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Reviews
Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon
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By Marie Rose Wong
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 337 pages. $24.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Robert R. Swartout, Jr.
Carroll College, Helena, Montana
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| Sweet Cakes, Long Journey is a very impressive book. It makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of Asian American history, urban history, and the specific history of Portland, Oregon. It is gracefully written and is based on a wealth of both local and federal primary sources. It is comparable to Sucheng Chan's This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (University of California Press, 1986) and Anthony W. Lee's Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (University of California Press, 2001), two remarkable monographs that broke new ground in the field of Asian American studies. |
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In focusing her attention on Portland, Marie Rose Wong has shed critical light on one of the largest and most significant Chinese communities found anywhere in the United States. On the West Coast, where most Chinese and Chinese Americans resided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only San Francisco had a larger population. (Portland's Chinese population peaked in 1900 at 7,841.) Yet, until the publication of this volume, little had been written on the Chinese experience in the Rose City. Although the historical accounts in the book run from the 1850s up to World War II, most of the detailed descriptions focus on the years from the early 1880s, when the first Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress, through the 1920s. |
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One of the major strengths of this study is the author's ability to place the Chinese experience within the larger context of Portland's history as a burgeoning urban center. In fact, Chapter 1 examines in some detail the special role that immigrants, and the Chinese in particular, played in urban communities such as Portland. Chapter 2 discusses the reaction, legal and otherwise, of white Oregonians to the presence of Chinese pioneers in the state and in the city. |
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The central theme of the book is that the Chinese settlers in Portland, although concentrated in the downtown area of the Westside, were able to avoid being squeezed into a geographically defined ghetto or enclave, a fate that befell many Chinese in other large American cities. According to the author, "Portland's Chinatown was different ... in that it did not acquire the qualities of an ethnic urban enclave until the 1930s," and, even then, the concentration was due more to escalating real-estate values than to legal or social harassment. The city's "unique qualities" that produced this rather broad distribution pattern of Chinese settlement "were generated by interactions between the peer [that is, white] community and the immigrant Chinese and by political positions taken by members of white society" (p. 266). Throughout the volume, but especially in Chapters 2 and 3, the author describes how civic leaders such as Harvey Scott, the influential editor of the Oregonian for forty-five years, and Matthew P. Deady, judge of the Ninth District Court for thirty-four years, worked to thwart the acts of violence and discriminatory laws that were often aimed at Chinese in other urban areas such as Tacoma, Denver, and San Francisco. |
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Another major strength of the study is the author's detailed description and analysis of how Chinese community leaders used the courts and sympathetic lawyers and judges to protect their civil and commercial rights during the Chinese exclusion period (1882–1943). Chinese residents in America during this period certainly faced daunting challenges, especially from the federal Bureau of Immigration, but it is no longer possible, thanks to the evidence put forward by this volume and other recent studies, to view these Chinese residents simply as passive victims who had no control over their own destiny. |
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I have a couple of minor quibbles with the book. On numerous occasions the author refers to the Chinese minister in Washington, D.C., as the "Chinese foreign [sic] minister" (see, for example, pp. 71, 74, 82, 89–94, 180–83, 256). Had a specialist in diplomatic history reviewed the manuscript, this problem would have easily been caught. In a few cases, there is confusion about proper family names. For instance, Wu Ting Fang is referred to as Minister Fang, when, in fact, his family was Wu (pp. 181–83). |
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Such items, it must be stated, do not detract from the overall quality of this major new work. Indeed, a brief review such as this cannot do justice to the richness and complexity of the narrative. There are detailed discussions of specific legal cases, the varied roles of Chinese community leaders, Chinese urban architecture, and the Chinese vegetable gardens than ran along Tanner Creek — to name but a few of the intriguing sub-topics covered in this fine volume. Thanks to the diligence and skill of Marie Rose Wong, the Chinatowns of Portland may finally receive the serious attention of historians that they have long deserved. |
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