'Garden of Surging Waves' written in Chinese characters.

On the corner of 11th and Duane streets in Astoria, tucked tight to the breast of the downtown core, a splendid but enigmatic city park is speaking volumes of history while barely uttering a word. At once beautiful and strange, it beckons and beguiles its guests, compelling them to sit, stroll, and explore in this seemingly out-of-context space where past and present converge.

Completed in 2014, a legacy gift from the city of Astoria and the first phase of a larger redevelopment plan for Heritage Square, the Garden of Surging Waves seeks to honor and memorialize the Chinese community’s contributions to the Columbia-Pacific — a part of the region’s history that, prior to this project, was largely unknown.

At its opening ceremony, on a cold spring day eight years in the making, then-Mayor Willis Van Dusen, the Garden’s champion, stood before a sizable crowd of well-wishers and told the simple truth: “What we are doing here today is dedicating a beautiful park that tells a story,” he said. “It is the story of the American pioneers that came from China to make Astoria, and the Northwest, a better place to live.”

In tones that oscillated between adamant instruction and humble apology, he said that a proper account of the Chinese experience had been intentionally withheld from official records and, admitting the city’s mistake, vowed to correct it.

“We’re telling it all in the Garden of Surging Waves,” Van Dusen said, acknowledging an uncomfortable past, “the good, and the not-so-good.”

He stressed the need to recognize the Chinese for the frontiersmen they were: “every bit the same” as the pioneers that came by covered wagon.

“This is a great day for Astoria,” he concluded, “and for the United States.”

A glance back

From his part-time home near the shores of Willapa Bay, Shawn Wong pushed back his plate, took a sip of coffee, and folded his hands on the table in front of him. Hospitable and kind, he wore an easy smile and had been quick to laugh over an exchange of lighthearted breakfast banter.

But when the conversation turned to the lives of his 19th-century kinsmen, his voice took on a softness. He began to speak more slowly, his every word measured and deliberate.

“Most of them were poor farmers,” he said, “just boys — young and illiterate.” As a novelist, editor, and 30-year professor at the University of Washington, Wong has dedicated most of his life’s work to understanding the Asian-American experience — his own, as the American child of Chinese immigrants, and that of his forebears. With academic credentials that could stretch across the Pacific, his knowledge of the history is vast, and he tells it with a matter-of-fact sadness.

“The majority all came from the same region along the Pearl River Delta,” he said, “which was suffering from the same things that have always made people leave one place to seek another: famine and disease and political rebellion. That they left only to make money and return home is a common misconception — a myth. To leave China at that time was a great risk, an open betrayal against the Emperor, punishable by death.”

“They didn’t want to go home,” Wong said. “They came here to make a better life for themselves, just like every other immigrant. They came here to become Americans.”

In the garden

Standing before the entrance to the Garden on a cloudless day, blue sky stretched above her like a canvas, Suenn Ho’s small frame almost disappeared into the mass of rusted steel that made up the towering screen behind her. Overhead, snippets of conversation, plucked from the narrative of daily life, blazed anonymously against the cerulean backdrop.

“It’s our stories that bring us together,” Ho said, moving her hand across a section of rugged metal. “It’s in our stories that we discover the richness of culture, the richness of place.”

The words she gently traced, splayed sky-high across the eastern archway, are memories from the elders of Astoria’s Chinese community — the children and grandchildren of immigrants who crossed an ocean to make their home at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Brief vignettes of day-to-day life, they speak of the common — work, study, mealtimes, play — and for Ho, the creative mind behind the Garden’s design, they were a perfect launching point.

“The Garden of Surging Waves is an immigrant’s story,” she said, “like immigrant stories everywhere. These quotes are universal — the tale of the underdog, head down, trying to get by.”

But as an urban designer, especially for public spaces, Ho feels she has a responsibility to contribute to the community in a way that is more than just a story. “The story is important, the story is the backbone,” she said, “but you have to move beyond it. You have to convey an attitude.”

Of course, in order to move forward, it’s imperative to look back first.

Facing facts

Between 1849 and 1853, more than 300,000 people from across the globe made their way to California’s gold fields. Propelled by rumors of riches so plentiful you merely had to stoop to pick them up, they came with visions of wealth and dreams for a better, more prosperous future.

Of these immigrants, 24,000 were Chinese.

Welcomed at first, the tides soon turned. Greed and envy on the part of white forty-niners quickly turned to resentment, then violence, until finally prejudice against them was simply written into law: Chinese were prevented from mining, owning property, voting, and, eventually, testifying against their wrongdoers.

Driven from the mines, they followed the paths of a new and booming western economy, laying the track of the great railroads that would unite the continent. As the rails moved north, so did the Chinese.

By the early 1870s, with the salmon-canning industry in its infancy, the rugged, sparsely inhabited Columbia-Pacific region was struggling under the demand for seasonal workers. Eying opportunity, contract laborers shifted their crews handily from railways to canneries. Eager for work, uncomplaining, adept at their tasks, and willing to accept a pay rate half of what the white working class demanded, Chinese crews soon dominated the employment pool.

Industry on both sides of the river began to grow in direct proportion to the influx of Chinese workers. By 1881, more than 3,000 Chinese immigrants called the mouth of the Columbia home, churning out nonstop prosperity for the 25 canneries that boomed along the river’s banks.

But life for them was far from sweet.

“There’s no doubt the Chinese here had it very hard,” said Liisa Penner, archivist for the Clatsop County Historical Society. “Things were bad throughout the Northwest, but Astoria had a newspaper editor who made a special point of stoking sentiments against them.”

Clinton DeWitt Ireland, publisher of the Tri-Weekly Astorian, exercised his powerful voice with precision and frequency, almost always at the expense of the Chinese. Excerpts from his newspaper editorials from the 1870s, saturated with bigotry and vitriol, are painful to read:

“The great majority of Mongols who come here are simply articles of merchandise — not human beings within the definition of our organic law; a specie of personal property incapable of elevation to the dignity of free manhood.”

Inspired by Ireland’s strong campaign of hatred, which echoed the growing sentiment of the new West overall, local anti-Chinese societies sprang into existence, lobbying to curb immigration. Laws were passed preventing the Chinese from owning property or fishing. Special taxes were imposed, and if they couldn’t be paid, debts had to be worked off on public labor projects. Chinese citizens were even denied police protection.

Discrimination intensified with time, culminating in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a federal law placing a complete moratorium on the immigration of Chinese laborers. It was the first law ever implemented that denied entrance to the U.S. based strictly on ethnicity.

With every edict designed to drive them out, and new technology in the canneries outpacing the need for human labor, in the decades following the turn of the 20th century, the Chinese population in Astoria, and throughout the West, began to decline.

Crossing the threshold

To properly enter the Garden of Surging Waves, you must pass through the Moon Gate. An ancient element of Chinese design, it serves as both the physical and spiritual portal to the park — a connection between two worlds, and a fitting marker for the experience of Chinese immigrants passing from one culture into the next. Inset into its rusted steel frame, hand-hammered bronze panels depict idyllic scenes of village life as the eye meanders over streams, across mountains, and into the heavens. At the base, a pair of sentinel lions stand watch.

Considered the mightiest of guardians in Chinese lore, lions possess mythical powers to protect the people and structures they defend and are highly meaningful icons — especially here, in a space where every step is suffused with symbol.

Laid out on a nine-square grid — the template of good fortune in Chinese design — the park is a mix of open space and quiet nooks, with stunning art at every turn.

From the backside of the Story Screen, words from the experiences of a new world float above three bronze scrolls, permanently unfurled to reveal their ancient wisdom. Across the way, supporting a traditional Chinese pavilion, eight hand-carved granite columns swirl with majestic dragons encircled by wave and cloud motifs. In Chinese mythology, dragons control water and rainfall, ruling over ocean and sky. Symbols of power and strength, they harbor good luck for those who are worthy.

Outside the pavilion, past a trio of coveted Scholar’s Rocks, another dragon — for a total of nine — marks the Platform of Heritage. Cast in bronze, with a monkey sitting astride, it is an enlarged replica of an incense burner dating back to 200 B.C. — a reminder to the Chinese of their long and vigorous lineage.

But mixed in with all the auspicious Old World fundamentals, new symbols, representing a new experience, also begin to emerge. Underfoot, elongated concrete pavers mimic the wood-planked floors of Astoria’s canneries, where Chinese immigrants worked 15-hour days processing the fish that launched the region into fame. Across them, two pairs of railroad tracks slice through the park, a fixed memorial to previously unrecognized public labor contributions, including work on every train line in and out of Astoria, as well as the building of roads, the city sewer system, and the jetties that still tame the mouth of the river today.

Within the pavilion, three colorful mosaic sturgeon swim beneath a delicate salmon lantern, all encircled by a rim of stainless steel — another tribute to cannery days. Overhead, traditional tiered brackets are hewn from local Northwest timbers. Enormous slabs of Columbia River basalt, polished to a high shine, serve as artful benches. Behind them, forming the western edge of the Garden, smaller blocks represent the early sea wall that can still be seen along Astoria’s Riverwalk — another accomplishment of the city’s earliest Chinese citizens.

Choosing a lens

With so much symbol and history intertwined at every turn, it’s natural to look for explanation, and most parks would have a host of interpretive panels staged along the way. But here, aside from one glass plate that serves as a kind of useful key, lengthy words of instruction or elucidation are markedly absent.

“I don’t think we have to know the meaning behind every single thing in order to make it meaningful to us,” said Ho, the mother of the Garden. “The park needs to be allowed to be the park it needs to be, and that’s going to be different for everyone.”

Pointing to a line of benches that form the northern boundary of the square, she said, “If you need a quiet spot to rest or think, with a view of something beautiful, this is a place for that. But if you’re looking for a history lesson, you can find that, too.”

Running the length of the park on the Duane Street side, the benches offer a visual display of time, starting with the arrival of Chinese laborers in the 1860s and spanning all the way through to the present. Permanently fixed in concrete, 24 bronze markers move through the decades, briefly summarizing important events and milestones — the tragic and the triumphant.

Alongside dates that measure the rise and fall of the local Chinese population, specific events prompt different reactions: “1 Chinese tailor, 32 Chinese grocers, 7 Chinese farms,” reads one, noting growth and prosperity for Astoria’s once-booming Chinatown. Not far away, another speaks to the mounting political pressures of its day, capturing cries to “Expel the Orientals,” and quoting a shameful sign once posted on Astoria’s waterfront: “Chinese caught fishing will be shot.”

But if the park is literally bounded by the accomplishments and atrocities of the past, its center, in fact its very beating heart, according to Ho, is all about transformation.

“The Garden presents each of us with a choice,” she said, likening how she executed her vision for the project to the way a photographer might select a lens for the camera. “If you choose to, you can zoom in, looking at every microdot of pain, every slight, every discrimination. Or you can choose the fish-eye approach, stepping back, where the harshness of the edges are made more round, where your perspective is allowed to shift.”

As for Ho, she prefers the latter, and nowhere is that philosophy clearer than in the Garden’s focal point: the Pavilion of Transition. Open to the four directions, two sides — west and south — are blocked by the massive basalt benches, making it so that once you enter the structure, the only way through is to physically turn yourself in space.

According to Ho, it’s a fitting metaphor — for the plight of the Chinese, and for life itself.

“Sometimes the only way forward is to turn away from the suffering, away from the past,” she said. “Sometimes, the only way to move ahead is by simply deciding to, and making a conscious change.”

The bright side

For David Lum, the Garden of Surging Waves seems more like a “thank you” than an apology, and that suits him just fine. The feeling is mutual.

“I didn’t get where I am today without help,” he said from his Warrenton office on the upper floor of Lum’s Auto Center, the successful business he’s spent a lifetime building. “Help from the family that came before me, and help from the community. I’ve lived my whole life in Astoria,” he added, a sense of pride in his voice. “We’ve invested a lot in each other.”

Born in 1933, the youngest of six children, Lum is a collection of stories, many of them chronicled in his recent memoir, “What a Great Ride!” which tells his family history — from his father’s immigration to Astoria after San Francisco’s great Earthquake in 1906, to his own immediate family’s recent journey back to China, the land of his ancestors. “It was very humbling to make that trip,” he said. “It’s a great gift to know where you come from.”

Wanting to bestow that same kind of feeling for his grandchildren, and those that might come after, was part of his reason for supporting the Garden.

“I wasn’t for it at first,” Lum admitted, acknowledging that in the Garden’s infancy, its design phase, there were public opinions against it. “I didn’t want there to be any bad feelings,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to feel offended.”

“I have just gratitude and respect for this place, my home,” he continued. “I could tell you some things that are ugly, I suppose, but that’s everyone’s story. Even in the old days, things were much better here than they were in other places. We didn’t have the same violence they had in Tacoma or Seattle. We were lucky, and Astoria was different, special. I didn’t want it to seem like we were complaining …

“But now I see that it is a celebration, a memorial to the contributions of the Chinese, and it makes me proud,” he said. “As a man of Chinese heritage, but also as an Astorian.”

Lum wants his children and grandchildren to see what they have risen from. “And I want all of us to learn from the past.”

Here and now

If there ever was a time when there was dissidence surrounding the Garden of Surging Waves, that time is over, according to Angela Cosby, director of Astoria’s parks and recreation department. And as time goes by, the park is “hitting its stride” more and more, she said.

Now entering its fifth year as a public space, its use increases annually, and it’s also diversifying.

In addition to its expected daily use in the downtown — a site for coffee breaks, play dates, and picnic lunches — the park has become a venue for weddings and other intimate ceremonies, she said, as well as a place for Zumba groups, tai chi, and regular chess games. It even inspired the graduation project of one local high school senior, which culminated in an art installation of Chinese lanterns strewn throughout the park.

More recently, though, it’s been the backdrop of multiple public gatherings more serious in tone.

After the 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, which claimed the lives of 50 people, local groups made plans for a vigil, their point of rendezvous the Garden of Surging Waves. On Jan. 21, 2017, when more than 1,300 people gathered in Astoria for the Women’s March, uniting their voices with those across a nation, some met in the Garden, connecting first in smaller sets. And last September, when the federal government announced its plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, the legislation that protected the children of illegal immigrants, the screens of social media lit up once more with a cry for activism: See you in the Garden, 3 p.m. Meet in the Pavilion of Transition.

Reflecting on the unique niche the park seems to fill, Cosby said it isn’t like any of the city’s other public spaces. “The Garden creates a feeling that really resonates with people, a way that makes them connect. And this will sound strange,” she said, “but I think that somehow, it also makes them behave better.”

With lots of public spaces out in the open night and day, city officials see plenty of vandalism, she explained, but never in the Garden. “I take that back, we did have an incidence of graffiti once,” she said. When they went to clean it up, though, they discovered it had been painted only with soap, and likely to have washed away with the first rain. “So even the vandalism is respectful,” Cosby said, laughing.

“I think it creates a soothing energy,” she said, noting that, above all else, it adds a singular beauty to the city and “always keeps people talking.”

For Shawn Wong, it’s the latter point that holds the most interest.

“It takes more time for us to talk about the park than it does to walk around it,” he said, “and that is the great success of the Garden of Surging Waves.” Especially now, he added, as we continue to have a national discussion about race and immigration and the power of symbols.

“That our reaction to it and our articulation of it goes on and on — that’s how a park like this creates its permanence — that it’s able to enter our dialogue, always a part of our continual conversation.”

The ageless echo of the underdog, finding its way.

• In the 1890s, when its population peaked, Astoria had the largest Chinatown north of San Francisco.
• Formally opened in 2014, the Garden of Surging Waves cost approximately $1.4 million and was funded by the city of Astoria and multiple grants, as well as private donations. Most of the major artwork was commissioned from a Sculptural Arts Company in Xian, China; the rest was created by Northwest artists and local craftsmen.
• In Chinese folklore, evil spirits move only in straight lines, so all pathways through the Garden of Surging Waves are nonlinear or have objects fixed in place to disrupt direct motion — an ancient form of protection.
• In the Garden of Surging Waves, native plants and grasses of the Northwest mingle with bamboo, Chinese maple and flowering plum — all eastern varieties believed to bring good luck.
• Number plays an important role in Chinese design. In the Garden, look for repeated use of 3’s, 7’s, and 9’s — all meant to bring good fortune and prosperity.

Chin, Art and Doug, Chinese in Washington State

(Seattle: OCA Greater Seattle, 2013)

Deur, Douglas, Empires of the Turning Tide

(National Park Service, 2016)

Ficken, Robert E., Washington Territory

(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2002)

Kirtley, Karen, ed., Eminent Astorians

(Salem: East Oregonian Publishing Company, 2010)

Penner, Liisa, Chinese in Astoria, Oregon, 1870-1880

(Astoria, 1990)

Wong, Shawn, In This Place, History is Retrieved

(Tacoma: Tacoma Art Museum exhibition catalog, Zhi Lin exhibit, 2016)

Suenn Ho is a Portland-based urban designer and co-principal at Resolve Architecture and Planning. The daughter of two Chinese students enrolled at Harvard, she was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but mostly raised in Hong Kong. Having returned to the U.S. as a student herself, she knows firsthand what it feels like to be an immigrant — even on her native soil.

A Fulbright Fellow, with a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University, her award-winning work encompasses a broad spectrum, with projects in both the municipal and private sectors. Whether she’s designing a public library, a grocery store, or an outdoor amphitheater, her philosophy, and that of her firm, remains the same: “To improve the built environment and the human condition.”

Weeks turned into months, and still no one could account for the shipping delay: Eight granite columns from China and bound for Astoria were stuck at the port of Los Angeles.

At last, the cause was revealed: One of the hand-carved mythical dragons — a figure so central to the Garden’s design — had been badly damaged on its arduous voyage across the Pacific.

A replacement was ordered and on the way, but when the city of Astoria hosted an early unveiling of the artwork, all eyes stayed fixed on that broken column.

“People were genuinely worried about it,” said Suenn Ho, the urban designer behind the Garden of Surging Waves. “They would pass by the healthy columns on display and go straight to the crippled one — caressing it, petting it — like it was an injured puppy.”

Immediately, a symbol was born. “It became so obvious that we needed to keep it,” she said.

A special brace was created to secure the broken pieces, allowing the misfit column to keep its destined place in the Pavilion of Transition. “After a long journey, with plenty of bruises and scrapes, it’s broken but still standing,” she said, “welcomed by its new family to be made whole once more.”

In Chinese, the name for the Garden of Surging Waves is pronounced “Cāng Láng Yuán.” In written form, two of the characters can also be used to express struggle or hardship. When you hear it spoken aloud, it sounds like a story: Beginning on a high, hopeful note, it lofts along, bright and musical. But then the tone dips down, becoming low and elongated — like one thing has slipped unexpectedly into something else.