Topic: Asian & Pacific Islander Americans
The Chinese Village was built for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific (A-Y-P) Exposition in Seattle in 1909. The exposition took place between June 1 and October 16, 1909, drawing more than three million people....
Chinese immigrants, largely men, began arriving in Seattle in the 1860s, and played a key role in the development of Washington Territory, providing labor for the region's mines and salmon canneries a...
Kichio Allen Arai was Seattle's first Asian American architect to design buildings under his own name. His approach integrated Japanese aesthetics with American conventions. Arai's career was unfortun...
Joseph Koch (1920-2000) was a longtime resident of Auburn, a small town located in south King County only a few miles from the Pierce County border. From the time of his retirement in 1962, Joe was on...
Carlos Bulosan was a prolific writer and poet, best remembered as the author of America Is in the Heart, a landmark semi-autobiographical story about the Filipino immigrant experience. Bulosan gained ...
Over its 65-year history, Bush Garden has been many things to many people -- the second Japanese restaurant in the state of Washington; the first American restaurant with a karaoke bar; a restaurant o...
The Puyallup Assembly Center, better known by the euphemism Camp Harmony, a name coined by an Army public-relations officer during construction in 1942, was situated at the Western Washington fairgrou...
Chinese immigrants played a critical role in the development of Washington Territory and of Seattle. By 1880, more than 3,000 Chinese lived in Washington Territory and worked in various industries.
In the late nineteenth century a few Chinese immigrants found work in the San Juan Islands in domestic service, on farms, or in mining and logging camps, but most Chinese laborers came to the islands ...
Ruby Chow was dubbed a "living legend" (Rhodes) for her 50-year career as a restaurateur, Chinese community pioneer, civic activist, public official, and a major bridge between Seattle's Chinese commu...
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project is a Seattle-based nonprofit organization founded in 1996. The word Densho means "to pass on to the next generation," and this concept of legacy lies squar...
Lawrence Matsuda (b. 1945) is an award-winning poet, author, and educator who in 1969 started the first Asian-American history course in Washington public schools. Matsuda was born in the Japanes...
With an estimated population of 30,000 (in the late 1990s), the Filipino American community forms the largest group of Asian Americans in the Seattle area. Beginning with the first known Filipino resi...
As early as the 1920s, Filipinos from Seattle were contracted to work in Alaskan canneries. The canneries offered summer work for students to pay for their studies. In 1930, more than 4,000 of these "...
Many histories of the San Juan Islands and of Friday Harbor, the town on San Juan Island that is the county seat of San Juan County, report that the protected bay known as Friday Harbor (from which th...
Goon Dip was a phenomenon -- a visionary and wealthy entrepreneur, public servant, philanthropist, and the most influential Chinese in the Pacific Coast during the early years of the twentieth century...
Mariano Guiang (1904-1992), a Filipino boxer, emigrated from the Philippines to live in Seattle, arriving at the age of 19 on June 12, 1924. This is a reminiscence excerpted from a longer interview co...
The distinctive music of the Hawaiian Islands is easily recognizable -- its signature thrumming of a 'ukulele, thwacking of bamboo percussion sticks (puili), and keening "steel guitar" lines are, toda...
The Higo 10 Cent Store (later Higo Variety Store, located in Seattle at 602-608 S Jackson Street) represents one of the few threads linking the bustle of Seattle's Japantown of the 1930s to recent eff...
In a remarkable show of personal courage, Seattle native Gordon Hirabayashi was one of handful of Japanese Americans nationwide to defy U.S. government curfew and "evacuation" orders issued in 1942 (i...
George Hirahara was 5 years old when he left Japan with his mother to join his father in Washington. At the age of 19, his parents sent him to Japan to wed Koto Inoue in an arranged marriage. The coup...
Bettie Luke (b. 1942) helped Ben Woo (1923-2008) organize a march in 1986 to mark the centennial of the 1886 expulsion of Chinese residents from Seattle and led the effort to commemorate the 125th ann...
Marie Wong is an associate professor at Seattle University's Institute of Public Service, sits on the board of InterIm Community Development Corporation, and is public-information advisor to the Kong ...
Maxine "Max" Chan (b. 1955) is a food anthropologist and a community activist who has researched the evolution of Chinese cuisine in the Pacific Northwest. She has also worked in social services in th...