Mike Dillon reviews Ron Chew's MY UNFORGOTTEN SEATTLE

My Unforgotten Seattle by Ron Chew
Nonfiction, ISBN 978-0-0297484-1-2
International Examiner, publisher,
Buy at: https://iexaminer.org (Book sales benefit the International Examiner, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization)
2020, hardcover, 704 pages, price varies

“Ever since I was little, I relished being alone,” Ron Chew writes in his memoir, My Unforgotten Seattle. “My secret life rivaled that of Walter Mitty.”

Chew, a shy, sickly child born in 1953 to Chinese immigrant parents, started out from his Beacon Hill home with a halting command of English. He would grow up to expand the lens of Seattle’s Nordic soul.

The list of awards, honors, and responsibilities that have come Chew’s way is noteworthy. As editor of the International Examiner, he worked at the crossroads of Seattle’s tight-knit Asian and Pacific Island communities. As transformative executive director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum, he was honored by the Clinton White House and given the Ford Foundation’s “Leadership for a Changing World” award. The American Association of Museums recognized him in their “Centennial Honor Roll.” From 20008 to 2010, Chew served as scholar-in-residence in the museology department at the University of Washington.

In a distressed time, My Unforgotten Seattle provides much-needed ballast against the city’s spiraling historical amnesia.

This is only a partial list; a nod to biography as résumé. 

But the narrative of any life, especially of the shy, cannot fully capture the interior drama between the contemplative observer and the public figure. That drama, a sort of Proustian, pilgrim’s progress, is the undertow that moves through Chew’s life and makes My Unforgotten Seattle, ultimately, moving.

Chew’s big book weighs in at 638 pages plus, not counting 56 pages of photographs, most of them in color. The acknowledgements section offers a reason to take the plunge: it contains the names of more than 200 people Chew wishes to thank, an indicator of the book’s true subject—his remembrance of a world and the people in it as an act of devotion. 

Chew’s world lies mostly south of Yesler Way. For post-War, White, middle-class Seattle—the Seattle of the old Frederick & Nelson Tea Room, Greek Row, the Washington Athletic Club, and Opening Day on the Montlake Cut—that world might as well have existed on the backside of the moon. 

Aided by a journal he kept for nearly twenty years, Chew brings that world back with pointillist exactitude, right down to the addresses of old businesses, menus from long-gone restaurants, the taste of food no longer served, a remembered conversation, the shadow of an emotion. 

Chinatown, better known as the International District since the mid-1970s, was Chew’s second home. His father was head waiter at the three-level Hong Kong Restaurant, which closed in 1983. Chew started work there as a busboy at thirteen. The venerable establishment featured a viewing aquarium, a dimly lit cocktail lounge called the Sampan Room, and watercolor murals by Fay Chong on the second floor.

“Chinatown was loud. It was alive,” Chew writes. “Shoppers scrambled in and out of stores, dumping armfuls of purchases into the back of cars left idling. People chatted gleefully, yelling at one another even though they stood only inches apart. Thin bachelor men smoked in doorways, hacking vigorously and spewing wads of phlegm on the sidewalk. Along both sides of the alleys, rusted metal fire escapes zigzagged downward, the railings draped with wet clothes and kids peering from above. The streets smelled like a mixture of pungent fried Chinese food, gasoline, and rotting garbage.”  

Between Beacon Hill Elementary and Franklin High School, a few admirable teachers encouraged the struggling student. In college, Chew’s world widened: “My mind toggled between the vibrantly open cultural and political opportunities at the University of Washington and the rigid traditions of Chinatown and my upbringing.” A journalism class taught by William F. Johnston was where “I found my life’s calling.” He sharpened his craft by writing stories under deadline for The Daily, the campus newspaper.

These were the years of campus ferment. As a Daily reporter, Chew covered nationally-known activists who came to town, including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Ken Kesey, Eugene McCarthy, and Cesar Chavez. In line to be The Daily editor, Chew was passed over for a White student who hadn’t applied for the job: a clear case of discrimination. Chew did not turn the other cheek. The highly publicized case was settled in 1976: Chew received $1200 in back pay and a promise on the part of the university to revise its Student Publications Board procedures.

He left the university a few credits short of graduating, taking with him a reputation as a “troublemaker.” His mother warned him: “That is the way it is in America. . . . You are not safe. You have to be very careful from now on.” He found his way to the International Examiner in Pioneer Square, where he became editor.  

Here he rubbed shoulders with labor organizers from the Alaska Cannery Workers Association, and became friends with anti-Marcos activists Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, who were gunned down in 1981; the hit was traced to the Marcos regime in the Philippines. Viernes, working on a book about the Asian labor movement in the Alaskan canneries, sensed his time was short. He entrusted his manuscript, journal and photos to Chew, who kept faith with his friend. Chew’s Remembering Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes: The Legacy of Filipino American Labor Activism, was published in 2012. The day after the book launch, Chew tells us, he sat in his car in the International District and wept. 

Chew’s chapter on the murders at the Wah Mee Club in 1983, which left thirteen dead, is an object lesson in how the mainstream media, falling back on clichés and racial stereotypes, can heap more pain on a community already in pain. 

When he took over as executive director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum in 1991, Chew quickly realized the financial picture was perilous. With the approach of the 50th anniversary of the imprisonment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, Chew saw an opportunity. The groundbreaking “Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After,” stepped outside the traditional, academic framework to stage an exhibition created at the grass-roots level. Executive Order 9066 saved the museum and provided a model for future, community-based exhibits. Chew saw the Wing Luke as a verb, not a noun — a vehicle to lift up the community on behalf of social justice, the way African American churches did during the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1995, the Wing Luke received the National Award for Museum Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Chew and other Wing Luke staffers traveled to Washington D.C. to accept the award at the Clinton White House. The exhibit, “If Tired Hands Could Talk: Stories of Asian Pacific American Garment Workers,” was recognized in 2002 by the Western Museums Association as the best exhibition in the region. In sweet symmetry, Chew’s mother, a garment worker, was one of those he interviewed.

Chew was asked to serve on boards, and to speak at public forums. The University of Washington finally awarded Chew an honorary Bachelor of Arts Degree in 2002. The shy Beacon Hill boy had become a major influencer in the life of the city.

The quest for a new Wing Luke museum, to be located in the Kong Yick Building, is a tale of teamwork among staff, board and community. The $23.4 million capital campaign was, Chew allows, a “moonshot.” Dollars chipped in from the community, grants from the likes of the Gates Foundation and Allen Foundation, and federal funds, pushed the campaign across the line. The new museum opened in 2008. After the fund-raising effort, Chew stepped down from his leadership role. His parents did not live to see their son’s achievement. 

My Unforgotten Seattle opens a window on Seattle’s generative home ground for social change. Hundreds of people, living and dead, are remembered in its pages—the role models, icons, and beloved figures, along with the everyday people with no claim to history except their hard work and decency, who form the conscience and character of the world south of Yesler.

Currently president of the International Examiner board, and owner and operator of Chew Communications, Chew served as executive director of the International Community Health Services Foundation from 2010 to 2020, putting his fund-raising skills to work on behalf of community clinics.

Chew still lives on Beacon Hill. At 68, he runs, and he gardens: “When I’m in my garden on warm summer days, I like taking off my shoes and kneading the soil with my bare toes. I lie on a small patch of grass in the middle of this paradise and gaze at drifting white clouds, just as I did when I was a child.”

In a distressed time, My Unforgotten Seattle provides much-needed ballast against the city’s spiraling historical amnesia. “My life has been the poem I would have writ,” Thoreau, who was no Walter Mitty, wrote. “But I could not both live and utter it.” Ron Chew has managed to do both.

Seattle needed this.

Mike Dillon, retired publisher of Pacific Publishing Co., grew up on Bainbridge Island. As publisher of a half-dozen community newspapers in Seattle and environs, he won numerous awards for his feature and column writing, including first place in the social issues category from the Society of Professional Journalists for a three part series on sexual abuse. Bellowing Ark Press has published four books of his poetry; three books of his haiku have been published by Red Moon Press. Several of his haiku were included in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from W.W. Norton (2013). His most recent book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor” (Unsolicited Press, April 2019). In 2013, the WNPA recognized him with its Master Editor/Publisher Award.