Historical preservation is not only about the built environment. It is, above all else, the memories of that built environment, including historical memory often erased by decades of narrative control wrought by the powerful over the oppressed. In creating calls for preserving historically oppressed communities, it is necessary to speak truth to that power. This poem was written to highlight a pattern of removal, exclusion, erasure, and displacement. It frames the current fight to preserve Philadelphia’s Chinatown in a long, often violent history of Chinese in the United States. That violence, in most recent times, again is called down by the highest officials of the US government. It challenges the disposal of communities—precious not because of the material but because of the intangible that cannot be measured by dollars. It is, in fact, the intangibles—relationships, memories, love of place—that is the heart of the defense of Philadelphia’s Chinatown. It is, in fact, the intangibles that speak to the struggle of multiple generations across multiple decades to protect and nourish this small community.

FOREWORD

First there is history.

CHAPTER 1: THEY WERE CALLED THE “DRIVING OUTS”

October 24, 1871 Los Angeles
500 men attack
15 Chinese lynched
swinging on the corner in their community.
September, 1876 The entire Chinese population of Placer County
Chico
Weaverville
Yreka (where there were two Chinatowns  
just like in Boise, Idaho)
Truckee—the 2nd largest Chinatown in the United States of America
By 1886 not a single Chinese remained
1877—San Francisco  
yes, even there.

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