Wing Luke

This city, probably like most sizeable cities, is home to a host of specialty museums.  Yesterday I knocked another item off the Someday list by going with a girlfriend to one of them: the Wing Luke Museum in the International District.  It describes itself as the only pan-Asian Pacific American community-based museum in the United States, which focuses on the culture, art, and history of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.

Wing Luke himself was a ground-breaking, quietly inspiring lawyer and politician.  He was bullied in school as the only Asian in his class, but was able to transform his bullies into friends by doing drawings of them depicting them as superheroes.  In fact, he became so popular that he was voted Student Body President.

After much-decorated military service, he served as assistant attorney general of Washington state in its civil rights division and was later a member of the Seattle City Council.  He was the first Asian-American to hold elected office in the state.  Sadly, he was killed in a plane crash at the age of 40.

The museum is mostly historical in significance, offering perspectives from quite a few different Asian cultures.  A tour guided us through an adjacent former grocery store that has been preserved just as it was when it was active and open, even including its stock of glass jars of various dried or salted herbs, candies, fruits, etc, and actual packaged and jarred items from that older time.  We also toured what was left of an old flophouse above the store and museum, a place that used to have 155 single occupant rooms, which sometimes housed entire families.  All occupants of those 155 rooms shared 4 bathrooms.

The collective information offered, without bitterness, by the museum was challenging to me as a white/European American, because of course this country's deep-seated racism is highlighted at every turn, on every placard.  My girlfriend and I later had a conversation over dim sum about guilt and discomfiture and how to deal with them.  My attitude toward guilt has always been that it's a complete waste of emotional energy.  When I feel guilty, I look to see if I've done something wrong, and if I have, to correct it, and if I haven't, or if it's so far in the past as to be uncorrectable, to let go of the guilt and move on.  I guess the same is true of discomfort.  What is it that I'm uncomfortable about?  What does it reveal to me about my assumptions, opinions, values, and beliefs?  I feel very strongly that rather than trying to protect children from discomfort, as seems to be a GOP trend these days, a more effective approach is to teach them to examine their discomfort, to learn to understand, address, and navigate it.  But that's just me.  I'm not a parent nor a teacher so I suppose my opinion about it doesn't hold much water.