Kids tour a bit of local Asian American history

Monica, 9, attends third grade at Wing Luke Elementary School, and she and her classmates explored the old brick building in the International District last week as part of a collaboration with the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Both the school and museum are named for Seattle's first Asian American City Council member, killed in a 1965 plane crash.


		Phil H. Webber / P-I
	Yick Fung Co. owner James Malcolm Mar, left, tells students from Wing Luke Elementary School some of the history of his store, one of the oldest in Chinatown.

The museum plans to move to one of the two Kong Yick buildings in 2007 from its present site, around the corner at 407 Seventh Ave. S.

Along with their teacher, Sandra Kim, Monica and the other third-graders wandered through Wah Young Co., a rice and foodstuffs importer and distributor that operated until last summer in part of the first and second floors of the cavernous building.

Crossing worn tile floors beneath high ceilings marred by flaking paint, they peered in the company safe and walk-in cooler.

Upstairs, they examined an abacus, magnifying glass, passport and Chinese-character rubber stamp left on a partner's desk.

An ancient typewriter, an adding machine, Chinese soup bowls and spoons, faded shipping labels and a 1986 Hong Kong calendar added to the clutter in the cavernous room.

The kids took photographs with digital cameras and scribbled notes on tiny pads.

"I've never been inside an old building before," Monica said afterward on the sidewalk on South King Street. "It had all this interesting stuff, and mostly, it's really old."

Alejandro Nuezca, 9, was impressed by the upstairs windows, their glass wavy and cracked with age.

Offered 8-year-old Muna Ahmed: "The coolest thing I saw was a dead squirrel."

Kim was skeptical, but Muna insisted.

In any event, the teacher said, "I think it's great that they get to see the way it was left and will eventually see it when it gets renovated. It stirs up all kinds of questions."

The east Kong Yick Building the students inspected is one of a matching pair built in 1910 by 170 Chinese Americans who pooled their resources to finance the construction.

The buildings have housed several import-export businesses -- including the Yick Fung Co., founded in 1910 and still open in the west Kong Yick Building. There also have been a hotel, apartments, restaurants, gambling parlors and meeting rooms for immigrant social organizations.

The buildings served as a focal point for the International District and the waves of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino immigrants who washed through it.

The third-graders will return to the Kong Yick Building later this school year for more investigation.

Their outing last week began at the Wing Luke Museum, their second visit there under the collaboration, in which they are studying the history of the International District.

As part of their research, the students have gone on a walking tour of the neighborhood, traveled to nearby libraries and interviewed elderly Japanese American immigrants from a retirement home.

The students have also composed poems about their discoveries. They've created timelines of the neighborhood's past, and they will produce reports on what they've learned.

A $9,235 grant to the museum from cable TV's History Channel supports the school-museum collaboration. The grant paid for the students' digital cameras and for a professional photographer and a poet to advise them. It also will cover the cost of binding and publishing their collected year-end work for distribution to libraries, schools and community groups.

"The ultimate goal is to make history more alive for the kids," Kim said, "and for them to realize everything that they're living through becomes a part of history."

The History Channel also has awarded $10,000 to The Steamer Virginia V Foundation in Seattle to develop an educational program tied to the restoration of the 1922-vintage vessel.

When restoration is completed later this year, students from elementary school to high school can voyage along the city's waterfront aboard the Virginia V, one of two wooden-hull passenger steamers still in operation in the United States.

The project involves development of lesson plans that will be posted on the Internet, in a partnership with the Teaching with Historic Places Program of the National Park Service.

Other sponsors of the Virginia V project include the King County Cultural Development Authority and the county's cultural services agency, 4Culture.

The History Channel is distributing $250,000 nationwide through its Save Our History grants.

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Local headlines to