by Luna Reyna
The Wing Luke Museum was open late on Sept. 14 for an after-hours event for Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American organizing group that supports immigrant and refugee communities “targeted by racist, inhumane, immigration policies.”
The plan was to tour the “Resisters: A Legacy of Movement From the Japanese American Incarceration” exhibit and examine the legacy and learnings of how communities organized around issues of detention and incarceration.
During the introduction of the tour, Wing Luke exhibit developer and program manager for Wing Luke’s youth camp Blake Nakatsu and others began hearing banging noises and then glass shattering.
“I run up to the back of the theater and I look out into the alley and there’s this guy swinging a hammer,” Nakatsu said. He alerted the security guard before coming back to attempt to stop the vandalism. By the time they arrived, the person had already destroyed several large glass panes.
When they asked the man what he was doing, he responded by telling them that he came down to Chinatown to cause as much destruction as possible. “We’re like, ‘Why, why?’,” Nakatsu said. “He says some pretty horrible things along the lines of ‘the Chinese ruined my life and something had to be done about it’ and we’re all kind of just in shock.”
The destruction did strike a blow that can’t be measured in terms of sweeping away shards of glass and installing new windows. Two of the nine windows broken used to be the living room windows of Chinese families in the 1920s who lived there and gazed through them at their new home.
In that sense, they are irreplaceable.
“More than the windows’ value is the priceless significance of historic Canton that’s housed generations of migrant families and hosts numerous neighborhood activation events all year round and especially our beloved annual JamFest and Alley Parties,” said Wing Luke Museum Executive…
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