Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West

Members of the Chinese Heritage Tour started the Tuesday portions of the 2010 voyage by taking a guided tour of the Wing Luke Museum – including the boarding rooms and meeting area above the ground level.

The boarding rooms of the Freeman Hotel were a place where immigrants could stay before going to their next destination. Many Chinese immigrants would save their money and move to other areas in Seattle, such as Beacon Hill and Rainier Valley, when they could.

The Freeman Hotel also gave them a chance to be around those who spoke the Toisan dialect. The East Kong Yick Building – The Wing’s home – also has a community meeting room on the top floor.

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“America” headed east Tuesday with a group of Chinese American history buffs, ready to pursue stories more than a century old from the Oregon hills.

Actually, the country itself was not moving on the highway.

The name sat on top of the chartered blue bus that left the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle and made its way east on Interstate 90, as the 2010 Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West - the moving part of it, that is - began.

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For more than an hour on Monday evening, the plates full of Chinese food – chicken with a ginger-and-green onion sauce, steamed fish with preserved olives, steamed egg - kept arriving at the Four Seas restaurant in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Maxine Chan, a Seattle food anthropologist, devised the recipes as part of the 2010 Chinese Heritage Tour which the Wing Luke Museum and the USDA Forest Service are sponsoring.

She stood before about 90 guests and gave an overview of each dish – and how immigrants from the Toisan area in southern China brought the food they had known in the fields and rolling hills from their homeland to the American West. The kick-off meal to the 2010 Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West had drawn people to the table.

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If you’re driving on a highway or backroad in the coming seven days in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada and spot a bus full of people sporting these tan baseball caps with green lettering, please give us a friendly wave.

If you see us in person, please say hello. We’ll respond in kind – in English, Cantonese, the Taishan – or Toisan – dialect of southern China and Mandarin.

We’re not a new group of conservation corps workers. We’re a group that left Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum on Tuesday. We like history. For many of us, our relatives left the Taishan – or Toisan – region decades ago.

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The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle collaborated with the USDA Forest Service for this second Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West. Beth Takekawa, the museum’s executive director, and Dale Hom, a Forest Service supervisor, take a moment to offer their greetings for this week’s tour.

Hom was instrumental in organizing the first Heritage Tour in 1994 – and this one. Takekawa and staff members at The Wing worked tirelessly to coordinate the logistics – including contacting historians, arranging lodging and putting all the sites in four Western states into historic context.

The International Examiner, a Seattle newspaper, offered a trip preview, written by Paul Kim.

In it, Cassie Chinn, the museum’s deputy executive director, talked about one reason why she participated in organizing this week’s tour. She traveled on the first Heritage Tour in 1994.

She walked away inspired.

The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle strives to accomplish one goal in all of its endeavors - connect people with Asian Pacific American history.

The lessons and stories of the past have always mattered in the United States. Sometimes, they are overlooked. Still, they are important and relevant.

The Wing – as it’s known – is undertaking a rolling history project, of sorts, with this summer’s Chinese Heritage Tour of the American West. It includes stops at historic sites in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. The last trip of its kind was in 1994.

The trip kicks off this evening in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District with an exploration of food once eaten by Chinese American pioneers. On Tuesday, participants board a bus.

We invite you to visit this blog and our Twitter feed throughout the week to get glimpses into the trip and see what participants are experiencing as history appears before their eyes.

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