How Portland’s Chinatown history shaped the Oregon Chinese Festival, which returns to Pioneer Courthouse Square Saturday

Really, it’s a straightforward question.

Why did Hongcheng Zhao decide to start Portland’s well-liked annual summer celebration of local Chinese culture, the Oregon Chinese Festival?

However, when you ask Zhao the question, he laughs heartily since the solution isn’t that easy to find. Buried beneath decades of relocation and mistrust is a forgotten and contentious past. It’s full of obstacles, hard labor, drama, and miscommunication. However, it’s also full of achievement and hope.

In a sense, it is a microcosm of Chinese cultural history in a city that, in spite of its complex past, takes pride in its progressivism today.

Zhao, the head of the Oregon Chinese Coalition, laughs and says, “Let me give you a brief introduction.”

After an hour and forty-four minutes, it is evident that Zhao never intended for his brief to be so brief, given his intense desire to educate people about the intricate history of his culture in Portland.

According to Zhao, I wanted to take the initiative to spread awareness of Chinese culture and educate the broader public. I wanted to be given the chance to talk to others. However, it was quite difficult to get started in 2019 since Chinese people are not accustomed to such activities.

However, it did start. And now, six years later, one of the most anticipated summer events in downtown Portland is the Oregon Chinese Festival, which will take place in Pioneer Courthouse Square on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Zhao remarked, “We are doing this more and more, bigger and bigger, better and better.” You simply can’t stop. You want to keep improving when you set the bar high. You experience a sense of self-satisfaction on this type of stage, but it goes well beyond that.

What a stage it is, too. Over 60 performances spanning traditional and modern Chinese performance art will be presented by almost 500 performers over the course of seven hours. They will also perform on what Zhao says is the biggest stage ever to fill Pioneer Courthouse Square, a gigantic 40-by-32-foot structure that the coalition paid $8,000 for.

Home Taste, Little Beijing, LoLo S San Xiang, Mandarin House, and eight other local food vendors will serve a variety of classic Chinese delicacies, such as Jianbing, Jian Bao, Sichuan noodles, steamed dumplings, barbecue, pot stickers, and much more.

A number of hands-on activities and arts and crafts, including diabolo, calligraphy, burr puzzles, tangram, and origami, will also be available at six tables. Many of these activities are designed to keep kids entertained.

And beneath every show, every bite of food, and every craft will lie the history and backdrop of a culture that has subtly pervaded Portland for almost a century. Zhao was excited to go into detail about this history in that succinct opening.

Before Oregon became a state, Cantonese-Chinese immigrants began to settle there in the middle of the 1850s. Ten years later, they literally built the gateway from the East on their backs when they poured into the region to work on the Western portion of the transcontinental railroad. According to Zhao, some 20,000 Chinese laborers contributed to the project’s completion.

Since about 10% of Portlanders were Chinese, the city had the second-largest population in the US by 1890, after San Francisco.

However, they had few career options and frequently faced discrimination, particularly as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration and employment for many years. Until China joined the Allied forces in World War II in 1943, it remained a law.

According to Zhao, Chinese people lived in Southwest Portland along the Willamette River in those early decades, which is around where the Saturday Market now flourishes. However, persecution and harsh weather soon forced them to relocate a few blocks north, and local Chinese eventually made their home in what is now Old Town Chinatown.

According to Zhao, there were no banks on either side of the river. Thus, there was annual minor flooding as well as occasional major flooding. For the local population, that is not ideal. Additionally, there was a belief that they weren’t worthy of residing there. They began to migrate during World War II because they believed that you didn’t deserve a million-dollar view.

Chinese people thrived there for decades, creating a close-knit society that included, among other things, renowned eateries and retail establishments. A fresh wave of Mandarin-Chinese immigrants arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, seeking white-collar professions and higher education degrees. Among them was Zhao, who attended the University of California and Harvard before coming to Portland in 1995.

However, things began to alter with the turn of the century. Both Portland’s reputation and population grew. Downtown exploded. Gritty warehouses gave way to opulent galleries and apartments in the Pearl District. While this was going on, the city concentrated social services in the neighborhood.

The Chinese in the center of Chinatown felt the squeeze all of a sudden. Numerous businesses moved their stores and eateries. Most went to the east. Others made money.

A single piece of land owned by a Chinese person sold for $11.5 million. The price of a two-story building was $8.5 million.

According to Zhao, people were swarming into Chinatown to purchase any available real estate. And the elder generation recognized a chance. “I can’t fight; I’m not in a position to fight,” they thought. They then relocated to 82nd. 82nd is a new Chinatown, they say. Over there, they feel more at ease.

Zhao and others in the Chinese community worried they were losing an important part of their cultural history, so in 2016 the same year that plot of land sold for $11.5 million he founded the Oregon Chinese Coalition. He knew it would be impossible to unify the entire local Chinese population, which now features roughly 40,000 people and is diverse and splintered, with half (mostly Cantonese) living on the Eastside near 82nd Avenue and the other half (mostly Mandarin) living in Southwest Portland and Beaverton.

But he hoped to do his best to bridge the divide for the betterment of the culture and for the preservation of Chinatown.

We speak different languages, have a different history and background and do different things, Zhao said. Normally we don t connect that much. But if you don t do anything as a community, change the way you have been doing things, then you seal your own fate. After 20 years, trust me, you are going to be forced to move further away. You have to learn how to become part of this community. Participate. You deserve respect, you deserve space for your own, and you have to learn to stand up and say no to people.

Zhao convinced would-be sellers to hold on to their valuable property in Chinatown, and Chinese Americans still own seven or eight key active buildings in the district, he says. And in the nine years since, his coalition has expanded its reach and impact.

It organizes 50 different events annually, ensuring that at least one happens nearly every weekend. It comes together in November to replace all of the lanterns and lampposts in Chinatown, using funding from grants and community donations. It provides rental assistance to 1,000 families, using government programs and grants to eliminate the threat of homelessness for hordes of Chinese Americans. And it was the first organization in the nation to successfully advocate for restorative justice in response to Asian hate crimes.

But its biggest event will come Saturday, when thousands gather in Portland s living room less than a mile from Chinatown to celebrate a group that has been a fabric of the community for more than a century.

It s a pure, 100 percent immersive cultural experience for everybody, Zhao said. For the community and for us.

Joe Freeman|jfreeman@oregonian.com| 503-294-5183 |@BlazerFreeman|@freemanjoe.bsky.social

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