From down the block on Sunday, Oct. 11, it sounded like walking toward any Chinatown on a festival day: the snap of firecrackers, clanging cymbals and rattling drums growing louder along the approach to the foot of Eureka’s E Street. There, at the corner of First and E streets, a crowd gathered as Chinese lion dancers in purple costumes wove their way through the round gate at the center of the newly finished Chinatown Monument.
The monument stands blocks from the former block of homes and businesses where more than 200 Chinese Eurekans, all men but for some 20 women, lived and worked in the city until they were forced out under threat of violence in 1885. It’s the result of a five-year-long volunteer project by the Eureka Chinatown Project (ECP) and Humboldt Asian Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI), a mission that grew out of a desire to bring a too-often hidden history and lost community to light, as well as a sense of urgency at seeing echoes of the same racism and xenophobia in our time.
HAPI steering committee member Paul Michael Atienza thanked donors and supporters as he introduced speakers. Among them, Mayor Kim Bergel offered congratulations and said, “We can’t change the past but we can certainly change what we do in the future,” citing actions like the building of the monument and return of land to the Wiyot Tribe as models going forward. Daryl Ngee Chinn read his poem “The Water Book of Questions,” which is engraved along the low walls of the monument. There were performances by San Francisco’s Lion Dance Me, Humboldt Taiko, Humboldt County Lao Dancers, Eureka High School K-pop Dance Club and White Lotus Cultural Dancers. Then the crowd dispersed to the food stalls, greeting friends, stopping with questions at the Ask a Historian table or to pick up a signed copy of Yung Stands Strong from author Annette Makino. Many explored the monument, passing through the arch, reading the words, walking the etched river, tracing their fingers along the Chinese characters and the English words of Chinn’s poem.
The structure and walkway, created by artist John King, features a path bordered by a “river timeline” marked with flat and raised stones emblazoned with Chinese characters and their English translations: Hope, Gold Mountain, Chinatown, Expulsion, Resistance, Resilience, Rebirth, Community and, again, Hope. The round archway, a moon gate traditional in Chinese gardens, allowing the peaceful flow of positive energy, harmony and wholeness. Locally, it also calls to mind Charlie Moon, who remained after the expulsion and married Minnie Tom of the Chilula Redwood Creek Tribe, and whose name descendants still carry among tribal communities in Humboldt. On the other side of the arch, a pedestal is topped with a pyramid of oranges lit with sun, an offering to ancestors and ones who left little trace.
The poem “The Water Book of Questions,” by local poet and monument committee member Daryl Ngee Chinn is engraved along the low border walls, gingko leaves scattered among the words.“The ginkgo tree has several meanings, but it’s really important in Asian cultures, and it speaks to remembrance,” Amy Uyeki, HAPI steering committee member and ECP co-lead, is quoted saying in a press release.“When it loses its leaves, it loses them all at once. It’s like one day they’re there and the next day they’re all down. It seemed symbolic of the expulsion also because in the spring, the leaves come back again.”
A clay pot with a wash of brown glaze led historian Katie Buesch to take her first steps into Eureka’s historic Chinatown. Originally from San Diego, she studied anthropology and religious studies at then Humboldt State University before working as registrar and curator at the Clarke Historical Museum in 2017. In 2019, a man dropped off a stout pot, likely used for storing food, that was in his family for generations. She recalls, “he felt kind of weird still having it,” as his relative “took this from Chinatown after they kicked the Chinese out of it.” It was the first she’d heard of the enclave or the forced removal of its residents, and it sent her on a deep dive into the history of Eureka’s Chinatown and the 1885 expulsion and the creation of a special exhibit at the Clarke.
“Something that resonated with me a lot was the rhetoric that was being used in the historic papers,” she said. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been law since 1882, and anti-Chinese sentiment — racist tropes about Chinese people being sinister, diseased, stealing jobs, threatening white women — was strong nationally and in Eureka, where the Humboldt Times called for the expelling of Chinese residents from the town “by any means necessary” on Feb. 5, 1885, the day before the expulsion.
Especially as the news of the COVID pandemic broke and anti-Asian rhetoric was picking up in the media and in government, leading to escalating violence against Asian people, the story of Eureka’s Chinatown felt relevant. Once the exhibit was open, Buesch says she’d hear visitors talking as they viewed the displays, making connections to current events.
Since the COVID pandemic hit only a month into the Chinatown exhibition, the museum shifted to guided walking tours of Chinatown history. She drew on her experience doing interpretive tours for state parks. The tours also raised some cash for the museum. “I think it’s really powerful to take people to the spots where things really happened,” she says. As attendees crossed Fourth Street, she’d zip back to the middle of the crosswalk to hold up a photo of how the view looked in the 1800s so they could view it as they passed.
One of the museum attendees was Brieanne Mirjah D’Souza, who worked in digital marketing and is of Chinese and West Indian heritage. Via email from Michigan, where she now lives, she recalls it was “the dead of COVID, during Trump’s first reign of terror causing an alarming rise of AAPI hate in this country. I had just finished celebrating Chinese New Year virtually — on Zoom with my family, as we all squinted at the screen watching online classes out of Manhattan’s Chinatown, trying to recreate tang yuan (glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame paste).” She was pregnant and away from her community back home. The visit to the Clarke was her first, and she wishes she could recall it in better detail, “But I know the feeling I felt walking through it and learning that there had once stood a Chinatown in the heart of Eureka: hopeful.” She was excited, too. “The days following my visit to the exhibit, my mind fluttered with ideas and conversations that would soon launch the Eureka Chinatown Project.”
Mirjah D’Souza began with an Instagram account meant to call together the local Asian American Pacific Islander community. “That’s where Alex Ozaki McNeill messaged me and we started talking about building community and commemorating the historic Chinatown with a plaque,” she says. “She introduced me to a handful of AAPI community members and the ideas started pouring out.” Things moved quickly. “Every person that was connected to the group brought in another person who they knew would bring resources, experience and perspective to the group — some of Chinese heritage, some not. By the time we had our first group meeting on Zoom on April 1, 2021, we had representation from almost every corner of the community — the colleges, the historians, the artists, HAPI and AAPI neighbors.”
The consensus was for a plaque marking the location of the historic Chinatown and more education. Soon the group was working as a Ink People DreamMaker program, planning fundraising. “Within a month, we had a walking tour meeting with Mayor Seaman,” says Mirjah D’Souza, “and I presented to the Eureka City Council the Phase 1 projects on our list: commemorative plaque, Chinatown mural, naming of the Chinatown alley, city of Eureka wayfinding signs and walking tours.” Once the group partnered with the city, even the plaque concept began to grow.
Activist, academic and author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, Jean Pfaelzer recalls joining the ECP and its early Zoom meetings about the plaque and the planned mural with a little awe. “I’ve never worked with a group of people where there was no conflict,” she says, “everyone just moving forward with a common goal. … It just built and built.”
When Alex Service, curator at the Fortuna Depot Museum, moved to Humboldt from San Diego in 2009, her mother was already working at the Clarke and stories of Eureka’s Chinatown had already filtered down to her. But it was when Service joined Buesch and others to consult on historical aspects of another ECP project, Makino’s children’s book illustrated by Yukari Mishima, Yung Stands Strong, that she immersed herself in research.
One day a week, she says, “I lived in the microfilm at the county library,” reading daily newspapers of the period, looking for mentions of Chinatown and Chinese people. As a result, the fourth-grade book, meant to dovetail with California history units, includes what ECP members believe is the most accurate depiction ever of a Chinese girl’s experience of an expulsion, as well as a thorough historical and discussion section in the back. It’s the group’s hope the book will bring the story of Eureka’s Chinatown and similar expulsions into mainstream history.
On Friday, Feb. 6, 1885, at 6 p.m., David Kendall, a Eureka city councilmember and livery stable owner who lived with his wife Prudence at the northeast corner of Fifth and E streets — the corner of Chinatown — was walking back from dinner to work at the livery on Second Street. As he was crossing at Fourth and E streets, gunfire broke out halfway up the block on Fourth Street between E and F streets outside a general store owned by local Chinese community leader Sing Yek. A pair of Chinese men fired between seven and 12 shots at each other amid several gathered men. A stray hit Kendall, and passerby Millard La Grange helped him back to Kendall’s home, where the councilmember died 15 minutes later.
The rainy, muddy February weather meant plenty of loggers were waiting out the season without work drinking in saloons. In minutes, hundreds of white men were out in the streets, forming a mob calling for burning Chinatown and killing the Chinese. Civic leaders moved the crowd into Centennial Hall a block or so away, where the Arkley Center for the Performing Arts lot is now. Several of the men who were voted onto the Committee of 15 white businessmen later that night, including Mayor Walsh, made speeches about the need to oust the Chinese. Rev. Charles Huntington spoke against punishing all the Chinese for the actions of one, saying it was as wrong as punishing all whites for one man, but he was shouted down. Sheriff T.M. Brown insisted they proceed lawfully, however loose his interpretation of the law, and the Committee of 15 were charged with informing Chinese community leaders it wouldn’t be safe to stay, that the Chinese needed to pack what they could carry and be ready to leave by boat to San Francisco in the morning.
More explicit was the sign on the quickly erected gallows at the corner of Fifth and F streets, declaring that any Chinese remaining by 2 p.m. would be hanged.
Once they’d packed what they could, abandoning the rest of their property to looters, Chinese residents waited locked and guarded in a pair of warehouses until two regularly scheduled steamships waiting out bad weather in port could take them south to San Francisco. By about 6 a.m. Sunday, the ships were able to set sail and cross Humboldt bar. “It must have been absolutely terrifying with the very rational fear that at any moment the mob might break in,” says Service.
Pfaelzer says she thinks about the warehouses where the Chinese stayed those two days. “Some [white] people came to jeer, some people came to say goodbye and some women showed up wanting their laundry back,” she says. “There’s no tally of the pain. There’s what the Chinese lost and what the town lost.”
After finishing her dissertation and teaching at HSU in the late 1970s, her curiosity about the lack of Asian students led her to the story of Eureka’s Chinatown. A local poet told her the purge had kept Chinese Americans from sending their kids to Humboldt. After leaving the county and working in Congress and at the University of Delaware, she waded into research on expulsions. She started traveling to counties where it had happened in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and California, where she was often met with surprise or disbelief.
As Pfaelzer describes in Driven Out, Eureka’s expulsion was so quick and thorough that the tactics came to be called “The Eureka Method.” A booklet produced by the chamber of commerce called “The Humboldt Souvenir” bragged that: “One fact makes Humboldt unique among the counties of California and indeed, on the Pacific Coast — we have no Chinese. The community rose up as a man and drove every Chinese out of the county. Even in far-off China, the coolies know that they are not permitted to come here, and none ever attempt it.”
But, as Pfaelzer noted in an earlier Journal interview, the resistance of the Chinese Eurekans shouldn’t be overlooked, “They came together and sued Eureka for damages and for being the victim of mob violence. It’s important not to view them just as victims. Their lawsuit explodes so many myths of Chinese immigrants as docile and subservient. They were standing up for their civil rights, and they can be a model for all of us today” (“Driven Out,” June 7, 2007).
Wing Hing vs. City of Eureka, in which 56 Chinese plaintiffs, including two women, filed in January of 1886 in San Francisco “dragged on for four years” before dismissal for non-appearance. Service imagines by then the plaintiffs may have run out of money for fees or moved on, perhaps returning to China even.
As Uyeki, a member of the HAPI steering committee points out in a press release about the monument, “It was the first reparation suit of its kind in California. It was really sort of an amazing thing that these people were able to use the legal processes to try and get reparations for their loss of property but, unfortunately, because they were not allowed to become citizens, they were denied a lot of the same rights.”
Service says she was surprised to learn that despite the lawless expulsion, there was an actual trial for Kendall’s killing. Four Chinese men went to trial in April of 1885, and the city brought six of the expelled Chinese residents back to testify. Lim Gow and Ah Kow were tried in the shooting but the jury felt the prosecution hadn’t sufficiently proven who fired the fatal bullet, so both men were acquitted and two others held on the same charges, Sing Yek and Ah Chooey, were released as well. All were sent to San Francisco, expenses paid. “There is actual proof that the legal system was still doing what it was supposed to be doing,” Service marvels, even as it carried out other injustices.
Another myth of the Chinese Expulsion is that all the Chinese left. Residents outside Eureka, Service says, remained, many of them gold miners, some working along the Klamath. The 1890 census shows 19 Chinese men in the county, though the original document burned and only a summary remains. Three of those had married into Native families, Charlie Moon among them.
Moon, whose white employer at Bair Ranch in Redwood Creek refused to turn him over to white men who came to get him during the 1885 expulsion, married Minnie Tom, a Native woman of the Chilula Redwood Creek Tribe, with whom he had eight children. Renaming the alley at the site of old Chinatown Charlie Moon Way was another item on the ECP’s to-do list of educational landmarks, particularly important for its highlighting of the connection between Native and Asian communities in Humboldt. The alley was already marked with a mural by artist Dave Kim, who’d completed the piece during the 2021 Eureka Street Art Festival. “Fowl” depicts a Mandarin duck and World War II veteran and restaurateur Ben Chin, the first Chinese American to open a business in Eureka in 1955, 70 years after the expulsion. Emblazoned with the word “hometown,” the title holds a triple meaning: the “foul” conditions the city created by sealing off the boardwalk that trapped sewage Chinatown, the ducks that somehow made a home in the lagoon that formed there, and the hope symbolized by a down pillow, the traditional wedding gift for Chinese couples.
Yolanda Latham, Moon’s great-great granddaughter, is among his many living descendants in the area. She reached out to the ECP after seeing the alley renaming on the Nov. 2, 2021, Eureka City Council agenda. She, too, felt the importance of making a positive connection to her Chinese roots and the larger community amid escalating racism and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country, especially attacks on elders. She gave an emotional speech at the commemoration of Charlie Moon Way.
Latham returned for the opening of the Chinatown Monument to speak beside Sheila Moon. “Charlie Moon and Minnie Tom’s story began in a hard time,” said Latham, “and today we’re standing together in a good way.”
Members of HAPI and the ECP were, and in some cases still are, braced for blowback, vandalism and racist reactions. Mirjah D’Souza admits, “We were unearthing a dark and heavy past that still had strong roots in the community today. I feared the backlash we would face, violent crimes and funding denied due to the ignorance and widespread AAPI hate we were seeing across the nation,” adding the racist murders of Asian women in Atlanta rocked the community in March of 2021. Instead, she says, “We were met with kindness, excitement and unwavering support. That truly brings a tear to my eye thinking about the courage this group has, unified, standing together and making a huge change in their community. Healing our community.”
Uyeki echoes the words of other HAPI and ECP members, saying the support from the community and the city has been overwhelming. Donations have come from more than 40 businesses, and more than 300 individuals, while the group also gained grant funding and/or assistance from the California State Coastal Conservancy California Humanities, Eureka Cultural Arts District, Humboldt Area Foundation, the Ink People Center for the Arts and Deborah Lee Cooper. Only once have they been asked, she says, and not by any of the above mentioned, to tell the story in a purely positive light. “But that’s not telling the story.”
Construction, estimates Sheri Woo, HAPI steering committee member, came in around $240,000 and “all the contractors donated significant hours of time and materials.”
Woo, who is Chinese American, first learned about Eureka’s Chinatown when she moved to Humboldt in 1989, despite warnings from relatives about how Chinese would be treated here. Her own family’s history goes back to the 1860s in Stockton and to Folsom, where her family owned a laundry business in the 1920s. In an earlier release, she’s quoted as saying she doesn’t long for the return of a Chinatown, at least in its strict form, that she hopes a community wouldn’t “need to be segregated together for safety.”
“It’s been so exciting to see how much has come out of it, the opera, the kids’ book,” says Buesch, who feels proud to have done her “little part.” “Everyone has a role to play in making a positive difference in the world and you never know where it’s going to go,” she adds, “It takes all of us and our talents and interests.”
Pfaelzer, who spent the afternoon with Buesch and Service at the Ask a Historian table, sees the monument as a teaching tool. “I wasn’t taught this and every single time I talk about it, somebody says, ‘How come I never heard this?’” As schools whitewash history books and universities lose funding for ethnic studies, she says, “It’s why I think the monument right now is so incredibly compelling, is it goes in the face of all the denials about racism in this country. It’s a real community acknowledgement.”
At a reading of Yung Stands Strong in Los Bagels the following weekend, just around the block from the monument, retired professor Sue Lee Mossman, who describes her role as “grandmother” of the ECP, joins a panel for a Q&A.
Flanked by ECP members, she says, “What we want to do is reclaim our common history. Whether you got here three weeks ago or your ancestors have been here since time immemorial, it’s all our common history. It’s part of the work of healing.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in The Eureka Chinatown Monument.
