Inside the cracked decor of the Eastern Cafe, Uncle Bob greets me like old time friends. He says my name like he’s been drawing out memories since twenty years past and reads my face like the back of his hands.
We sit at a large table where he looks off to the light. Towards Maynard and King, these pavements are familiar stomping ground for his and the likes of his. He turns 80 in a few weeks and complains that old age is making him forgetful. Yet, I couldn’t help but think he didn’t fully believe his own exaggeration. For someone who moves cautiously about, he carries with him a sharp demeanor, as if his mind hasn’t dared tapped into the practices of old age for fear of its master displaying displeasure.
40 years ago the Kingdome’s construction was underway and the few blocks that made up Chinatown faced deconstruction. Homes to generations of family members and individuals who look like me were told to move elsewhere. Deal with the changes coming with economic development, for the sake of the greater good, and figure something elsewhere.
But when you’ve been stripped of most rights and your identity has been questioned, placed on a forum to discuss its validity and you feel the need to have to justify why your existence counts for something, why fear any more the powers that be than you’ve been forced to fear up to this point?
So the few blocks that is Chinatown became a chess board where individuals began taking up their positions as pawns, bishops and knights, so willingly ready to defend their royalties.
It was the recognition that their parents’ inabilities to speak English with adequate annunciation, the dilapidated buildings and the lack of services to address the impoverished area demanded a redress.
It wasn’t a matter of settling, but a play into the strategies of a lazy man’s economic practice: an exchange of goods and products.
If the city was going to claim part of Chinatown for the Kingdome, then the city had hand over another piece of property elsewhere for the sake of the Chinatown community. “The city can claim to be out of funds, but it can’t deny its possession of property.”
A pawn for a pawn.
Before this, Uncle Bob and his cohorts were witnesses of civil unrest. Many quickly became bitten by the demonstration-bug, influenced by the Black Power movement, and began a partnership with their brown(er) brothers and sisters. Together they picketed and sat-in for more inclusive hiring of administrators of color at Seattle Central; they did similar at the University of Washington’s construction site where no minority workers were hired for building the facilities.
“It wasn’t a matter of race, but a matter of human rights.”
The thing about fear with authority, Uncle Bob reflected, is that you have to remember these quote-on-quote officials are where they are because of people like you. They serve you, at the end of the day, so they have to listen to you.
And once again with strategy, Uncle Bob and his friends began a series of “incubating projects.” They came up with certain grassroot services that would address the lack of culturally competent healthcare, counseling and resources, education…etc., and they’d each take up leadership positions at these different facilities, during which they’d create a board of directors, who would then taken it upon themselves to run it as if it was their own , and off the initial players would go to work on a new project. Like a bee collecting pollen and building upon its colonies, these projects were intentional, and they were thinking well into the future.
These were radicals of their days. Activists who fought to change the language and the conversations around minority groups, model minority stereotypes and fighting the culture of demeaning and patronizing tones that circled around the treatment of human beings who were not white.
“And it was fun, not the meetings, but all of these activities.”
