district from the light rail, we walked beneath the historic Chinatown gate, taking a moment to read its plaque before walking further up the street. We passed dozens of shops selling delicious, freshly made food before continuing onwards toward the museum. On the way to the Wing Luke, we saw a number of murals, plaques, and other pieces of street art adorning the walls and streets of the International District. Once arriving at the museum, we spoke to the front desk attendant and sat down in a theater area near the entrance. On the wall where a movie screen would be in a theater rested a massive mural. We learned from our two guides that this mural was a collection of advertisements from the Japanese community, prominently displayed for Japanese citizens to examine. We learned of the fierce competition between Japanese businesses to get on the mural, and about the nature of Asian-owned businesses in the International district.
We then moved next door and witnessed a perfectly preserved example of an Asian-owned business from the mid 20th century. This was my favorite part of the tour- admiring all the preserved goods, posters, and even the wooden architecture. I was unreasonably excited seeing an important ingredient in my favorite childhood dish, Hoisin Sauce, resting on a shelf near the register. After touring the shop, we moved upstairs and witnessed a preserved hotel that used to house Asian residents before it was condemned in the 1970s and preserved by the museum. I was shocked to learn that some rooms housed seven or eight family members, despite being barely the size of my dorm room! We learned all about the nature of community organizations between Chinese Americans, especially relating to the curious phenomenon of people with the same surname and province of origin banding together for survival in a new country. Finally, we toured the displays ourselves, and got to witness the various struggles and contributions of the Asian American residents of Seattle over the years. After the group concluded our tour, I had a lively discussion with one of our guides about the nature of marriage and relationships in the Asian American community in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned that even during periods of intense racial discrimination, interracial relationships still occurred between people of different Asian ethnicities, as well as with Native American and white residents of Seattle. In particular, because the Chinese Exclusion Act initially denied immigration rights to Asian women, relationships between Chinese and Filipino men and white women became relatively common. It was interesting to learn that even when institutions reinforce racial discrimination, the power of human love and emotion transcends the petty confines of human prejudice.
I learned a lot on my trip through the International District and the Wing Luke museum, but nothing stood out to me more than the intense discrimination faced by Asian Americans in Seattle, and their struggle for equality over the years. In Module 3 of the course, we discussed matters of racial and class based discrimination, and how they interact with the LGBTQ+ community. Professor Kimberly Crenshaw describes intersectionality as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things'' (Crenshaw 2017). This really gets to the root of the material on display at the Wing Luke museum, and the nature of the civil rights struggle that the man himself, Wing Luke, dedicated his life to.
The Asian American residents of Seattle’s International district, then split into “Chinatown”, “Japantown”, and other such racial enclaves, were usually quite poor. They were denied the employment opportunities available to their white counterparts, and as such they had to take lower paying and less prestigious jobs in the area. Many Asian American migrants banded together for protection and community, employing each other for various jobs, be they mundane trades or specialized jobs that white Americans could not do themselves, like recreating delicacies or clothing from their countries of origin. Over time, the shared economic solidarity of the Asian American communities aided in their struggle for better treatment and representation in the institutions of power, such as the legal system and the local government.
Wing Luke, the namesake of the museum, was a Chinese American who attended school alongside white pupils. Instead of being ostracized and disliked, Wing turned his unique position into an advantage, and was quickly befriended by his white classmates. In High School, he was elected class president despite being the only Asian student at his school. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the military to go fight in WW2, and because of his Chinese heritage he avoided the internment camps his Japanese peers soon faced. When he returned to Seattle, he studied law and became a prominent local figure. Over the course of his career, he moved up in local government until he became a member of the Seattle city council. He tragically died in a plane crash while holding this position, but by advancing so quickly into positions of power no Asian had held before, he blazed a path forward that other Asian Americans followed after him. His rhetoric of racial unity came from a place of deep compassion and understanding for the plight of not just Chinese Americans but also other Asian Americans and even Native Americans. Wing Luke understood the intersection of class and race, and how these factors influenced the lives of oppressed populations, and used this knowledge to try and create a better world for himself and his community. This story touched me deeply, and it helped me understand that interracial and class solidarity are essential building blocks for any kind of struggle for equality. Class cannot be separated from race or gender, and these structures of power reinforce each other. However, in the face of mass movements of politically educated and motivated marginalized groups, they can be weakened and even broken.
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Works Cited:
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
Columbia Law Staff. (2017, June 8). Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, more than two decades later. Columbia Law School. https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later
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