The faces of Chinatown

By Ben Jacklet

The Portland Tribune, Jun 10, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The heart of Portland’s Chinatown, at Northwest Third and Fourth avenues from Burnside to Glisan streets, contains two dozen Chinese establishments, a dozen social service agencies, another dozen taverns and nightclubs, a parole transition project, an upscale condo development, a Chinese herb shop run by an Iranian, an Italian cafe run by Albanians, a Jewish museum, a legendary drag club, and many people and properties in transformation.

This is the historic center of Portland’s Chinese business community, the place where Portland’s poorest residents are housed and fed, a neighborhood that has been trying to run out the drug dealers for years and the hub of a growing club scene at night. It also is a potential expansion zone for Pearl District-style opulence.

The city is pouring more than $5 million into remaking the two crucial avenues with the goals of celebrating the neighborhood’s diversity and stimulating private investment, without forcing out the poor.

Easier said than done. Dig around Chinatown for a day and a night and you’ll find that while the forces shaping the neighborhood theoretically may be allied, they are also, in a very basic way, diametrically opposed.

8:30 a.m.: The food line

The food line extends a full block, from Northwest Third Avenue and Burnside Street to the soaring gate to Chinatown over Fourth. This is one of the most dangerous street corners in the city, in terms of cars hitting pedestrians, predatory drug dealers and drunks making trouble. But for Jim, who didn’t give his last name, it’s a place of opportunity.

Jim’s a bearded guy from Fairbanks, Alaska. He sits on the sidewalk next to a plastic bag full of bottles and cans that he plans to return for the 5-cent deposits, for cigarette money. He’s been in Portland about six months, and every morning he walks across the Burnside Bridge for a free sack lunch from Union Gospel Mission.

He’s trying to get a painting job, but to get a job he needs identification. Staffers at a nearby shelter are helping him track down his birth certificate. In the meantime, he says he wonders how anyone on the street in Portland could claim to be hungry, with all the free food available in Chinatown.

Jim says he used to put up a sign saying he was hungry to persuade people to give him money Ñ “but to be honest with you I was trying to buy beer.”

He doesn’t panhandle anymore, he says, and he’s determined to get and stay sober.

“Right now I’m just trying to get to where I’m employable,” he says. “I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer.”

The line starts moving at last, but the crowd is large Ñ it is the end of the month, and money is running low for the many who subsist on checks from the federal government. Jim gets his share, but the food disappears before the line does.

9:30 a.m.: The shelter

Mike Smith got his food before it ran out, a bagel and two sandwiches. Now he’s heading back to his bunk at Transition Projects Inc. on Northwest Glisan Street. He points out social service agencies as he walks from Burnside to Glisan: a shelter for homeless women, offices of drug-addiction counselors, apartments for the mentally ill, a soup kitchen with beds up-stairs. É The list goes on.

Smith is a large, outgoing fellow with a youthful face who seems to know everybody on the sidewalk. He first showed up homeless in downtown Portland at age 18. That was 13 years ago. He got off the streets for a while, but now he’s back. “I made some bad choices,” he says.

Down Third Avenue, the construction equipment is starting to rattle. The sidewalks are dug up, and there are orange cones and yellow tape all over. It’s a hot day, with temperatures expected to top 90 degrees.

Smith’s bunk is one of 90 in the shelter. It’s a crowded but clean place, with bunk beds, showers, toilets, lockers, a few tables with chairs. Tenants are expected to stay sober Ñ a rule enforced with Breathalyzer and urinalysis tests Ñ and everyone gets two hours of chores per week.

There are 160 names on the waiting list.

Lights come on every morning at 6:30, to get the lines to the toilets and showers moving. At 9:30 the facilities are opened to people sleeping on the street. A big sign on the door reminds people that the Greyhound station’s bathrooms are not public.

The men staying here know the location of every public toilet in downtown Portland. “You learn that real fast,” a big guy named Tyrone explains, “when people are looking at you like you’re on drugs or doing crime or the scum of the Earth that got stuck on the bottom of their shoes, and you just have to go to the bathroom.”

Tyrone, who didn’t give his full name, just had one of his feet partially amputated. “I got one size 16, the other’s a size 6,” he says. He shows off the three Bibles by his bunk, then takes a paper bag and dumps containers of pills and syringes onto the table.

Tyrone is diabetic; he’s got high blood pressure and blood clots, and his foot hurts. He’s got a felony drug conviction on his record. He’s 39.

“The hardest thing is to stay positive,” he says.

11 a.m.: The cafe

There isn’t a Starbucks in Chinatown, but there is the Monte Rosa Cafe, with sidewalk tables amid the construction rubble. The cafe is on the ground floor of the 15-story Pacific Tower, a project of the Portland Development Commission, and some of its best customers are PDC staffers like David Davies.

Davies is deeply familiar with what’s going on in the neighborhood, what’s worked and what hasn’t. His colleague, Ellen Vanderslice of the Portland Office of Transportation, kids him that the PDC has its “fingers in everything” in Chinatown, but to a certain extent, it’s no joke.

The neighborhood is full of properties in transition, like the former warehouse (now a parking lot) across the street that may become offices and housing; the big construction project down the block that will bring software firms, builders and architects; the future Union Gospel Mission building, which will enable folks to line up for food indoors instead of on the sidewalk; and the Royal Family Ginseng shopping center at Fourth and Davis, open for a while but shuttered because of sewage problems.

At the foundation of all this is the project that Vanderslice and Davies are managing: $5.35 million worth of elaborate street improvements. The plan calls for new “festival streets” on Northwest Davis and Northwest Flanders, sidewalks embellished with granite imported from China, 20 engraved bronze medallions and more than 100 exotic trees that were selected by a landscape architect who flew to China for that very purpose.

The architectural renderings of the festival streets take a block where you’re likely to see street people pushing shopping carts and shady-looking men hanging out as if standing guard, and turn it into a vision of families strolling among palm trees as dragon dancers undulate.

So where do the homeless people go?

“It is definitely not part of the vision to push the social services out,” Davies says. “The idea is to bring up the neighborhood without displacing anyone.”

That’s already happening, Davies argues. But it’s a tricky formula.

For example, the condos are sold out next door at Old Town Lofts, but the ground floor retail space remains vacant.

Across the street, the Blanchet House of Hospitality gives out 800 free meals each day. The PDC owns the property that surrounds the Blanchet and hopes to redevelop it. But Blanchet has been in the neighborhood for more than 50 years, and any change in the name of economic development would be viewed with suspicion.

Another PDC goal Ñ to persuade Asians to move back into Chinatown Ñ has also proved a tough sell. The PDC marketed to Asian seniors when it first tried to lease out the Pacific Tower apartments over the cafe. That didn’t work out Ñ partly because of the low-income requirements, but also because Asian elders have their reasons for living in the outlying neighborhoods and the suburbs.

12:30 p.m.: The restaurant

Grace Tam ventures into Chinatown every other week or so from her family’s home in Beaverton to pick up roast duck from the Good Taste Restaurant, two doors down from a porn shop on Fourth Avenue.

She never comes at night Ñ too dangerous. And she never stays for long Ñ parking is too expensive.

Tam said she has no interest in moving to Chinatown. She’s got a family, two children. There’s a reason you rarely, if ever, see children in Chinatown, she says. The idea is to move your family to a better neighborhood, not a worse one.

At the time of the 2000 U.S. Census, there were fewer than 100 Asians (2.6 percent) living in the 3,600-person census tract that contains Chinatown. There is no seafood market here, no produce market. The Chinese restaurants truck in their broccoli and oysters from the markets around Southeast 82nd Avenue, where the parking is free and the Asian population is growing.

Inside the Good Taste, Amie Chan moves from table to table with purpose. She started working at her family’s restaurant when she was 20. Now she’s 31, and she’s not afraid to tell off the street people and the crack dealers when they deserve it.

“If they don’t get out, I yell at them,” she says. “I call the police.”

A man threatened her with a hammer once. She’s been harassed by addicts many times and forced to clean up feces and urine around the restaurant’s garbage area more times than she cares to recall. Given the opportunity to vent, she vents:

“I hope after the construction they don’t let these people come anymore. They hurt the business. I don’t think it will improve unless they move.”

2 p.m.: The gift shop

Over by the Portland Chinese Classical Garden, Bill and Ruthann Barta are visiting from Chicago and looking to do some shopping. They loved the garden. Now they’re trying to figure out where Chinatown is, even though they’re right in the middle of it.

“We’re not used to it being so broken up like this,” Bill Barta says. “We’re used to Chinatown in Chicago. You go there, and it’s all Chinese. It isn’t like this.”

JoAnne Hong, who runs the shop the Bartas end up entering, Great Era Oriental Imports, doesn’t disagree. “You’re in Chinatown,” she says. “Can you roll a ball down this street and hit one single Chinese person?”

Hong is 72 years old, born and raised in Portland. Her father ran a restaurant at Southwest Second Avenue and Oak Street. That was the original Chinatown, before the government evacuated all Japanese-Americans from Portland after Pearl Harbor, opening the door for Chinese entrepreneurs to move into what had been more of a Japantown before internment.

Hong has been working in Chinatown for 28 years. Her family owns the building the shop is in as well as the one that houses Hung Far Low restaurant.

She says she misses the old neighborhood antique shop, the kite shop, the fabric shop.

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