Last weekend was the public viewing of Exposed: Little Saigon, in one of the Pacific Rim Center‘s many strange and underused spaces. The building abuts the ID’s physical and cultural divides, right there peering over I-5 and the Viet Wah parking lot. It’s the liveliest ghost mall you’ll ever see; you could say it straddles a dimensional divide, too.

Exposed is the first annual neighborhood photo show, established in part to assert that something does change as you pass under the highway. This is not Chinatown. (Neither is the west side of 5, but that’s another post.) The show helped showcase the neighborhood’s bayanihan (to borrow from a book my friend Joyce gave me at the reception) and build on recent successes, the better to manage future changes responsibly.

One of those recent successes, the Battle of Dearborn Street, will be remembered as a watershed every bit as significant as the Kingdome protests or the occupation of the Milwaukee in 1977, in that it established a new template for how neighborhood interests and developers work together. To describe the resulting Community Benefits Agreement as concessions perpetuates the very inequality the arrangement itself corrected. It was a remarkable negotiation between equal partners that secured jobs, housing and traffic mitigation as part of a major development, as well as financial benefits for small businesses and nonprofits. All of that is worth remembering when they start building the Jackson Street streetcar. As big changes like that roll through, I expect the second, third and twentieth annual neighborhood photo shows will, collectively, turn out to be an invaluable wiki that other areas will admire for their foresight.

And the photos? Well, I report, you decide. I think there were some real winners that got to the heart of the matter. Without much residential housing or family tongs, Little Saigon is where you go to shop, worship or eat — then leave. It’s low to the ground, if that makes any sense, with the Pac Med building up on the hill like an open-armed deity. The best of the photos were those that caught its rhythms in detail, gracefully. The worst were city texture clichés, and mad props go to Panda Lab for making even those look pretty good.

Program note: a smaller version of this show will be on display January 29-30, 2011 at Tet in Seattle.

In another century, I used to work on the very north end of Rainier Avenue, which was probably when my love for the ID began. I’d go for lunch sometimes at the old Waji’s, or venture into an herbalist for ginseng or some mysterio-lixir to repurpose into homemade soda. I even met the Murakami sisters when they ran the wonderfully random Higo variety store. Sometimes — like, when I was high — the neighborhood felt like a Moroccan bazaar: smelly, ancient, and very anti-retail.

So I should have guessed that this week’s workshop in branding and business promotion, put on by SCIDpda and delivered in part by yours truly, would go over like a lead balloon. But so what? Like Ciardi says, “the least song, clod, consumes the singer.” And yes, for a while the preparation really did consume me. Even if our audience of two were to act on just one of the ideas we suggested, that’s one advertising effort that their competitors don’t pursue. Graphically, it’s an untamed prairie, which is always fun, and can give the greenhorn designer and client a chance to find their voice.

Here’s the heartbreak, though. As far back as I can remember, the business owners there never failed to give great service, even through the cultural and linguistic barriers. And at the places where I’m a regular, I’ll keep going back even if that standard should go flaccid now and then. The problem is how to get new customers — how to increase foot traffic, and the foot traffic problem is twofold: first, back in that other century I was telling you about, the stadium consortia, in an effort to get taxpayers to help finance their little playgrounds, argued that all those hungry lo-fans coming to events would make a night of it at local eateries before the game. Which would make sense if there were no food available in the stadiums themselves. In practice, if anyone gets a game-day business spike it’s the Moriguchis and the folks who rent space in their food court. Everyone else loses their street parking, and gets a plate of steamed bupkis in return.

Second, the neighborhood is skeeving out. King Street can be a real gauntlet even in broad daylight. On the periphery of Hing Hay Park, you could equip yourself for a lost weekend in no time. And how many locations for their dumpster did Hop Thanh reject before choosing this one— literally on the corner of 12th & Jackson? I don’t mean to make light of deep social ills; in fact, the services are available, prominently, for those who need. I’m just saying it’s hard out there for a pimp. Of flowers.

Maybe the light rail or streetcar will help, I don’t know. BTW, who remembers a restaurant in the Ding How Shopping Center called “House of Good Taste”? That always made me chuckle.

Anyway, this is the context for any advertising efforts that seek to broaden an ID business’ customer base. Well, this is part of the context. Another part is what my friend Dan once said: that there’s more soul in one square block of the ID than all of, say, Fremont and Wallingford combined. The photographer Andrew Hida, once a co-exhibitor and always il miglior fabbro, has a show up now in a space under Fort St. George that fondles the contours of that soul in documentary fashion. And if you’ve ever had the contours of your soul fondled, I think you know…seriously, geography notwithstanding, it’s really good. His stuff feels uncomposed and accidental, and yet. He mounts photos that I probably wouldn’t chimp on twice before throwing them away, including a series on mi vato Bill Lee, one of the many tireless forces fighting the good fight for the neighborhood.

Tom Waits: Step Right Up
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

Last year, Mr. Nguyen was instrumental in organizing the local resistance to a planned development of the Goodwill site on Dearborn, which, the argument went, would have undersold every one of these places out of existence. We’ll never know how that would have panned out, but one thing is true: the man is persuasive. In one of the jewelry stores, he wanted the owner’s son to call another store to see if we could stop by; after the fourth appeal, the poor kid finally caved. As we walked the neighborhood, he also seized the opportunity to take a head count for an upcoming meet-and-greet. That’s the thing about the herding group: there’s very little in their work that you can point to or quantify, but people respond to their exhortations, and as a result things get done, sure as eggs is eggs.

The Trap Door in all this is, it has to work behind the scenes. For every Quang Nguyen, Minh-Duc Nguyen, or SCIDPDA’s incomparable Joyce Pisnanont, there’s a newspaper editor or county blowhard up front, ostensibly flying the plane, who misses the runway every time. That’s what stinks—or maybe it’s a cultural thing, a taste I haven’t yet acquired.

My patron for all this is the non-profit Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDPDA) and their Idea Center, opening early next year in the Bush Hotel, just off Hing Hay Park. The idea behind the Idea Center is to establish a place where residents, businesses and other stakeholders can find the means to make real their neighborhood improvement projects. In addition to sponsoring a real-time photo shoot, they’re also interested in some of my shots from the west-of-5 part of the ID, which I’ve been shooting ever since I went rogue digital in 2002.

Landscapes and landmarks are all well and good. Nor is there a shortage of food porn from the area, some of it quite good, so even if I were interested I don’t think that’s particularly necessary. Food is certainly a big part of the soul of the place, but I want faces. Young, old, posed, candid, working, shopping, studying or hanging out. And with my camera, you really have to get right up their noses for a good shot. So, good luck, me, and pre-apologies to the shoppers at Hop Thanh and Lam’s Seafoods tomorrow.

Phuong Dung: Trang The (I Love You in the Moonlight)