Informally referred to as “The Wing,” The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience is dedicated to serve as a forum to engage the Seattle community with issues regarding the cultural history and heritage of its local Asian Americans. And as a student deeply involved with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, my research focuses on the concept of “collective memory,” and how various marginalized social groups have preserved these memories throughout history.
For example, the mural above is a remnant of a painted advertisement screen hung inside of a movie theater in Seattle’s historic Japantown. These icons represent many businesses that served the local Japanese community, from cobblers, to hairdressers, to all-purpose markets. More importantly, they represent individuals whose lives have been afflicted by racism and xenophobia. With the introduction of Japanese internment in 1942, many Japanese-American Seattleites were forcibly relocated from their homes into camps, held until 1946.
The government did not issue a formal apology or reparations to the victims of internment until 1988, over 20 years after the founding of The Wing. And so we can see that this museum not only provides the intellectual space to explore, engage, and empower the stories and histories of the victims of internment, but it also serves as a literal physical space in which we can preserve the narratives a small, minority community living in the mud hills of Seattle that have been crucial to shaping American identity.
By Conrad Jeong
The government did not issue a formal apology or reparations to the victims of internment until 1988, over 20 years after the founding of The Wing. And so we can see that this museum not only provides the intellectual space to explore, engage, and empower the stories and histories of the victims of internment, but it also serves as a literal physical space in which we can preserve the narratives a small, minority community living in the mud hills of Seattle that have been crucial to shaping American identity.
By Conrad Jeong