The Ritual of Civic Apology

Journalists didn’t question Antioch’s recounting of its history. I did. The 1876 expulsion and fire are part of the historical record. The tunnels are not. Nor is there any evidence of a sundown ordinance in Antioch. When I wrote to the museum asking for documentation of either claim, they backtracked: there was nothing about any such law, and serious questions about the tunnels.

The myth of Chinese tunnels has circulated for more than a century. In the nineteenth century, it was a racist fantasy—Chinese men sneaking through city sewers “like rats,” kidnapping sailors, enslaving women. In Antioch’s version, the tunnels stand for Chinese ingenuity and survival. But myth is still myth.

The historian Elliott West once wrote, “History tells stories that surprise and unsettle us. Memory gives us the story we think we need.” Unintentionally, Antioch’s efforts at civic acknowledgment had crossed into the realm of memory.

A few months after Antioch’s apology, and after San Jose and Los Angeles had followed with similar statements of regret, I joined Hernandez-Thorpe on KQED’s “The Forum,” a live call-in show. He spoke first, slipping between Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate—and, without seeming to realize it, between history and myth.

“What inspired me, frankly, was last year’s racial reckoning, post-George Floyd and Black Lives Matter,” he said. “One of the back-burner issues during that time was anti-Asian American hate. Obviously, very troubling, but certainly wasn’t at the forefront as it probably should have been.”

He regretted that Asian Americans had been overlooked in the great moral inventory of 2src2src. He’d been committed to racial justice, yet the wave of anti-Asian violence had caught him off guard.

“One of the things that really bothered me is when I looked on social media, I would post things like ‘Stop AAPI Hate’ and get comments like ‘Well, tell your people to stop beating up my people,’ ” he went on. “When you saw young men of color doing some of these things—it was very disappointing.”

His words sounded like shame—shame on behalf of Black communities, and a kind of reflexive accountability to Asian anger. (I recognized the feeling, having experienced its mirror image.) But Hernandez-Thorpe didn’t want to talk about shame and conflict, not directly. (How many of us do?) Instead, he reached for an analogy in the past, invoked Antioch in the eighteen-seventies, and hoped that his message would still be clear: “What existed then is no different than what we see today with certain other groups.” We have each suffered our own racial injuries—can’t we work together to heal them?

When I spoke later in the program, Hernandez-Thorpe was no longer on the line. I didn’t realize it until a caller named Don joined the conversation.

Don, who was Black, had no interest in history. He wanted to talk about now. He condemned violence “against any group,” but insisted that the men who had attacked Asian Americans were “criminals” or “mentally ill”—people who would attack him, too. In effect, he questioned whether anti-Asian hate existed as such. Anti-Blackness, he said, did.

“Every day,” he told us, just walking the streets of El Cerrito, he was treated with suspicion. Asians crossed the street to avoid him. A Chinese woman “verbally attacked” him when he visited a friend. Chinese children “jeered” at him in Barcelona.

Hernandez-Thorpe might have known what to say. The host, Mina Kim, simply offered her apologies. “I’m sorry for those experiences,” she said. “I wonder if you think the acknowledgements we’re talking about on today’s program—of what happened to Chinese Americans in the past, the concurrent effort to acknowledge the atrocities against Black Americans—do you think that they’re effective in creating a shared understanding of our experiences?”

“Are you asking me?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m curious,” she replied.

But he didn’t have an answer: “I wish I knew.” He returned to his stories of harassment by Chinese people, and to his certainty that it would keep happening. That was answer enough.

The Point Alones Fishing Village—a Chinese settlement in Pacific Grove, California—burned to the ground on May 16, 19src6. I’ve studied hundreds of incidents of anti-Chinese violence. The first I heard of this one was when the city apologized for it in 2src22.

The council’s resolution surprised me. It was unusually long, detailed, and precise. It named villagers by name, recognized their contributions to fishing and marine science, and didn’t shy from assigning blame. It read, in part:

The Council apologizes to the memory of those whose dignity was assailed, whose voices were silenced, whose homes were burned, whose belongings were looted, whose community was destroyed and scattered, whose stories and history were lost or hidden due to racism, fear, protectiveness or shame.

I wanted to know who had written it. Eventually, I found Kim Bui, a former director of the Monterey Public Library and a current member of Pacific Grove’s D.E.I. Task Force. When we spoke, I learned that the resolution built on the work of another woman: Gerry Low-Sabado.

In the nineteen-nineties, Low-Sabado discovered that she was descended from the residents of the fishing village. She was taken aback. “How could I be born in 1949 in Monterey and not know anything about Chinese history there?” she asked in an interview. “I had no idea there was a Chinese village there and it burned down.”