I am like a salamander. You won’t find me east of the Cascades.
Biologists consider mountain ranges like the Cascades to be zoogeographical barriers. Departing Seattle on I-90, you pass through Bellevue, then Issaquah, before gradually gaining altitude in North Bend, the blocky profile of Mount Si looming to your left. All the way up to Snoqualmie Pass, the scene is characterized by thick forests of Douglas firs and Western cedars and dense undergrowth of ferns and salal. But the legendary, soggy Seattle precipitation dead-ends at the Cascades. As soon as you crest the pass, you descend quickly into drier, pine forests that herald your arrival into eastern Washington.
Growing up in a Puget Sound suburb, in the forests near my house, I caught Ensatina salamanders, soft and moist to the touch. Drop one of those amphibians in Wenatchee or Yakima and it’ll be dead in a week, its desiccated red-brown carcass curled into a crispy question mark of cartilage.
When I was a young, amphibian-hunting boy, eastern Washington was a distant land, far from Seattle’s meager Chinatown. It was a land I thought was devoid of bok choy, bitter melon, cha siu or hom yu, familiar components of Cantonese cuisine. As a family, we never drove eastward of Snoqualmie Pass. Not once. My world was the suburbs of Seattle. To this day, I can’t imagine living somewhere without easy access to the groceries I routinely use.
Eastern Washington lacked, in addition to Chinese foods, Chinese people. And Black people.
In the early 1980s, one of my friends got married in Walla Walla, Washington, so four of us, Willie McCullum (Black-Japanese), Gerald Lathon (Black), Bill Gosnell (White) and I piled into Willie’s beat-up Toyota Corolla and drove from the University of Washington to Walla Walla. As we passed oncoming traffic, we could see white faces in pickup trucks looking down through the Corolla’s windshield, their expressions almost asking: “What are you doing on this side of the mountains?” When we checked into the motel upon our arrival, the young white clerk looked at us and asked, “Are you in a band?”
A quick look at the U.S. Census indicates that little has changed in eastern Washington. Today, Yakima, Wenatchee and Spokane are less than 2% Asian. Seattle is now 17% Asian and two miles across the I-90 bridge, my hometown is now 22% Asian. It was a skinny 1% Asian when I was a kid.
Like many salamanders, I am most comfortable west of the Cascades.
However, not all Asians remained west of the mountains. In the 1800s, white working men, upset over competition for jobs and committed to enforcing racial purity, harassed and killed Chinese men. From Alaska down to Washington, Chinese by the dozens were forced onto ships to leave town.
To escape the violence of coastal cities, some Chinese men went east, over the Cascade mountains. When Ron Chew invited me to lunch with his friends, the Beacon Hill sisters Laura Wong Whitebear and Teresa Wong Whitebear of the Colville nation, I learned how Chinese men, like their father Harry Wong, sought refuge on the Colville reservation — a small city in Okanogan County, the northeast corner of Washington state.
They explained that while physical safety was certainly a draw of the reservations, there was also the benefit of finding a mate. Even before the Page Act of 1875 banned the immigration of Chinese women, severely limiting the opportunities for Chinese men that sought wives, or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that shut down immigration of Chinese to the U.S., the Colville Reservation in eastern Washington, fortunately for Laura and Teresa, was a romantic option, and families like the Wong Whitebear clan were a result.
I have a postcard that I bought at the Chesaw tavern in the fall of 1984. Pat Poe, John Isakson and I had gone deer hunting in the brown hills of central Washington, near the Canadian border. On the way to a motel in Tonasket, we stopped in Chesaw, which had a population of 18 people. Pat pulled his 1973 Jeep Wagoneer into the dirt parking lot and we walked in for a beer. The tavern was rustic. Hard benches and rough-hewn, unpainted timbers. A brown room in a brown building in a brown land.
I first heard of Chesaw a few years earlier when my older sister, Debra, told me how she had gone there on a summer job. A professor from the University of Washington was doing a study for NORML, an organization that was working to legalize marijuana. Debra and the professor had traveled to different police departments around the state to collect information on how long people were detained for marijuana possession.
At the Okanogan County police office, the clerk proudly explained to Debra the Chinese origin of the Chesaw name. The clerk said that Chee Saw was a Chinese miner who had married a Native woman (a Colville woman?) and ran a store.
Another account I found online states that white miners came to the area only to find Chinese miners working the claims. Before long, whites owned the claims. White miners displacing Chinese miners was common in California at the time, and Chinese, with no legal footing for anything, were left with the scraps. I can’t remember who told me, maybe Debra, but the story I recall hearing is that the Chinese there mined at night because they were shot at by white people during the day.
The Wing Luke Museum has a photograph online of Joe Chesaw on horseback. The picture is blurry, the figures are from a distance and it’s hard to make out the person identified as Joe Chesaw. Well, if that is truly the man, then Wikipedia and the clerk are correct.
However, Debra informed me that “chesaw” is the Cantonese word for toilet (Mandarin is “cesuo”). In the 40 years since then, I have yet to meet another Chesaw or even see that name. I doubt the Hong Kong phone book has any Chesaws. I will check on my next trip over there.
When Chinese men came to the U.S. during the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, some men used “paper” names, adopting the name of a sponsoring family to skirt immigration laws. Maybe Joe wryly used the Cantonese word for toilet as the ultimate self-effacing moniker. Or maybe he took it from the name bestowed by the other Chinese miners on the shit hole of a place where they dodged gunfire while trying, always hoping to strike it rich, to scrape with shovels and picks, a living from the dirt and rock.
