The Ritual of Civic Apology

I was standing onstage at the University of Puget Sound, preparing to give a talk about anti-Chinese violence in the American West, when a man I’d never met stepped up beside me. He was introduced as a member of the Tacoma City Council. Without preamble, he turned to the audience—and then to me.

“I tell my kids reconciliation begins with an apology,” he said. “On behalf of the city of Tacoma, I am sorry.”

Maybe he meant the apology for the room. But it landed on me.

In November, 1885, the white residents of Tacoma, Washington Territory, drove out their Chinese neighbors. It took only hours. Armed with clubs and pistols, vigilantes went door to door, herding more than three hundred men, women, and children through the streets and out of town. As the forced march began, rain started to fall. Two of the expelled died of exposure; the rest made their way to Portland by foot or rail. Days later, arsonists returned to burn what was left of Chinatown. No one came back. For decades, anyone who tried was run out again. That history was the subject of my talk. It was why I had come to Tacoma.

The Tacoma councilman looked at me. I felt the instinct to respond—to match his gesture with one of my own. I know what he tells his children; I tell mine the same: when someone apologizes, you accept. But this apology wasn’t mine to take. I let it hang in the air.

When you visit small-town archives in the West, ask for records of anti-Chinese violence, and look like you might be Chinese, the apologies come quickly. While I was researching my latest book in one such archive, the kind white archivist apologized every twenty minutes or so, each time he handed over another piece of evidence.

“This one is a coroner’s report of a ‘Chinaman’ killed by parties unknown. I’m sorry.”

“In this one, the sheriff tried to arrest one Chinese man and shot another instead. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry. This one involves a suicide. He was in the jail.”

The volunteers who worked with him echoed the refrain. “I’m sorry,” one of them, a woman with white hair and a sympathetic smile, told me. “Would you like a caramel?” She watched me from the corner of her eye for most of her shift, chatting with the others about wildfires, her grandchildren, a friend with cancer, and what to do about the “illegals” who had come to town. Once, there had been Chinese in this gold-rush settlement. Now there were only white residents and new fears of an immigrant threat. I worked to the taste of melting candy.

When I struggled to unfold a file, the volunteer rushed to help without being asked. Her polished nails appear in my photos of the materials, framing images of discrimination and death. She leaned in to read over my shoulder.

“It’s just terrible how they were treated,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Tacoma has a long history of trying to come to grips with what happened there. The effort began in 1991, when the city council solicited public input on how to redevelop a stretch of land along the waterfront. Among the suggestions was a handwritten note from David Murdoch, a Canadian pastor who had moved to the city. He proposed that the city acknowledge the 1885 expulsion. “Our city has never apologized for this gross injustice,” he wrote, “& it would appear our city, as a result, has suffered (in many ways: especially reputation & unity).” His solution: “an area of reconciliation”—a small park, with a Chinese motif—and a citizen committee, with members “most essentially of Chinese ancestry.”

Murdoch’s note arrived in the midst of a global surge in public contrition. What began in the nineteen-eighties with Australia’s calls to reconcile with Aboriginal communities became, in one historian’s words, “a global frenzy to balance the moral ledgers.” In the U.S., truth commissions were launched to confront slavery, the colonization of Hawaii, the Tuskegee experiment, Jim Crow violence, and Japanese American incarceration. The language of reconciliation drew openly from psychology—trauma, healing—and tacitly from theology: confession, redemption.

Tacoma’s gesture was early and, at the time, singular. Though hundreds of towns in the American West had histories of anti-Chinese violence, I could not find any others that had made a formal acknowledgment. In 1993, Tacoma broke the collective silence and passed Resolution No. 32415. It did not apologize. But it did call the expulsion “a most reprehensible occurrence,” affirmed the council’s commitment to the “elimination of racism and hatred,” and allocated twenty-five thousand dollars toward building a park. No other city would officially confront its own role in anti-Chinese violence for another two decades.

Tacoma spent years building its Chinese Reconciliation Park. David Murdoch reached out to the small Chinese community then living in the city—mostly recent immigrants who’d never heard of the 1885 expulsion and initially felt detached from what they called “ancient history.” But, by the time I first visited the park, in 2009, that detachment had turned to purpose. I was joined by Theresa Pan Hosley, a Taiwanese immigrant and businesswoman, who had taken on the work of research, fund-raising, and design. While seeking to heal the local community, she told me that she also hoped the memorial would register in China. “We want those buses of Chinese tourists, the ones who drive through Seattle,” she said. “We want them to come here, to Tacoma.”

When I returned in 2020, I visited the park again—this time alone. A map at the entrance announced, “Your Journey to Reconciliation Begins Here.” The words gave me pause; were they meant for me, a fifth-generation Chinese American who was an outsider to this city and its history? Was I to journey to reconciliation?