Chrissy Shimizu sat on the floor of the basement of the Wing Luke Museum. Shimizu is the museum’s new executive director, and this is her favorite place in the building, where she is reminded of its “many different lives.”
In the basement, the museum stores signs from neighborhood businesses that have closed and “furniture and trunks from Japanese-American families — some still with incarceration tags on them,” Shimizu said. Those tags came from internment camps in the United States during World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all people of Japanese descent.
"The objects and artifacts down here ground me in the feeling of, you know, the magnitude of all of the histories that are here and that have passed through here," Shimizu said.
Many of the items there — and in the rest of the building — reflect the evolving story of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. As the museum’s director, Shimizu wants to remind people of that history and get them involved.
Shimizu has only been in this role since May, but she is a familiar face in the CID. She grew up in Edmonds, and spent a lot of time in the neighborhood. Her grandfather owned a shiatsu business, or Japanese massage parlor, on 16th and Main Street that her father also worked at.
“We grew up coming to the Chinatown-International District on the weekends, eating and grocery shopping here,” Shimizu said.
The museum’s model allows community members to help guide and contribute artifacts to the exhibits. Shimizu hopes that more people feel comfortable doing that and exploring the neighborhood like she did as a child.
Wing Luke’s “largest exhibit”
The neighborhood was initially established south of Pioneer Square. That’s where Chinese businessmen opened shops and built boarding houses for Chinese immigrants who worked as fishermen, loggers and on the railroad.
The Great Seattle Fire of 1889 forced residents to relocate to an area north of Pioneer Square. A few years later, the city wanted to make the area more accessible, so it reshaped more than 100 blocks of downtown Seattle, pushing the CID to where it stands today.
The building that houses the Wing Luke Museum was constructed in 1910 by Chinese immigrants and it helped establish that neighborhood.
“A lot of people don’t know that this was the third iteration of Seattle’s Chinatown,” Shimizu said.
The building featured Yick Fung Co., an import store with spices and items from Asia that were difficult to find here, as well as the Freeman Hotel that offered single-room occupancy housing, known as SROs.
Today, Shimizu said, this building and the history preserved inside it are a big part of what drives the area’s economy.
“We refer to the neighborhood as our largest exhibit,” she said. “Part of the museum's role is to get people out walking and learning and eating and shopping and experiencing and living in the Chinatown-International District.”
Creating dialogue
Shimizu is taking on this role at a time when museums across the country are still trying to bounce back from low attendance after the pandemic. The Wing Luke Museum is facing another challenge: Shimizu said its target audience has moved further away because of the cost of living in the city.
"The neighborhood is still relevant. It's still a cultural home and a regional home for many people who live even across the state and outside of the state,” she said. “But how are we talking with the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities who no longer live in the historic red lines of Seattle?”
Shimizu said talking to people in the community will help them develop ideas about how to connect.
Shimizu signed on after the museum had to close its doors for several days in 2024 after staff walked out over a controversial exhibit called “Confronting Hate Together.” Employees said the show framed “Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism” and excluded perspectives from Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim communities. Eventually, the Wing Luke Museum decided not to show the exhibit.
Shimizu said the museum continues to rebuild after the incident. To her, that is an ongoing process that includes building trust with employees, creating a culture of learning and bringing greater transparency about how decisions are made within the organization.
“The museum’s work is dedicated to historical interpretation, and it’s our job to create dialog on social issues and to be both keepers of history, but also to not be bystanders when there is moral failure,” she said. “To us, this is what it means to also be a museum that is grounded in racial and social justice.”
A bridge
The museum is updating a permanent exhibit called Honoring our Journey, which highlights the Asian and Pacific Islander experience in the CID using items, such as shrine, a prayer rug and Chinese exclusion files.
The update will add items from the museum’s collection and work to include more experiences from Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander peoples that were previously underrepresented in the exhibit. Plans include spelling out connections between past and current immigrant experiences.
The Wing Luke is also opening the Eng Family Homestead home next month, after purchasing the historic property from its original owners in 2021. This property showcases how the Eng family with six children lived in the neighborhood during the Chinese Exclusion era. The family ran a bean sprout business out of the basement of this property that served as a fresh food source for the area.
Shimizu fundraised with the museum as its director of individual giving from 2017 to 2021. In the five years she was away from the museum, Shimizu, who is 40 years old, led Puget Sound Sage, a nonprofit that advocates for a variety of issues including land use and workers rights. She also became a mother.
Now, she feels like it is her turn to be a bridge between younger generations and elders of the community — a pressure “that feels very familiar to the children of Asian immigrants.”
“Don't worry, we know how to internalize that pressure. Yeah, it's the pressure to work hard, it's the pressure to make our elders proud,” she said. “I don’t feel resentful of it right now. I’m up for the challenge.”
