The Ritual of Civic Apology

I was standing on stage at the University of Puget Sound, preparing to speak of anti-Chinese violence in the American West, when a man I had never met intensified was next to me. It was presented as a member of the Tacoma municipal council. Without preamble, he turned to the public – then for me.

“I say that reconciliation to my children begins with apologies,” he said. “On behalf of the city of Tacoma, I’m sorry.”

Maybe he meant the excuses for the play. But he landed on me.

In November 1885, the white residents of Tacoma, in the territory of Washington, chin their Chinese neighbors. It only took hours. Armed with clubs and pistols, the vigilants went from door to door, developing more than three hundred men, women and children in the streets and outside the city. As the forced walk started, the rain started to fall. Two of the expelled died of an exhibition; The rest went to Portland on foot or in rail. A few days later, arsonists returned to Burn what was left of Chinatown. No one has returned. For decades, whoever tried was again exhausted. This story has been the subject of my speech. That was why I came to Tacoma.

Tacoma’s city councilor looked at me. I felt the instinct of responding – to match his gesture with one of mine. I know what he says to his children; I say mine in the same way: when someone apologizes, you accept. But these apologies were not mine. I let it hang in the air.

When you visit the archives of the small town in the West, ask for registers of anti-Chinese violence and seem that you could be Chinese, the excuses arrive quickly. While I was doing research on my last book in one of these archives, the Kind White Archivist apologized every twenty minutes, each time he gave another evidence.

“This is the report of a coroner of a” Chinese “killed by unknown parties. I’m sorry.”

“In this one, the sheriff tried to stop a Chinese and get another one instead. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry. This implies suicide. He was in prison. “

The volunteers who worked with him echoed the chorus. “I’m sorry,” said one of them, a woman with white hair and a nice smile. “Do you want a caramel?” She looked at me from the corner of the eye for most of her quarter of work, chatting with others forest fires, her grandchildren, a friend with cancer and what had to be done with the “illegal” who had come to town. Once there had been Chinese in this golden colony. Now there were only white residents and new fears of an immigrant threat. I worked to melt the candies.

When I had trouble going beyond a file, the volunteer rushed to help without being asked. His polished nails appear in my photos of the materials, framing images of discrimination and death. She leaned over to read my shoulder.

“It’s just terrible how they were treated,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

Tacoma has a long story to try to understand what happened there. The effort began in 1991, when the municipal council requested the public’s contribution on how to redevelop a land extent along the seafront. Among the suggestions, there was a handwritten note from David Murdoch, a Canadian pastor who had moved to the city. He proposed that the city recognizes the expulsion of 1885. “Our city has never apologized for this blatant injustice,” he wrote, “and it would seem that our city, consequently, suffered (in many ways: in particular reputation and unity).” Its solution: “a reconciliation zone” – a small park, with a Chinese reason – and a committee of citizens, with members “most essentially of Chinese ancestry”.

Murdoch’s note has arrived in the middle of a global increase in public contrition. What started within nineteen years with Australia calls to reconcile with Aboriginal communities has become, in the words of a historian, “a global frenzy to balance moral books”. In the United States, truth commissions have been launched to face slavery, Hawaii colonization, Tuskegee experience, Jim Crow’s violence and Japanese American incarceration. The language of reconciliation openly drawn from psychology – traume, healing – and tacitly from theology: confession, redemption.

Tacoma’s gesture was early and, at the time, singular. Although hundreds of cities in the American West had stories of anti-Chinese violence, I found no other that had made official recognition. In 1993, Tacoma broke the collective silence and adopted resolution n ° 32415. He did not apologize. But he called the expulsion “a most reprehensible event”, confirmed the committee’s commitment to “the elimination of racism and hatred” and allocated twenty-five thousand dollars to build a park. No other city would be officially confronted with its own role in anti-Chinese violence for two other decades.

Tacoma has spent years building its Chinese reconciliation park. David Murdoch contacted the small Chinese community and then living in the city – mainly recent immigrants who had never heard of the expulsion of 1885 and initially felt detached from what they called “ancient history”. But, when I visited the park for the first time, in 2009, that the detachment had turned to the lens. I was joined by Theresa Pan Hosley, an immigrant and Taiwanese businesswoman, who had taken research, fundraising and design. While trying to heal the local community, she told me that she also hoped that the memorial registering in China. “We want these Chinese tourist buses, those who cross Seattle,” she said. “We want them to come here in Tacoma.”

When I returned in 2020, I visited the park again – this time alone. A card at the entrance has announced: “Your trip to reconciliation begins here.” The words gave me a break; Were they intended for me, a fifth generation American Chinese who was a stranger to this city and its history? Did I travel to reconciliation?