How Portland’s Chinatown history shaped the Oregon Chinese Festival

It’s a simple question, really.

Why did Hongcheng Zhao decide to create the Oregon Chinese Festival, Portland’s popular annual summer event celebrating local Chinese culture?

But pose the question to Zhao and he responds with a hearty chuckle, because the answer, it turns out, isn’t so simple. It’s buried in a forgotten and controversial past, lurking under decades of displacement and distrust. It’s littered with drama and misunderstanding, hard work and hurdles. But it’s also filled with hope and accomplishment.

In a way, it’s a microcosm of the history of Chinese culture in a city that prides itself on progressivism today despite its complicated past.

“Let me give you a brief introduction,” Zhao, the president of the Oregon Chinese Coalition says, laughing.

An hour and 44 minutes later, it becomes clear that brief was never Zhao’s intention, not with his passion and thirst to spread knowledge about the complex history of his culture in Portland.

“I wanted to be more proactive to educate the general public and to have people be more exposed to Chinese culture,” Zhao said. “I wanted to have the opportunity to engage in conversations. But Chinese people are not used to these kinds of things, so it was extremely hard in 2019 to get started.”

But start it did. And six years later, the Oregon Chinese Festival — which will be held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Pioneer Courthouse Square — has blossomed into one of downtown Portland’s marquee summer events.

“We are doing this more and more, bigger and bigger and better and better,” Zhao said. “You just cannot stop. When you set the bar high, you want to keep building. On this kind of stage, you feel a sense of self-satisfaction, but it’s way beyond that.”

And what a stage it is. For seven hours, roughly 500 performers will deliver more than 60 performances covering traditional and modern Chinese performance art. And they will do so on what Zhao claims is the largest stage to ever span Pioneer Courthouse Square, a mammoth 40-by-32-foot structure that comes at a cost of $8,000 for the coalition.

Eight local food vendors, ranging from Home Taste to Little Beijing and LoLo S San Xiang to Mandarin House, will serve an assortment of traditional Chinese dishes, including Jianbing, Jian Bao, Sichuan noodles, steamed dumplings, barbecue, pot stickers and much, much more.

Additionally, six tables will host a variety of hands-on activities and arts and crafts, with many aimed at entertaining children, including diabolo, calligraphy, burr puzzles, tangram and origami.

And underlying every performance, every nibble of food and every craft will be the background and history of a culture that has quietly been a fabric of Portland for more than a century. It’s a history Zhao was eager to detail in that “brief” introduction.

Cantonese-Chinese immigrants first arrived in Oregon in the mid 1850s, before it officially became a state. A decade later, they began flooding into the area to work on the Western section of the transcontinental railroad, literally building the gateway from the East on their backs. Zhao says roughly 20,000 Chinese workers helped finish the project.

By 1890, Portland featured the second-largest population in the United States behind San Francisco, as roughly one in 10 Portlanders was Chinese.

But their professional opportunities were limited and they were regularly discriminated against, most notably by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration and labor for decades. It remained a law until 1943, when China joined the Allied forces in World War II.

During those early decades, Zhao says, Chinese lived in Southwest Portland along the Willamette River, roughly where the Saturday Market thrives today. But the combination of harsh elements and discrimination ultimately displaced them a few blocks north, and local Chinese eventually settled into the area of modern day Old Town Chinatown.

“The river had no banks on both sides,” Zhao said. “So there was small flooding every year — and sometimes big flooding. That’s not ideal for the people that live there. Also, there was an idea that they didn’t deserve to live there — ‘You don’t deserve a million-dollar view” — and so they started to move during World War II.”

For decades, Chinese flourished there, building a tight-knit community that featured, among other things, celebrated restaurants and shops. In the 1980s and 90s, a new generation of Mandarin-Chinese immigrants arrived in search of higher education degrees and white collar jobs. Zhao, who went to Harvard and the University of California before landing in Portland in 1995, was one of them.

But sometime around the turn of the century, things started to change. Portland’s population and reputation flourished. Downtown boomed. The Pearl District was transformed from gritty warehouses into glitzy galleries and condominiums. All the while, the city moved a concentration of social services into the area.

Suddenly, the heart of Chinatown — the Chinese — felt the squeeze. Many relocated their shops and restaurants. Most moved east. Others cashed in.

One Chinese-owned plot of land sold for $11.5 million. A two-story building sold for $8.5 million.

“People were rushing into Chinatown to buy whatever property was available,” Zhao said. “And the older generation saw an opportunity. They thought, ‘I cannot fight — I’m not in a position to fight.’ So they moved to 82nd. They claim 82nd as a new Chinatown. They’re more comfortable over there.”

Zhao and others in the Chinese community worried they were losing an important part of their cultural history, so in 2016 — the same year that plot of land sold for $11.5 million — he founded the Oregon Chinese Coalition. He knew it would be impossible to unify the entire local Chinese population, which now features roughly 40,000 people and is diverse and splintered, with half (mostly Cantonese) living on the Eastside near 82nd Avenue and the other half (mostly Mandarin) living in Southwest Portland and Beaverton.

But he hoped to do his best to bridge the divide for the betterment of the culture — and for the preservation of Chinatown.

“We speak different languages, have a different history and background and do different things,” Zhao said. “Normally we don’t connect that much. But if you don’t do anything as a community, change the way you have been doing things, then you seal your own fate. After 20 years, trust me, you are going to be forced to move further away. You have to learn how to become part of this community. Engage. You deserve respect, you deserve space for your own, and you have to learn to stand up and say no to people.”

Zhao convinced would-be sellers to hold on to their valuable property in Chinatown, and Chinese Americans still own seven or eight key active buildings in the district, he says. And in the nine years since, his coalition has expanded its reach and impact.

It organizes 50 different events annually, ensuring that at least one happens nearly every weekend. It comes together in November to replace all of the lanterns and lampposts in Chinatown, using funding from grants and community donations. It provides rental assistance to 1,000 families, using government programs and grants to eliminate the threat of homelessness for hordes of Chinese Americans. And it was the first organization in the nation to successfully advocate for restorative justice in response to Asian hate crimes.

But its biggest event will come Saturday, when thousands gather in Portland’s living room — less than a mile from Chinatown — to celebrate a group that has been a fabric of the community for more than a century.

“It’s a pure, 100 percent immersive cultural experience for everybody,” Zhao said. “For the community and for us.”

— Joe Freeman | [email protected] | 503-294-5183 | @BlazerFreeman | @freemanjoe.bsky.social