- Hello, everyone.

I'm Crosby Kemper, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

And welcome to Visions of America.

All stories, all people, all places.

In this episode, we're in Seattle, Washington, to explore the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience here in the heart of the Chinatown International District.

Visions of America is coming up next.

(bright music) One of the responsibilities of the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant program is the effort to preserve our nation's history to make sure that many of the unheralded stories that might otherwise be lost or forgotten, are given the resources they need to stay a part of our national conversation.

The Asian American story is a story of immigrant oppression becoming a hard fought immigrant success.

I'm standing in what was originally known as the East Kong Yick Building in Seattle's historic Chinatown International District.

This is the building that some of the earliest Asian immigrants to the United States called home when they began arriving here in 1910.

Today, this building is the home to the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, affectionately known as the Wing.

Two members of the community here.

It is the only Pan Asian Pacific American community based museum in the country and is dedicated to shining a light on the culture, art and history of Asian Pacific Americans.

The first person I'm meeting on our visit here is Joel Tan, the director of the Wing, to take a look around at some of the history preserved here and to find out how his own family's story only reinforces the importance of this institution.

Joel.

- Hey.

- Well, good to see you.

- Good to see you, Crosby.

- It's great to be here in the Wing Luke Museum.

Thank you.

So the Wing Luke Museum is called the pan-Asian museum.

What?

What does that mean?

- That's right.

Our museum is the nation's only pan-Asian and Pacific Islander American Museum.

And that means we tell and present and center authentic stories from the many different groups, the diasporas within Asian Pacific Islander communities.

- It's a true community-based museum, including the Filipino-American community here.

Your background is Filipino.

- That's right.

That's right.

I'm Filipino and we emigrated to the US in 1976, in fact.

- Each one of these groups, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-American, Filipino-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, they have very different cultural backgrounds, very different histories and a different history in the United States for each group, the Filipino-Americans, who, of course, relate to the Spanish-American War and the Philippines becoming a U.S. territory.

- That's right.

- It was colony.

And in the 20s and 30s, the Filipinos were the one Asian American group that could come to the United States after the immigration law because they had American passports as an American colony.

- That's right.

That's right.

That's the terrible beauty of history, right.

In terms of what brings us here, what forces us to leave our homelands, and then what we do once we arrive.

And for us, it's an incredible honor to work with the terrible beauty of all of that.

- [Crosby] Right.

- Terms of all the sacrifices the discrimination.

- Discrimination.

- Violence sometimes.

- And also what we do with it.

And it really is about, I think, the story time and time again that really moves people is all of the various ways the human spirit comes through.

- So show us the museum.

- All right, let's go.

- Let's take a look.

- All right.

(bright music) - So the very kind of seed of this place is about collective or community co-creation, And so our programs come together, through conversations, through conversations with many different folks who are invested in this issue.

And this one in particular.

- This is a Japanese-Americans being interned in the camps in World War II, 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned, and some of them are still here in this community.

- That's right.

So I think because it starts with the conversation, this particular exhibition starts with that story, the Japanese-American incarceration.

But in true Wing Luke Museum fashion, we are committed to telling that story authentically through folks who've lived it and through kind of historical evidence and through arts and culture that leaves also a conversation about it.

But it starts there, but then it also moves beyond.

And I would just say one of the things that really struck me initially about this exhibition and the way it came together was that if you notice a lot of the wall texts, it is written in the second person.

It's addressed to the you, which is not, as you imagine, not the usual convention for museums.

And this is where we're we're not like most museums in that we're about connection and so we go directly to you, you, your name is now a five digit number.

Your fingerprints on government record, your home, a converted home.

- [Crosby] If this if this had happened to you, what would you have done?

- [Joel] Right?

- Let's let's take a look at another exhibit.

- All right.

(bright music) - So, Joel, we're in the Honoring our Country exhibit.

You have it and the country is the country we're living in now, but also the 40 different Asian countries that Asian Americans came from.

And one of the things that you're keeping alive for the next generation, I mean, the work that you're doing with the next generation, with kids, kids of all ages, but especially school groups and that sort of thing is a very dynamic thing because you're keeping the culture alive with them and they get to participate in the culture through the museum.

- That's right.

Among the things that we just love and we're still in the middle of it, is our multi-week Camp Bruce Lee.

So a lot of these kids who don't even know who Bruce Lee is, but through the course of their experiences together and with our instructors and the stories that are told, the deep themes about who Bruce Lee is in terms of self-actualization, in terms of the power you derive from practice.

- And he had such broad interests intellectually.

And what were the quotes you have?

I think on the on the walls is "I am always learning."

- [Joel] That's right.

- And I think he's a great example of that, example of all of us, example that the museum gives to everyone.

- It's this joyful audacity of the human spirit that keeps coming through because it's not like, it's not an invitation to keep throwing adversity and challenges.

But ultimately the real story is what surface is always is our innate wellness and our innate joy.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) - While the Wing has become an invaluable archive of the Asian-American experience.

It's also a tribute to one of the most revered members of this community.

Wing Luke was voted to Seattle City Council in 1962, the first Asian-American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest.

And he had a vision to create a museum in Seattle's Chinatown International District.

In order to preserve the history of this neighborhood, a neighborhood that helped build Seattle.

After his death in a plane crash in 1965.

His family, friends and supporters united to bring his vision to life.

And today, this institution bears his name.

Bettie Luke is the youngest sister of Wing Luke and I sat down with her to talk about her family's story, her brother's legacy, and her own experiences as a multicultural educator and community activist.

Bettie, you're family came from Canton in the Pearl River area of China.

Your grandfather came to the United States, came to Seattle to start a laundry here.

And we're in a room in the Wing Luke Museum, which has, I'm told, some maybe some family objects, some objects from the laundry.

Did all the family work in the business together?

Did you ever work with your father or did Wing Luke work with your father?

- Oh, absolutely.

It was a family business.

You had to work.

You had to help run the business.

If you hired outside, then you'd have to share the profits.

And so we as a family we pitched in in ways that we could at our age.

- And at what point did he know?

Did the family know?

Did you know that he was going to go into politics?

- I would say that just gradually he kept doing leadership things.

He just kept doing more and more and just really being successful at it.

What I admire is that he was always thinking, thinking beyond what standard running for office would be.

- His slogan when he ran for the city council and won was, you are not electing a platform but a councilman.

And what exactly did that mean?

- He spoke about you don't elect the issue.

You're elect the man.

You elect a person.

What they stood for, things that they valued, things they promoted, the things that they cared about, the ways in which they cared about the community.

- I would guess you would agree that he would have loved this museum because of the stories it tells and the culture.

He talked about I know there's a quote in the museum about the importance of cultural heritage.

- Exactly.

Not only culture and the preservation, but through the lens of social justice.

- Right.

- And so he did very proud that.

- So, Bettie, your own work in the community, you followed in your brother's footsteps, in working in the community for change.

Can you talk about that?

- Oh, he was such a role model.

I try to live what I teach.

And so I've been involved in diversity training, multicultural education, multi-ethnic education for over 40 years.

And I've had the opportunity to conduct diversity training in 36 different states across the nation.

- Wow.

So he has a pretty profound legacy, it seems to me, helping to beginning the remaking through historic preservation of the city, open housing, a basic cornerstone of civil rights.

And for quite some time, this museum named after him and as a family member, as his sister.

What do you think his legacy is?

- I think his legacy is to show that it's possible to reach, it's possible to make things better for others.

In fact, very distinctly remember him saying, if you can make systemic change, then everybody gets a better chance.

- [Crosby] Yes.

- And so that is never ego is never aggrandizing himself.

It was like with this position, you can make bigger leaps and bigger changes and bigger, better things for people.

So that legacy that you can reach, that you can a piece of that too, is that you can reach across cultures.

(mellow music) (logo whooshing) - One of the darkest chapters of the story preserved here at the Wing is the government's internment of Japanese-Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

And as part of my time with the Wing, I met with a couple of notable voices in this community who have a firsthand perspective on the cruelty that people here endured and why this is a period of American history that should never be forgotten.

(logo whooshing) So we're here very appropriately in the governor, Gary Locke Library and Community Heritage Center of the Wing Luke Museum with the former director of the museum, Beth Takekawa.

And with Dr. Lawrence Matsuda.

Larry is an educator, a poet, a fisherman and an author, and he's particularly the author of a book that I found when I was touring the Wing Luke Museum and was in the shop.

And I bought his book, "Fighting for America: "The Nisei Soldiers."

And you both have a personal story that is related to the larger story of the Nisei.

And, Larry, you were actually born in an internment camp.

- All of my stateside family were incarcerated.

My uncle, grandfather, grandmother on both sides, brother, mother.

- Do you have any memory of the camp?

Do you?

- Well, you know that people ask me that I was born there, and I used to say, "No, I don't have any memories because I was too young."

But what I have are all these borrowed memories, these stories.

There wasn't a New Year's party, a wedding reception, a birthday party that didn't have the mention of camp.

No matter what, it always came up.

And sometimes it was really innocent.

Like, "Oh, you know, we had a piano" and that was it, you know?

Not only do we have a piano, but we had this, that, this, that, but we lost it all.

And then you would hear the rest of the stories as they unfold.

But there's this unifying thing that so many of the soldiers who volunteered for the United States Army during the war became the Nisei soldiers.

The Nisei regiment volunteered in the camps, from the camps.

And your father had the experience of his friends going off.

Tell us about his experience in the camps.

- So he had two best friends in Seattle, John Kawaguchi and Marko Kinoshita, and they were drafted into the Army from Minnetonka before he was.

And he had the experience.

They both were killed in combat and they had their funerals in Minnetonka behind barbed wire.

And my father was 20, 21, maybe.

And he had to give their eulogies-- - [Crosby] In camp.

- In camp.

Yeah.

And I think he never got over the irony.

I mean, to say the least, you know, is the irony-- - The tragedy and huge pain.

- Yeah.

- Now, his two best friends.

And then he has to go off and fight for his country.

A country killed his two best friends in combat.

They were fighting for their country as well, but has locked up his family, locked him up, - Like Larry, knows that.

A lot of families, they didn't talk about this time.

My father was the opposite, that within the family he was very outspoken.

So we heard these stories all the time.

- And yet the story you tell in this book, which is so phenomenal to me, of the 442nd and I think many Americans know a little bit about this, that there was a Nisei regiment that fought.

What they probably don't know is that it was the most decorated regiment in the history of the United States.

That seems to me, you know, is sort of an extraordinary story, particularly given and what this museum represents about, you know, the work that so many immigrants did to become part of their community and not allowed to be citizens until the 1950s, when, of course, many of them were already gone.

- It's significant that those are the photos and the stories that are on the walls of this museum.

And I remember being part of the first Wing museum exhibit that I was a part of the committees and everything.

It was the Japanese-American story.

So when this exhibit opened, it was 1992 and my father was still alive.

And I just remember that he came to the exhibit opening.

And he had this look of elation on his face that I have never seen.

And it was like vindication, you know, that this is my story.

It's told from our perspective, and it's on the walls of the museum.

- But it really it's doing what the museum ought to do, what you have done, which is to tell the story of people in the community and get them to tell it.

You provide the venue, but they do the storytelling.

And Larry, in the book, at one point, you have one of your characters say to tell this as if you're talking to your granddaughter and explaining what you did to your to your granddaughter, which it seems to me is a great idea, is the notion that we should all be thinking about telling our stories in that way.

- The good thing about this was I interviewed every one of them except for one who had passed away, Shiro Cassino, and I talked to these people and my father in law was in the 442, he got a Silver Star, I think two Bronze Stars.

And so I asked him, "What did you do?"

He wouldn't say.

He would not talk about it.

So I was really surprised to talk to these people and have them actually tell their stories, which is marvelous.

And, just tell me your story and and we'll work with it.

And once you get them talking, then they get it out there.

There was a lot of sadness there that people lost friends and relatives and there was frustration, but they all persevered.

And that was one of the clear things out of all of this.

And and they all had a belief in America, too, which was liberty and justice for all.

Even though they had no liberty, they had no justice.

They kept those values.

(mellow music) (logo whooshing) - The Asian-American story in America is fraught with oppression and struggle.

But the perseverance that countered those hardships has led to plenty of success stories as well, including the growth of the city that we are visiting today.

Perhaps no one story personifies this better than that of Seattle's own Gary Locke.

A third generation Chinese-American.

He became the first Asian-American governor in the continental United States when he was voted into office as the 21st governor of Washington State in 1997.

He later served as secretary of commerce and ambassador to China.

And his years of public service were directly inspired by Wing Luke.

Governor Locke, you've had one of the great political careers in recent American history, but I'd like to take you back to where your family comes from.

And the story of your family starts in Taishan in the Pearl River area of China.

What did your family tell you about where you came from?

- Well, the folks really didn't talk that much about the family village, other than this was the source of the Locke clan and most of the Chinese here in the state of Washington.

My grandfather came over to the United States when he was a teenager, 11 or 12 years old.

And we're not really sure how he came here, but he ended up serving as a houseboy, a servant boy for a family in the State Capitol, washing dishes, cleaning the floors, doing laundry and helping with the cooking.

And here I was inaugurated as governor of the state of Washington, moving into the governor's mansion exactly one mile from the house.

And I joked in the inaugural speech that it took our family 100 years to move that one mile.

- So how did you become interested?

When did you decide to become a politician as a servant of the people?

- Well, I never thought growing up that I'd ever be a politician, but I was always fascinated with government.

I got to meet while I was in scouting some of the political leaders, and I was just in awe of them.

The mayor of Seattle who came down and visited our Boy Scout troop at one time.

Seeing Wing Luke at a community theater event and hearing a lot about Wing Luke and then seeing him in person.

I never got to shake his hand or anything, but I was just so in awe of him.

And people always talked about him and people talked about his potential and where he could have gone had it not been for the tragic plane crash that he died in.

Later on, when I finally did decide to run for for office.

And that was only after many years working as a community activist and participating in Asian-American organizations, pushing for affirmative action, housing policies, preservation of the Chinatown International District, that people said, "Hey, Gary, why don't you run for office?"

And I said, "What?

Me?"

But I by then volunteered for a lot of people's campaigns, really enjoyed, you know, knocking on doors, passing out brochures or helping put up yard signs.

And so the more I thought about it, I said, "Yeah, why not?"

I mean, if I really care about the issues that affect our community, then maybe I should try to be at the table to help set those policies.

- And one thing that I think unites you with Wing Luke and it's important in the in two ways in the history of Seattle and particularly is real estate and housing and civil rights built around people living where where they want to live and not where they're told they must live.

Is that fair?

- It is.

Because quite frankly, I grew up in the south end of Seattle, and there's almost an unspoken rule that we never went to the north end of Seattle, that if you're a person of color, you could buy a house maybe in the south end of Seattle but not in the north end.

And so housing, access to housing and fair housing policies and getting rid of redlining where the banks basically would not provide loans for people in certain neighborhoods.

That was hard to overcome.

And certainly, you know, Wing Luke was a trailblazer just being in terms of civil rights.

I mean, it was a people of color that really established Seattle and indeed much of the West Coast.

It was immigrants.

And in fact, other than the Native Americans, America is really a land of foreigners.

We're all foreigners except for, you know, whether we're first generation or 10th generation, whether our ancestors came on the Mayflower, a slave vessel from Africa or a steamer from Asia, except for the Native Americans were all foreigners.

And I really believe that the prosperity of America, the energy, the vitality of America, is due to that diversity of culture, people, languages and religions and viewpoints.

- Do institutions like the The Wing Luke Museum, which presents a pan-Asian, you know, all the various groups.

Can the museum play a role in educating Americans about what Asian-Americans have done for all of us?

- Well, we need museums like the Wing Luke and museums all across the country to tell the story of America.

The contributions of different ethnic groups, whether from Europe, from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, all parts of the world.

And I think that Americans need to focus more on our history, our unique history as a country, and that certainly extends to Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.

And that's why institutions like Wing Luke that talk about the early Chinese settlers there, that these institutions are so important.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) - While Asian-Americans in the United States have faced a great number of challenges.

The exhibits at Wing Luke Museum and the stories preserved here make it clear that this is a vibrant immigrant community that has endured and made countless contributions to this district, this city, this state and our country as a whole.

I'm grateful to all of our guests for providing some unique views into the Asian-American experience.

And I hope that you made a few of your own discoveries along the way as well.

After all, that's what museums and libraries are for.

I'm Crosby Kemper, and I'll see you next time for another episode of Visions of America.

All stories.

All people.

All places.

(bright music) (bright piano music)