At Port Townsend’s Historic Chinese Gardens
My niece and I walk along madrona trees, fir, and pine. At the site of the old Chinese Gardens, a deer crosses our path, pauses to stare at us before walking on. “Deer are beautiful,” my niece says in a quiet other-worldly tone adding, “I love them.”
She takes a breath before walking on and speaks now in the voice of hers I recognize about her summer camp years, how she sprinted in and out of trees on Orcas Island, believing she was a deer among deer, experiencing freedom she had never felt.
“Why is what looks like a meadow called Chinese Gardens?” She asks. This is what I have learned: some Chinese people who settled in Port Townsend cultivated land for growing vegetables that fed the township. Other Chinese people created thriving businesses. When the Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any more Chinese nationals to enter the US, Chinese expats were smuggled by boat from nearby Victoria, British Columbia. At the gardens, they took the place of Chinese men and women who could move on because they had arrived before the Act became law. Since to Anglos all Chinese looked alike, the newly smuggled took their predecessors’ places and farmed, keeping the gardens’ numbers steady.
When spring comes, if I am lucky, a doe will give birth in the grasses along the quiet side of my house. I will mourn the day the fawn outgrows its spots, but I will relish the freedom this offspring has to sprint through the wooded ravine behind my house.
Then I will bend to planting vegetables behind a fence, tied to the land in the way that I know best.
