ANTIOCH, California — In 1939, after attending the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, Alfred Chan and his friends returned home to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“They got really hungry and decided to stop halfway to Antioch for a meal,” said his son Ron Chan. But the waitress refused to serve the young men or even talk to them. An hour later they left the establishment, hungry and humiliated.
Eighty-two years after that incident, Alfred Chan personally received an apology from Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe in November 2022. Chan, a World War II veteran who served in the U.S. Navy and worked for the city of Oakland for 38 years, died in 2022, age 98, about three months after hearing these words.
“It helped bring closure to a bad moment in my father’s life,” Ron Chan said, adding that it gave him peace to see his father’s closure as well. “An apology can consist of words that may not be enough to solve all past problems. But without that first step, we have no progress.”
In May 2021, Thorpe had issued a formal apology for Antioch’s mistreatment of early Chinese immigrants, including burning Chinatown and expelling its residents, which has been documented by local newspapers and historians. Thorpe’s actions led to major cities such as San Jose, Los Angeles and San Francisco passing similar resolutions.
The 2021 apology has also led local residents and historians to dig deeper into the past and work to create a Chinatown Historic District, complete with murals and museum exhibits highlighting the history and achievements of the Antioch community.
Chinese workers were among the early population of Antioch, which was named in 1851. There were probably just under 100, said Lucy Meinhardt, a board member of the Antioch Historical Society Museum. They worked on farms, canneries and mines. They helped build river dikes and founded a Chinatown where the center of the city is now located.
In the 19th century, Chinese people throughout California faced discrimination, such as wage disparities, bans on property ownership, and sunset laws that prohibited them from going out after dark. Those who worked and lived around Antioch were no different.
In 1871, a massive fire destroyed several blocks of Antioch’s Chinatown. The townspeople decided that a Chinese laundry had to be demolished to stop the fire. In 1876, local newspapers reported that another fire had been deliberately set to drive six Chinese women, who were alleged to be prostitutes, from their homes. A Buddhist/Tao temple also died in the fire, Meinhardt said.
It has become a popular local lore that Antioch was a “sunset city” and that Chinese residents used tunnels to get around the rules. Meinhardt says there is no record of such a law, “but if it existed, it must have been a practice. I still suspect it existed.”
Before he became involved with the Antioch Historical Society and became committee chairman of the Chinese History Project, Hans Ho said he had no idea a Chinatown had ever existed there. Chinese people were undoubtedly treated as second-class citizens, said Ho, who emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1960s.
“Regardless of which story you believe, it is still an atrocity because these people were expelled or persecuted without due process of law and their homes were burned down,” he said.
He was also one of the representatives of the Chinese-American community who accepted Thorpe’s apology, an act that moved him to tears.
“I cried shamelessly,” said Ho, who became visibly choked up by the memory of that moment. “It’s the most obvious means of reconciliation I’ve ever encountered.”
Today, the city of more than 111,000 residents is 25% white, while Asians make up 12%. Hispanic and black residents make up 35% and 20% of the population, respectively. Making progress on Asian American representation in public spaces remains an uphill battle. Plans for a public monument honoring early Chinese settlers are on hold after a consultant recommended the city invest in more research.
Even creating a space for materials related to Chinese residents at the Antioch Historical Society Museum has been met with resistance.
“(One board member) said they wanted this to be an ‘American’ museum,” said Dwayne Eubanks, former president of the historical society, who is African-American. “I took offense to that.”
He held up a photo of his father in his army uniform and told the man, “This is an American.”
On Saturday, Eubanks, Meinhardt and Ho all attended the May We Gather event in Antioch, which organizers described as the first national memorial service and pilgrimage in response to anti-Asian violence. Attendees, including the three locals, walked meditatively with Buddhist monks, nuns and lay leaders around the city block where Antioch’s Chinatown stood 150 years ago.
Ho said such events, while educational, should avoid portraying communities of color as victims and instead highlight stories of Asian American achievement in the face of great adversity. Eubanks somewhat agreed with his friend, pointing out that “healing is a two-way street” and that those who hate must first understand and acknowledge what happened.
“And then they have the opportunity to accept the medicine, because hatred is a disease,” he said. “We don’t want this to happen to our grandchildren. We don’t want history to repeat itself.”
