Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon

Abstract

The title Sweet Cakes, Long Journey refers to the sweet cakes that hid coaching papers baked inside and that were given to Chinese immigrants who endured the long trans-Pacific journey and a detailed interrogation in order to land in America. The strength of Marie Rose Wong's history of Portland's Chinatowns is found in the chapter “Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in Oregon.” In it she explains in detail how Chinese immigrants were highly successful in challenging, manipulating, and circumventing the changing laws and procedures that were implemented by immigration officers to thwart the entry of paper sons on the West Coast and, in particular, Oregon. Sometimes Euro-Americans were com-plicit in the schemes. Favorable interpretation and enforcement of federal, state, and local laws by prominent yet sympathetic local officials helped to settle the Chinese in Portland. Basically, the Euro-Americans favored cheap Chinese labor over Chinese exclusion and expulsion. Consequently, around the turn of the twentieth century and for decades thereafter, Oregon had the second largest Chinese population in the United States. In Portland, the Chinese established two Chinatowns, one urban and commercial and the other rural and vegetable gardening. The central argument of Wong is that the settlement of the Chinese in Portland—their spatial development and their relationship with Euro-Americans—was the exception to the typical experience found in San Francisco and other cities in the Pacific Northwest.