Ron Chew: Community Power -- Director Of The Wing Luke Asian Museum Believes Bringing People Together Is More Important Than What's On A Wall
You could call Ron Chew's way of operating "Power to the People, '90s style."
Look what happened to the Wing Luke Asian Museum after Chew took over as executive director three years ago.
"Overnight things changed, and that's not an exaggeration," recalls museum outreach worker Olivia Taguinod. The quiet, hushed space filled with people: stopping in to talk to Chew, bringing friends, bearing food.
The elderly offered treasured photos and artifacts; never before had they felt enough of a bond with the museum to hand them over. But Chew they knew; Chew they trusted.
Younger people formed a new wave of volunteers. Some Chew had mentored in his 10 years as editor of the community paper The International Examiner; some were just drawn by his reputation.
Before, the museum had concentrated on Asian folk art. The previous director, a Caucasian woman, had a particular love of textiles. As Taguinod recalls, the museum drew primarily non-Asians.
Chew, 40, with no museum background, had a different mission: to preserve and honor a history rapidly vanishing with the passing of the International District's pioneers; to bring the district's ordinary people into the museum.
So the new exhibits highlighted Asian-American history, among them "Executive Order 9066," which focused on the Japanese-American internment during World War II, and, drawing from a four-year-long oral-history project Chew has led, the current "The First 100 Years:
Reflections of Seattle's Chinese Americans."
In a model that's receiving national attention in the museum world, the exhibits were put together not by scholars but as community efforts that linked generations: contributing memories, ideas, scrapbooks, labor. A community organizer at heart, Chew will say frankly that bringing people together is more important to him than anything displayed on a wall.
His plan has worked. Museum membership has gone from about 300 to about 1,200. Says Velma Veloria, the 11th District state representative: "The Wing Luke has become a people's museum, and if anybody tried to take that away now, the whole Asian-American community would put up a battle."
Seeing their lives as worth showcasing in a museum changed the way they felt about themselves, says Veloria, who worked with Chew on an earlier exhibit on the Alaskeros, Filipino pioneers of the Alaska cannery industry.
"Ron has given me a lot of pride in being Filipino. He's put forward the history and contributions of our people. We're no longer just a bunch of these people who went to the canneries every summer . . . we helped build this country."
Muses Veloria: "Although Ron may not say it publicly or even think it, he has power. The power to make changes."
THE COMMUNITY IS HIS FAMILY
Ask around about Chew, and here's the picture you get: a workaholic who has sacrificed his life for the Asian-American community - working long hours for little pay.
Not true, says Chew. Well, OK, true except for the "sacrifice" part. "People make me into a martyr. I believe deeply in what I do. I enjoy what I do. I've always had the attitude, you do what you enjoy and that's your reward," Chew says.
Besides, he says, he's frugal. He had to be: when he left the Examiner, in September 1988, he was making "about $14,000, $16,000, something like that." He started at the Wing Luke at $23,000; he just got a raise to $30,000. His typical workday is 12 hours.
The "wedding license story" is pretty telling. When Chew and his wife, Loan Nguyen, decided to get married last fall at the spur of the moment, Chew called up Municipal Court Judge Ron Mamiya to ask if he'd do the marrying. He also asked Mamiya to buy a museum membership. Mamiya agreed to both. At the courthouse, Mamiya asked Chew for the wedding license. Feeling around in his jacket, Chew realized he hadn't brought the license, "but I've got the Wing Luke membership form here!"
`MARRIED TO HIS WORK'
"He's married to the community; he's married to his work," says Nguyen, who is busy herself working for the state Commission on Asian American Affairs and is understanding of his dedication.
His workers love him. They don't make much money, but he gives them great responsibility, welcomes their ideas, believes in them, shares power. His gentle and remarkable knack for getting people to do things for free or cheap - now for the museum, earlier for the Examiner - was a skill he says he had to develop because of both institutions' limited budgets. (The museum's is $380,000 a year.) In lieu of dollars, he offers opportunity and mentoring.
Chew's perseverance is legendary. It's a trait that was evident even as a young boy. At 10, he created his own newspaper, "Think-a-Newspaper." It included made-up and family news, sports, comics, jokes. Now other kids might create a newspaper for fun. But Chew kept this up every day for two years.
AN INSULAR CHILDHOOD
He was, says Chew, a classic late bloomer.
Not surprising. His first memory is of being bitten by a rat. His immigrant Chinese parents were very poor in the early years, and the area near their rented University District house, near his father's hand laundry, was riddled with rats.
In 1960 the family moved to Beacon Hill. Chew's world was an insular one: He hardly ventured from his neighborhood or Chinatown. Most of the people the family knew were Chinese. He never went to North Seattle, because they didn't know anybody there.
He rarely saw his parents. To support four children, his father, Soo Hong ("Gregory"), usually worked from about 10:30 a.m. to midnight as head waiter at the old Hong Kong Restaurant. He did this for more than 30 years - at first six days a week, then later seven days a week. Once all her children were in school, his mother, Wee Gam Har, worked at a sewing sweatshop from about 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., then at a second sweatshop until about 9 p.m.
School was traumatic for Chew. Not speaking English, and being a sickly child, for the first few years he could not understand what was going on. He remembers being terrified each morning having to write what he had for breakfast, and where it fit in the "major food groups." He didn't want to tell people he ate rice gruel and salted fish and shrimp paste, and didn't know the English words for them anyway. He had not a clue how they fit into the major food groups. So he copied from the kids next to him. One kid said he had bacon and eggs and toast, so every day Chew would say he had the same.
Chew did so poorly that his teacher thought he needed special education. But when his mother received the letter saying so, she couldn't read it, so she threw it away. That was the end of that.
Eventually he did better. His older sister, Linda Chew Burt, recalls Ron as the quiet one, always reading, always more interested in what was going on in the world than other kids.
How did his childhood experiences translate into the man Chew would become? His wife sees a clear path: "I think he saw early on the fragmentation of his family growing up. That's why the community is so important to him. He's made it his family."
Chew describes what makes him tick this way: a combination of curiosity, social awareness and paying back his parents.
He was affected by growing up during the civil-rights movement. "And the impact of seeing my parents struggle so hard. If we had grown up in different circumstances, my mother would probably be a brilliant story teller, or maybe a writer. My father probably would have done some ingenious things. But the opportunity wasn't there.
"I always thought, it's not right to have to work 70 hours a week to raise a family. Or that they'd have to sacrifice their whole life for us. . . . Part of the way you pay back is you create a society or world that doesn't perpetuate this lack of opportunity."
But even more than that, he says, he was always wondering about the social forces around him. "Curiosity drove me more than anything."
LAWSUIT CHANGED HIS LIFE
At Franklin High School he developed an interest in writing. He entered the University of Washington, where he studied journalism. Examiner photographer Dean Wong recalls that Chew was among a group of about 30 who formed "Third World Communications Students." They put out an alternative newspaper and were active in the issues of the times: affirmative action, the burgeoning Asian-American movement.
Amid this climate Chew filed a discrimination suit that he says "changed my life; it meant I ended up in community journalism rather than as a mainstream professional."
Chew, who spent so much time working at the UW Daily that Wong wondered if he ever went to class, had applied for the position of news editor at the student paper. The student editor was allowed to pick the next editor. It was an old-boy-network arrangement, Chew says, and it meant a lot of people of color were shut out. The editor never called him for an interview. Instead, he offered the job to four others, none of whom had applied for it, all of whom were white.
The case lasted two years; in 1976, Chew won. The UW offered him back pay, and more important to him, agreed to set up an affirmative-action program and establish job hiring and firing guidelines.
By that time, he says, there had been extensive coverage of his case in the major media, posing it as "an affirmative action versus freedom of the press issue. It divided the communications school. There were so many bad feelings generated. People thought I was sort of a troublemaker, or on the other side, maybe I wasn't really qualified. It made it hard for me to get directly into the profession." Friends were getting hired at local newspapers and public-relations firms; he wasn't.
Any regrets? No. "Because I wasn't treated fairly. He (the editor) never gave me the courtesy of interviewing me. Whether it took one year or 10, I was going to see it through. I don't give up."
Chew says he thinks he drew on the role model of his father. "He was able to get the most tips, he was the most popular waiter. But he wouldn't grovel. He was very friendly, but he had a lot of pride, too." From his father, he says, "I developed some sense that people need to treat you with respect. If they don't, you have every right to demand that respect."
THE EXAMINER YEARS
By then, Chew says, he'd gotten more interested in the community, and saw his best chance for a job was in the International District. He followed Mayumi Tsutakawa into the editorship of the Examiner, and stayed until 1988.
It was Chew, say Tsutakawa and others, who really shaped and stabilized the Examiner, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. His editing and people skills helped build the paper into a well-respected, quality product that chronicled the important community issues of the time: the rise of the ID's social-services agencies, demonstrations for low-income housing development, the 1981 murders of Alaska Cannery Workers Association activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, and the 1983 murders of 13 people at the Wah Mee gambling club.
As Chew looks back at the highlights, he sees the fulfilling of the community's need for a strong community press. "Of course there was the ethnic press, too, but there was also a need for an English-language, pan-Asian newspaper that could serve as a bridge for the American-born, and for the broader community that doesn't know a whole lot about Asians."
He also saw the Examiner as a forum to present an alternative viewpoint to the mainstream media - for example, dispelling the stereotypes and hype following the Wah Mee murders. "It wasn't a situation of `an evil curtain of darkness' in Chinatown, or dark alleys with hatchetmen walking through. The people murdered had names and identities, and we tried to show what happened wasn't a `tong rivalry' but simply a cold-blooded murder."
Was he an advocate, an activist? "You cover what you have an interest in and believe in. Journalism was an interesting position: You could be involved, and not be involved. I was always comfortable in this role."
CAREER TWISTS
After the Examiner, Chew worked briefly as multicultural program coordinator for Seattle Central Community College, then for the Commission on Asian American Affairs (he met Nguyen when she took over his job).
He was reluctant to apply for the museum job, but was persuaded by, among others, outgoing director Kit Freudenberg. She'd been brought on, the first director with museum training, at a time the Wing Luke needed someone to professionally care for and catalog the collection and move it to a larger space. But, she says, the museum was at a critical juncture and needed the stewardship of someone who knew the community.
Has the museum gone in the right direction? Freudenberg says it's won a number of prestigious museum and historic-preservation awards and some large foundation grants. Chew himself was named to the board of the Western Museums Association, a prestigious appointment. Some 10,000 schoolchildren a year visit the Wing Luke, a lot for an institution its size. Those accomplishments, Freudenberg says, would seem to indicate it has.
Chew, though, remains uncomfortable on the wine-and-cheese circuit of the elite, and mostly white, museum world. He took the museum job in part to branch out beyond the ID and Beacon Hill. But still, he says, "Sometimes I'll be in the middle of a crowd in power suits, and it feels unreal, like I'm in a world I don't belong." (For one thing, drinking makes him fall on his face, and he hates cheese so much that he has to cover his eyes in the supermarket cheese section.)
Though his new position and his marriage have broadened his vistas (friends were shocked when he went with Nguyen to the ballet), a lifelong lack of exposure still marks him, Chew says. He likes to laugh at it. Showing up late at a breakfast at the American Association of Museums conference last month (during which the Wing Luke hosted three receptions, thus enhancing its national reputation), he encountered a grapefruit half. What was he supposed to do with it? he wondered. Should he cut in quarters, or spoon it out? He left it there.
WHAT'S NEXT?
After four years of preparation, "The First 100 Years," the oral-history project that photographs and documents the histories of 75 Chinese-American pioneers, is being readied for press. It's been a longtime dream of Chew's (he started the project before joining the museum), and he assembled a 30-member team to make it happen. (The museum exhibit was an offshoot of the book project.)
Chew wants the Wing Luke to do more exhibits of Asian-American artists. The next exhibit, opening in September, will be "Pioneering Asian American Artists" and include George Tsutakawa, Fay Chong and Paul Horiuchi.
Next year the major exhibit will be on the Vietnamese community 20 years after the fall of Saigon. It probably will open in April.
The art exhibits will be more traditional, professionally curated, while the historical exhibits will continue to be created by the community. Like "Executive Order 9066," Chew hopes the Vietnam exhibit will revolve around oral histories and family artifacts to create a sense of the resettlement experience, and will showcase role models. "There's now a generation in college, high school, with little or no memory of Vietnam, a transitional generation struggling to find an identity for themselves, many growing up in white neighborhoods," Chew says. "Hopefully this will bring together different generations together, bridge a gap."
The Wing Luke needs to move to a larger space; Union Station and several other buildings are being considered. Chew says that with the expansion, the Wing Luke could become a national Asian-American museum, the only one of its kind in the nation.
Too ambitious? Why Seattle and not New York or San Francisco? "For the same reason the ID developed, there is a lot of very strong pan-Asian creative energy here," Chew says. "And it's small enough here that it's easier to come together."
In next few years they'll figure out their options. "If it happens anywhere, I think it would happen in Seattle."
But he won't necessarily be at the helm. He wants to start the building and planning process, he says, but hopes the younger generation will take over, so he can move on to some kind of writing.
He misses "the hustle bustle of journalism." And though others see him as "an ID institution," as many put it, he hates the spotlight: "I'm a journalist who took a major detour into the museum field."
------------- AWARDS DINNER -------------
Ron Chew, along with Ngy Hul, Sue Taoka and Khamsene Thavseth, will be honored at The International Examiner's fourth annual Community Awards dinner Wednesday. The Examiner, the nation's only nonprofit pan-Asian American newspaper, is celebrating its 20th anniversary, taking place during Asian Pacific Heritage Month.