Thank you for a great experience!

I just want to say thank you to Dr. Cowgill, Dr. Hessler, John, Jeff, Pam B., Ashley, Carmen and Pam for providing an opportunity to look at life in a new way. Now, whenever I leave the house, I try to take a different route to my destination in order to see something that I may not have noticed before. There are so many things that you see everyday that begin to fade into the background because we are in a hurry and do not have time to notice. Thank you for bringing me back to the present and helping me to see things that were beginning to fade. Debbie Boles

Pam B's reflective essay

The Oklahoman newspaper came into existence in 1889 and the Oklahoma Publishing Company bought it in 1903. From 1910 - 1920's later articles, research from Dr. Xiao-Bing Li, professor of history and geography from the University of Oklahoma, former mayor George Shirks papers and pictures, interviews from people living in the downtown area during that time, web based articles and blogs, and information found at the History Center in OKC have painted a small picture of what was known as the "Chinese underground" found underneath buildings in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred to 150 Chinese men lived underground, was noted in one of the articles, and from research I have learned it was basically void of women. Former mayor George Shirk discovered the Chinese underground in 1969 when Oklahoma City was undergoing urban renewal. (Many of the older buildings were being torn down so "new and improved" buildings could be built.) This may have caused a new found revelation with the Oklahoma City residents that the Chinese lived underground but if it is taken into context that many of the office buildings in downtown Oklahoma City had basements that they rented out cheap to the Chinese people for their living quarters, it makes it sound more humane. (If it happened today these rooms may have been described as a basement penthouse near Bricktown.) When I read the articles on the Chinese underground, all I envision is 150 men underground in these rooms, gambling, smoking opium, and growing mushrooms for the above ground Chinese restaurants because the conditions were dark and dank for mushroom cultivation.

In reality, 150 Chinese people probably did not live there together at one time. They would move in and out about every six months, according to Dr. Li. They would come and go from California, looking for employment opportunities. They were not locked up in these rooms as they were in a jail cell but were probably able to come and go as they wanted to. If there had been a newsworthy story about the Chinese underground, I would surmise that a scoop reporter from The Oklahoman during that time would have written a lead story on the first page of the newspaper.

This part of Oklahoma City's history is lost like so much of the jazz history that was a part of the Deep Deuce. We will have to rely on classes like this, articles, research, and interviews to keep it alive. (I still want to see Shirk's collection of papers and pictures in the OCU library.)

The Cox Convention Center now stands as a cemetery monument for the excavation area that Shirk found. (I just thought, I wonder if there is signage about the Chinese underground by the Cox Center. I will have to check that out.)

What I find interesting is the transition from the Chinese living in the downtown area to its new Asian District boundaries, NW 23, OCU, NW 30th and Paseo. For some reason I thought that Catholic Charities may have played an instrumental part in the Asian population living in this area. Catholic Charities is located on NW 15th and Classen and according to The Sooner Catholic have helped many immigrants find their home in Oklahoma City. According to research and interviews this area was conducive to the Asian population because of Asian markets, shops, doctors, churches, and even OCU. Dr. Ju-Chuan Arrow brought up the correlation of OCU graduating many Asian students who stay in Oklahoma City, become professionals and purchase homes in the area by OCU for rental property. Dr. Li said military brides were brought over and many refugees from the Viet Nam war attributed to the Asian District population.

When we attended the Chinese New Year celebration at the Super Cao I knew I was an outsider looking in. The colors of the dragons that swirled before me were colorful and entertaining in my eyes, but for the Chinese who attended, some in traditional celebration clothing, it meant their homeland, their families, their culture, their oneness with each other. The Chinese men and women who shop at the Super Cao were purchasing foods that were foreign to me. The Super Cao is like an open forum market were many elder Chinese greeted each other in their language and spoke for many minutes. It is a gathering place for them to stay connected to each other, their homeland, their culture.

The New Year Celebration is a celebration of good luck and good fortune for them. It is a celebration of one, of family ties, of their history. This is a drastic change of the first Chinese who lived underground in downtown Oklahoma City and who provided cheap labor for those Chinese or Chinese-Americans who owned Chinese restaurants and laundry stores.

I appreciate the history of the people who were here in the beginning of statehood but it is those who are here now that make Oklahoma City what it is today.

Brooke's Reflective Essay

Hi All,

Your presentations were grand. Today Julie and I will begin reading your reflective essays. I wrote mine on my other blog yesterday but I'm copying it here for any who might be interested. I didn't include a works cited list on the blog but I'm compiling a master bibliography for the whole course and will also post a copy of that here once it's done.

For now, here's my reflection:

* * *

As we began studying Oklahoma City's legendary "Underground Chinatown" what struck me hardest was OKC's apparent preference to acknowledge this immigrant culture and community as the stuff of legends instead of engaging it directly as a real group of people who lived and worked here. When you examine archived issues of the state newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman, you find references to this "hidden" population every few decades or so from the very early 1900s through just last year. And yet most every time it is mentioned it is referred to mostly as a rumor or mystery, as if our public memory about the downtown Chinese immigrants dissolved shortly after every verifiable report of its existence.

Even after Mayor George Shirk, a preservationist and past president of the Oklahoma Historical Society, brought public attention to an underground residence, most people seemed to "forget" about it until last year when Dr. Blackburn contributed a feature story to the newspaper and assisted with an exhibit at the state History Center.

Equally strange and disturbing is the fact that Mayor Shirk co-authorized the urban renewal process that literally buried underground Chinatown, making it utterly inaccessible as an archeological and cultural resource. I keep trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, to appreciate the momentum of the "Pei Plan," and to believe that somehow among Shirk's posesssions and papers are clues and perhaps even more preservation (artifacts even?) than is currently known. That's now become a research project on my short list.

All this was brewing in my heart and mind as I pursued this research and as I began conceiving a found-objects assemblage that would help me piece together what I'm learning and why it matters. Ultimately, what I wanted to achieve through my research and artwork was some sort of statement about what mainstream OKC society has chosen to overlook. To put it another way, my artwork is about selective memory.

To express this, I created an artificial Victorian-style sugar egg--the kind with a peephole and a diorama inside.

The peephole symbolizes the accessibility and inaccessibility of the Underground Chinatown history and the stories of its inhabitants. But the peephole is also intended to imply viewer-responsibility. Looking inside is a choice. And once you look, you bear a responsibility to do something about what you see. I don't mean to argue that every Oklahoman who read the newspaper or strolled by the underground entrances had a moral obligation to meet and greet and assist the people living there. But some positive action, some interpersonal and civic engagement was appropriate, and in the case of Shirk, who most famously led the newspapers into the abandoned habitats, publicity was a positive contribution but not enough given his influence as a leading citizen. So the existence of the peephole in my artwork implicates all of us who learn about the underground today, as well as all of those who glimpsed the place during our city's history. The word "peephole" itself I use advisedly here because I like its unsavory associations, its allusion to voyeurism. So many of us (and yes I'd include myself here) who have become curious about the underground story are surely attracted to its exoticism, its fringe undertones. The most persistent public memories were those about underground opium dens, gambling, and murderous thugs.

This lurid dimension of OKC's public memory is reflected in the color tones and textures of the artwork's interior. I lined the egg with red firecracker paper from the Lunar New Year celebrations in our contemporary (aboveground, thriving, and visible ) Asian District. (I'll briefly discuss the significance of the New Year symbolism in a moment.) In the center of the egg is a red lacquer trunk containing the Mandarin Chinese character for "remember." Within the trunk is a photograph c. 1918 of a Chinese woman who is probably the wife of Faug Kwai, an immigrant who worked in downtown OKC during the early years of the "underground" and may have been a resident and/or merchant there. His mailing address is a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. The other items in the trunk are photocopies of artifacts from Kwai's personal papers in the archives of the Oklahoma History Center. Kwai's box was the only one listed in the History Center's special collection holdings, and it is still labeled as "unprocessed." Its research finding-aid category is "Diversity." I cannot overstate the significance that his is the only Chinese-immigrant collection in the History Center's impressive database. It contains two personal letters, a framed photograph, and two legal deeds regarding a small parcel of property in Waco, Texas.

The exterior of the egg is gray, the color of urban concrete. The "icing" ornamentation is gray-tinted spackling paste, something we use to repair, refinish, and conceal things. I've "sugared" the egg with clear glitter to indicate how this history has been "sugar-coated" through its treatment as an urban myth.

The egg itself, a symbol of renewal, is a significant one from my experience during the class because, as Dr. Arrow taught us, the new year is a time when the Chinese congratulate one another for "waking up alive" when, as tradition holds, the Jade Emperor may have instead opted to eliminate us for our missteps and our misuse of the world. I wanted to incorporate Chinese New Year symbolism because it speaks of survival, both deserved and undeserved. Within my egg is an incomplete memory of people who were known and unknown and whose identity is now stored and exhibited in a place that simultaneously celebrates and ignores it.

To me, the artwork is about the enduring value of a culture and community that many chose to overlook as well as what lessons we might take from this history about, for example, other kinds of communities we choose not to engage fully.

(Thank you, Debbie, for this terrific image of the egg!)