Stage & Studio: ‘Coming Home’ to Portland’s Old Town

Dmae Lo Roberts talks in her new podcast with artists Chisao Hata and Roberta Wong about "memory activism" and Old Town's deep Chinese, Japanese, and other cultural and ethnic roots.

September 23, 2024

Dmae Lo Roberts

Culture, Stage & Studio

Roberta Wong and Chisao Hata, key figures in Vanport Mosaic's "memory activism." — Roberta Wong and Chisao Hata, key figures in Vanport Mosaic’s “memory activism.”

Chisao Hata, veteran artist, activist and community weaver, and Roberta Wong, longtime visual artist and curator, both have personal and family histories connected to Portland’s historic Old Town. They are about to embark on Vanport Mosaic’s Coming Home project events September 25 through October 5. Their project was one of 14 selected nationwide by Race Forward and Americans for the Arts.

Led by Chisao Hata, Coming Home will be a week of memory activism events that will highlight both the Japanese and Chinese communities in Old Town’s history as well as other ethnic communities that have called this area their home. There will also be arts shows curated by Wong featuring 27 Indigenous, AAPI and Black artists. The ultimate goal is to hopefully create awareness and support for the social challenges Old Town now faces. All events and art shows are at the 220 Building and are free to the public. For a full schedule of, visit VanportMosaic dot org.

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Dmae Lo Roberts talked with Hata and Wong about the Coming Home project and about the history and personal memories of Old Town. In this podcast you’ll hear…

Chisao Hata: “Japanese pioneers came in the late 1800s. My grandmother was one of 40,000 picture brides, because women were not allowed to come to America unless they were married. So she was one of those picture brides coming to Oregon and landing in Nihonmachi, or Japan Town. And at the time on the West Coast, prior to World War II, there were 41 Nihonmachis along the West Coast; Washington, Oregon, and California. Portland’s Nihonmachi had over 300 businesses. Many of the people lived there because of the covenant laws that restricted where they could live. There was about a 10-block radius. that occupied what was then Nihonmachi. And Chinatown spread not only in that area but farther northwest, so around where the Multnomah Athletic Club [is].”

Roberta Wong: “There were still strong businesses … in the area through the’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, even through the ’90s. It was probably post-2000 when the community really … became challenged with a lot of the … development that was occurring. The light rail impacted businesses, you know, being able to have, um, customers come to the area as well as, again, lots of buildings. And I think that was the the challenge that we see today, that we’re not the same Chinatown we were. There’s not the population that live there, thankfully, because they don’t have that restrictions.”

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Sponsor

Chisao Hata is a performing artist, community organizer and global citizen artist; Chisao’s original choreopoems weave issues of identity and social justice. Her performances in Hiroshima, Japan; Cuba; New Mexico; Ontario, Oregon; and Poston, Arizona are rooted in Japanese American history.

Her GAMBATTE: An American Legacy, and The Portland Assembly Center Project express stories of dispossession, resilience and humanity. She is an Oregon Humanities Conversation Leader, Vanport Mosaic Community Weaver, and a guest artist at the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland.

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Roberta May Wong was born to immigrant parents in Portland, Oregon. She is a graduate of Portland State University, B.A. in Sculpture. Volunteering with nonprofit art and Asian organizations led to a 20-year career as an administrator and gallery director supporting visibility and economic opportunities for BIPOC artists.

Currently, she is retired and serves as a volunteer and curator at the Portland Chinatown Museum. A conceptual and installation artist, her art explores racial, social, and cultural identity. She has exhibited in Oregon and Washington, and is published in The Forbidden Stitch: An Anthology of Asian American Women Artists, Calyx, 1989; Surviving Myths, Deakin University, 1990; and Where Are You From?: An Anthology of Asian American Writing, by Valerie Katagiri and Larry Yu, 2012.

Dmae Lo Roberts

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.