On the northern end of Capitol Hill in Seattle, the aptly named Lake View Cemetery snugs up against the chain link fence of Volunteer Park. When you enter the heavy, black iron gates, you can look east out over Lake Washington below and the foothills of the Cascades in the distance. When my daughter was a little girl, I would take her there to visit our family graves. Every visit, I would point out the BLT’s, the Bruce Lee Tourists, people coming to see the grave of Bruce Lee. Rain or shine, every time we were there, they were there. Striding purposefully, often with a latte in one hand, they head up the road, sometimes short-cutting over the grass of non-celebrity graves. Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, rest beneath two tall, polished marble sculptures near the crest of the hill that overlooks the eastern hillside of the cemetery. It is a quiet spot, far enough away from the freeways that the traffic noise is hardly a whisper.
Ron Chew, whose parents immigrated to the US from Hong Kong, is a generation closer to Chinese traditions than I am and tells me that traditionally, people visit the family graves on Ting Ming (Qing Ming in Mandarin), April 4th or 5th of each year, to sweep the graves and leave offerings. The rest of the year, one apparently leaves the graves alone, so the spirits are undisturbed. However, since I’m considerably Americanized, plus only a fifteen-minute drive from Lake View Cemetery, I drop in sporadically throughout the year, often with a small brush to scrub away the ever-accumulating moss, Seattle’s unsung flora, from my parents’ grave marker.
Bruce and Brandon Lee’s ghosts, like those of my family, get no rest. On any given day, tourists from all over the globe visit the Lee graves. Whether solitary, in pairs or by the busload, BLT’s are there, rain or shine, quietly ascending the hill to pay their respects. Many leave flowers or place coins on the grave. The foot traffic to Bruce Lee’s grave is so great that Lake View installed a concrete walkway and metal railing at the Lees’ graves because visitors trampled the surrounding grass like a muddy rugby pitch.
Many of us in Seattle have a distant link to Bruce Lee. My step-brother, Greg Luke, took lessons from Bruce Lee. My daughter’s friend, Sue Kay, an activist with Seattle’s Raging Grannies, was his first female student. Sue has a special connection with the Lee family because Sue introduced Bruce to his wife, Linda. Decades ago, I trained with Taky Kimura and Jesse Glover, two of Bruce Lee’s noted Seattle jeet kune do disciples. I was also fortunate to know the incomparable Southern Mantis gungfu master, Fook Yeung, who was a friend of Bruce Lee’s father and taught Bruce Lee when he first arrived in Seattle.
My cousins, William, Wilke and Willon Lew, told me about how Bruce Lee would eat dinner at their house on Beacon Hill. William had met Bruce Lee at the University of Washington campus and would invite Bruce for dinner at their house. Not only was their mom, whom I called Nom Mu (Aunt Nom), a talented Cantonese cook, but Nom Mu also had a collection of Chinese books. According to William, Bruce borrowed her Chinese books, but never returned them. My late father-in-law, Fred Hirai, mentioned how he would see Bruce Lee at the Seattle Community College campus. Fred, always blunt in his assessment of people, regarded Bruce Lee as a “cocky guy”.
Bruce Lee’s superstardom continues to garner him international attention, but it is another martial artist, Harry S. Lew, that I fondly recall and who is also buried at Lake View Cemetery. Harry Lew, or Hong Git Lew, was my grandfather’s younger brother and first introduced me to Chinese martial arts. Hong Git Lew sailed with my grandfather Tow Git Lew to the US in 1907. My grandfather, crippled as a youngster, walked with a cane because his left leg was three inches shorter than his right. Souvenir stores Pike Place Market used to sell a vintage postcard with him in it, his thick 3” heel visible in the photograph. I don’t know if this accident accounted for his disposition, but according to my father and his siblings, Tow Git was a gruff, stern man. When he came home from work, my father and his four sisters would hide in their rooms to study. While he wasn’t stern with us grandkids, I don’t remember him as a warm man. Our grandmother, Ngin-ngin, was completely opposite, smothering us with hugs and kisses until we squirmed.
Uncle Hong, like many brothers, was like night and day to my grandfather. Whenever I saw Uncle Hong, he was cheerful and quick to laugh. My older sister, Debra, proper as always and closer to Chinese customs than I, addressed him as Cheung Gung, the title for a grandfather’s younger brother. Copying my dad, and too lazy to fully address him as Grand Uncle, I always called him Uncle Hong.
Before running a nightclub, Uncle Hong ran a gambling house out of the three-story brick building that still stands on 3rd Avenue and Washington, near Pioneer Square. His son, Milton Lew, told me the gambling business was successful because at the time, Pioneer Square was popular with sailors. Befitting his vocation, Uncle Hong was a dapper dresser. I would see him driving through Chinatown in his brown, late-model Cadillac, always turned out sharply in a three-piece suit and well-shined shoes.
Somewhere in the family photo albums is a picture of Uncle Hong pheasant hunting with Eddie Bauer, the outdoor clothing magnate. No stranger to guns, Uncle Hong kept a revolver under one of his couch cushions. When Auntie May came from China in 1983, we paid him a visit. Auntie May sat down on the couch, leaned back, then remarked, “oh, what’s this?”, whereupon Uncle Hong rummaged around behind her and removed a small black pistol, which he stowed away in another room.
Uncle Hong told me how, down on the Seattle waterfront when he was a young man, they would fight with the larger, white boys. I think Uncle Hong might’ve been five foot two inches in his prime, similar to my grandfather, although with my grandfather’s crippled leg, it was hard to tell. My grandfather walked with a heavy limp, and I’m certain Uncle Hong meant other Chinese boys, not his older brother, when he said “they” fought. Fighting with white boys seems to be almost a family habit. My father’s older brother, Daniel, recounted how he got into a fight with an “American” (white) boy on the ship as he and my grandfather sailed for his first time from China to the US. To compound the blows Uncle Daniel weathered, he also got cuffed by his father for fighting in the first place. I too had a couple of scuffles as a youth, the words “Chink” or “Chinaman” usually a prelude to some shoving, if not actual blows. Lacking Uncle Hong’s prowess, I was never the victor. Half a century later, however, things have panned out with some of us. Larry Kutz, who fifty years ago stopped me cold with a fist to my chin, meets me regularly for coffee.
In 1962, to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, my father’s siblings gathered in Seattle. The Langs drove their Volkswagen bus from Louisville, Kentucky, the Chins came up from El Cerrito in the Bay Area, the Changs drove up from southern California. Auntie May and her family were stuck in China. Auntie May, born and raised on Beacon Hill, went to China with her husband, Uncle Chi-Liang, and their Florida-born daughter, Marcia just before 1949 Chinese revolution and the Bamboo Curtain slammed shut on them, locking them inside China’s borders until 1983.
While Auntie May and her family struggled in China, only a few years out of the Great Famine and on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the rest of us congregated at the Four Seas Restaurant on Eighth Avenue and King Street, then one of only two restaurants in Seattle’s Chinatown with white tablecloths. My family, if we ever went out for a rare meal at a restaurant, never dined, except for an occasional burger at Dag’s, outside of Chinatown. We never ate in a western restaurant until I was in college at the UW. No white tablecloths for our family; we usually ate at the original Sun Ya, on King Street just east of the Seattle Kung Fu club, or at Atlas Cafe, on the corner of King Street and Maynard Avenue, with its big, old fashioned wooden counter.
The banquet at Four Seas was served in standard Chinese progression, which meant, after a soup of either the prized and costly bird’s nest or shark fin, one honored the guests by serving proteins first. Platters of meats were served sequentially, starting with poached chicken, then pork belly followed by roast duck. Large shrimp might appear, perhaps pan-fried in their shells, dusted with salt and black pepper. You knew dinner was at its climax when the waiters (only men served the food at Four Seas in those days), brought out the fish, which in Seattle was always rockfish, known on the menus as rock cod. The whole rockfish, gutted and scaled, then steamed with sliced ginger and scallions, was served with the head intact, with the head placed in the direction of the most honored guest at the table. One can still buy rockfish in markets, but none now come from Puget Sound, due to the overfishing of this slow-to-mature species. These days, the live tanks in Chinatown restaurants contain ever-present tilapia and sometimes a cabezon or two, but the light, delicate sweetness of steamed rockfish, with a quick drizzle of hot oil and soy sauce, is a taste of years past. The common and vastly inferior substitute fish, tilapia, is a bland, cheap cichlid that is usually trucked to Seattle from fish farms in Idaho. Flatbed trucks haul heavy double-walled plastic totes full of tilapia over the Cascade mountains. Four-foot tall oxygen cylinder tanks lashed behind the cab supply a steady stream of air bubbles into the water to keep the fish alive for their interstate journey. I confess, I’m a fish snob and typically decline to eat farmed fish (no farmed salmon or tilapia for me).
After the chicken, duck, tofu and pork, Chinese greens would follow. About this time, waiters brought the rice, often in plastic ice buckets so the lid could retain the heat. This is the opposite of a family-style meal, where rice is served as soon as the first dishes appeared. A scoop of rice into the rice bowl, then some morsels from the protein and vegetable dishes. But at a banquet, one honored the guests by serving protein, as much as the host could afford, with rice bringing up the rear of the parade of dishes.
At the end of the feast, waiters brought a platter of orange wedges to each table. No desserts like today’s almond pudding or sweet soy soup. As we gnawed the orange wedges down to the rind and the tables were cleared, the young cousins, especially the boys, started getting restless. Before long, however, Uncle Hong had a crowd of us youngsters around him. He did a one-legged deep knee bend, then showed us how to stand in diu le ma, the cat stance, with all your weight on the back leg, knee bent. From this stance, he showed us how to quickly kick the opponent in the groin with a flick of the front leg. He also showed us a couple gripping techniques, such as a hard pinch on the opponent’s lunula of the thumbnail or yanking the lower lip of your assailant, tugging painfully at the lower frenum. Little Paul Lang, the youngest and perhaps most athletic of us cousins (later a star collegiate tennis player), impressed Uncle Hong when he crossed his arms like Uncle Hong, did a one-legged squat … AND stood up without losing his balance. Uncle Hong, smiling and chuckling, encouraged us as we pinched each other, squatted painfully on one leg and howled.
Uncle Hong’s grave lies some two hundred yards northeast of my parents and grandparents. I suspect he and Bruce Lee, both upbeat, positive men with southern gungfu roots and adventurous natures, one a fighter on Seattle’s waterfront from Guangdong Province at the turn of the century, the other a Hong Kong scrapper turned international superstar, might have been good friends, had their timelines intersected.
Other family relations rest at Lake View cemetery. When you enter the main gate, if you turn left, you will walk past the Goon family. A massive block of marble, etched with GOON and four Chinese characters stands behind the graves of Goon Dip, his wife Goon Chin Yook, and their children. The Chinese character carved into the marble is known as Yuen in Cantonese and Ruan in Mandarin.
A century ago, Goon Dip was the most prominent Chinese person in Seattle. Goon Dip emigrated from southern China to the US in 1876 when he was fourteen years old. Things here were dicey then for Chinese, what with the anti-Chinese prejudice, riots and murders, and he returned after a few years to China. About five years later, Goon Dip returned to the US and through a series of fortuitous events, business savvy and good English skills, Goon Dip became so that successful the Chinese government made him the honorary consul for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP) in Seattle. There, Goon Dip met Everett Brainard (E.B.) Deming, who had taken over Pacific American Fisheries (PAF), the largest salmon cannery operation. They struck a deal that made Goon Dip the exclusive labor contractor for PAF canneries throughout Alaska.
In Dillingham, Alaska, the century-old PAF boatyard is still in operation, a parking lot for the gillnetters that fish sockeye each summer. In the offseason, the boats are parked in rows, each boat balanced on its keel with wood blocking or metal stands to steady the vessel upright. The fishing boats seldom spend more than a month in the water, since the sockeye migration, and thus the fishery itself, generally lasts barely a month or so.
Each summer, I walk through the PAF boatyard, across the gravel and mud, through rows of boats, to visit fishermen and women as they prepare their boats. When I’m in Bristol Bay, whether walking across the rough wooden planks in the Peter Pan cannery in Dillingham, on a catwalk across the tundra or over the antique brick path behind the Egegik cookhouse, I’m aware, always aware, of the Chinese men that preceded me over a century ago, walking these same paths. That long voyage to Alaska in cramped quarters, rougher conditions than white workers had in the canneries, long hours in cold, wet conditions. I’ve had a very privileged career, whether as deckhand on a gillnetter, a management biologist with ADFG or as the Bristol Bay fleet manager for Icicle Seafoods, , but I never forget that I work in a white-dominated industry where Asian workers were historically treated as second-class citizens.
The Iron Butcher
In the basement of Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum stands a machine about six feet tall, reddish brown with rust and weighing close to a ton. The machine is an Iron Chink, invented by Edmund A. Smith in 1903. Smith named the machine after the Chinese men it quickly replaced in the salmon canneries from Oregon through Alaska. Prior to Smith’s invention, every salmon cannery employed hundreds of men, and dozens of them, wearing aprons to shield them from the constant splatter of scales, guts and salmon blood, worked on the “slime line”, butchering the salmon.
With a sharp knife in one hand and holding the salmon steady on its side in the other, the worker would place the blade just behind the pectoral fin, the “collar” and with a forward, sliding push of the blade, slice the head off.
The Iron Chink can do all this mechanically: the Model G can butcher sixty to seventy salmon per minute and the more modern Model K can go twice as fast. A salmon is fed by a conveyor belt into the bull ring, which whirls the fish through a series of circular knives and brushes that head and gut the salmon. Out will emerge a butchered salmon, ready for the gang knives, sharp blades mounted on a rack that, in one sweeping motion, slice the salmon into can-sized portions.
In 2005, when Icicle Seafoods bought the near-derelict cannery in Egegik, Alaska, I told my boss, Rob Rogers, that my two sisters, Debra and Cynthia, would sooner quit than work for any company that called the machines the Iron Chink. The next day, Rob sent out a company-wide email stating that hereafter, at Icicle Seafoods, the machines would be known as the Iron Butchers. This policy took years to take effect throughout the Icicle canneries around Alaska, and I know that many lifelong industry workers found it impossible to change. Years later, when I visited the Icicle cannery in Petersburg, the telephone list taped to the desk of the radio room read “iron chink”. Still, Rob’s email earned my lifelong loyalty.
When fishermen in Bristol Bay use the term “Iron Chink” in conversation with me, I tell them, gesturing at myself, obviously a Chinese man, that we now called it the Iron Butcher. And outside of the industry, to be consistent with how my sisters feel, despite what Edmund Smith’s patent and brass name plates say, I refer to the machine as the Iron Butcher.
Which brings me back to Edmund Smith. He, too, is buried at Lake View cemetery, in plot 814. The cemetery map says his grave near the fence that abuts Volunteer Park, so last week, I spent twenty minutes looking at the ground, reading over sixty grave markers. Finally, I looked up and saw the tall marble monument that looms over the cemetery. The grave of Edmund Smith. Less than five hundred feet from Goon Dip’s grave. In life, I doubt that they ever met. Goon Dip met Everett Deming at the Alaska Yukon Exposition in 1909, where he secured his future fortune. However, Edmund Smith, driving to the very same Alaska Yukon Exposition to show off his recent invention, tragically died in an automobile accident. He was thirty-nine years old.
