SWEET CAKES, LONG JOURNEY

SWEET CAKES, LONG JOURNEY The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon Marie Rose Wong University of Washington Press. Seattle, 2004. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, xx + 337 pp. $24.95 cloth.

After the death of her father, the discovery of a document written in Chinese in his old steamer trunk led Marie Rose Wong to study Chinese immigration in order to better know her father, and, eventually, to research the history of Portland's Chinatown.

An impressive gateway now marks that Chinatown, but few visitors realize the area is not the city's original Chinese quarters, once the country's largest in area, or that in 1890 the Chinese accounted for 25 percent of Portland's foreignborn population. Moreover, for at least thirty years, Portland had two Chinatowns, one an urban community of brick structures and the other one a vegetable-gardening community of wooden huts and shanties.

Wong examines the social history of the immigrants who created Chinatown's evolving settlement patterns; changes in its size and geographic location between 1850 and 1945; the central events and prominent people who contributed to its development, decline, and relocation; and how its history differed from the Chinatowns of Sari Francisco and other Pacific Northwest cities. Besides the usual secondary sources, Wong makes use of a wide variety of primary sources, including period newspapers, U.S. censuses, Sanborn Fire Insurance Company maps, and Chinese Exclusion Act case files. Numerous period photographs and well-executed maps and tables illustrate the text.

Wong divides her examination into five chapters. Chapter 1 places Chinese immigration in its historical context. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the effects of federal exclusion policy on Chinese living in Oregon and Portland. Chapters 4 and 5 consider life and society in Portland's Chinatown and the qualities that made it unique. Unlike in San Francisco, Portland's urban Chinatown did not develop within well-developed boundaries and did not display the typical "ghetto" spatial pattern (at least not until the 19305 when the Chinatown was relocated). Instead, Portland's Chinatown developed as an urban "non-clave." Lacking identifiable boundaries, it grew in a diffuse pattern, was defined by social characteristics, and displayed integration with the rest of Portland society.

A few minor, albeit fundamental, errors mar an otherwise excellent work. The Chinese rarely prospected (p. 19) but rather worked as independent miners (usually in placer mining) or as mining laborers. The terms secret societies and tongs are often used synonymously, but highbinders (a.k.a. hatchet men) (p. 26) refers to certain members of the tongs. Quartz mining, or hard-rock mining (p. 151), may be for gold, while placer mining is usually for gold. The absence of citations for many paragraphs makes checking a statistic or finding additional information almost impossible.

Sweet Cakes, Long Journey demonstrates that not all Chinatowns were merely smaller replicas of San Francisco's and that Chinese urban experience was quite heterogeneous. It is a notable and important addition to the growing body of literature about the Chinese in the Far West.

Randall Rohe

University of Wisconsin- Waukesha

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