An altar and long table, draped with an ornately embroidered runner, dominate the space under the benign gaze of a portrait of Sun Yat-sen. Climbing upstairs reveals a balconied room adorned with a rolled tin ceiling and bedecked with the flags of the United States and the Republic of China. Today, the Freeman Hotel lays silent save for the creaking of floorboards. It was a testament to the syncretic nature of this part of Seattle, which is what eventually resulted in an inclusive, albeit clunky, name: Chinatown-International District (CID). This hotel housed itinerant Asian workers from Japan, the Philippines and China. Up one flight and around a column, we are confronted by the former Freeman Hotel, a two-floor single room occupancy hotel with two toilets serving over 100 sparse rooms. Individual Chinese weren’t allowed to own property or land.” “This building was built by 170 Chinese immigrants pooling their resources because they had to form a corporation just to own property. “Many people were undocumented and weren’t really given any rights in terms of property,” explains a museum docent. Thanks to restrictive laws designed to exclude Chinese and other Asian immigrants from the country-or from public life if they were already there-it took many hands and pockets to build this modest cuboid structure. In this area, some balconies indicate that a business fraternity once existed inside while others mark family associations where immigrants grouped together according to their ancestral villages. On its north side, the structure features a distinctly large balcony. The museum itself was once the East Kong Yick Building, a typical four-storey brick edifice that has stood on the corner of King Street and 8th Avenue South for over a century. It shut its doors in 2006 and today, it exists preserved as though inside a candy jar of its own, an exhibit inside the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, named for the first Asian American to hold elected office in Washington state.
These vessels have long vanished from Puget Sound, replaced with ro-ro ferries shuttling passengers between Seattle and Bainbridge Island.īulbous jars of preserves line the shelves of the Yick Fung Company They were among scores of newcomers looking to find work fishing, logging, mining, or simply lured by the discovery of gold further south in California. These were the boats that brought the first Chinese immigrants to Seattle in the 1860s. Carefully examining curlicued labels, visitors to the shop peruse meticulously stacked shelves and consider the arrivals and sailings of Blue Funnel Line steamships, advertised in gold leaf on this Chinatown general store’s windows. These sweets were once a taste of home for many. It is a crystalised galaxy of candied ginger, dried seedless cherries and mangoes flavoured with loi 5 hang 4 mui 4 (旅行梅, dried plum), all of it glinting enticingly as sun-riding dust motes rise languidly against a marian blue sky. In the old brick blocks just south of Seattle’s downtown core, bulbous jars of preserves line the shelves of the Yick Fung Company.
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