A racial reckoning over a festival's disrespect toward Asians in Monterey Bay: Will its demise bring healing?
PACIFIC GROVE, Calif. — Walking the oceanfront footpath toward the fabled fish-packing warehouses of Cannery Row, Randy Sabado stops at a historical mural. As always, he grimaces.
It depicts white men and women strolling in Victorian dress, Japanese abalone divers on the hunt at sea and Chinese villagers fishing in front of cabins built on wooden stilts.
Something is off. The white characters are painted with care, rendered fully human with eyes and mouths. The Asians are indistinct, their faces mere smudges.
"You can't even tell they're Chinese," Sabado says. "You can't even tell they're people."
The inequality reflected in these portrayals is all the more disturbing to Sabado, who is Filipino-Chinese by heritage, because Chinese immigrants were evicted from the Pacific Grove settlement shown in the mural after a mysterious fire destroyed dozens of houses and businesses in 1906.
White residents taunted the Chinese as they rushed to collect their belongings, and some looted the salvaged possessions.
That trauma was dehumanizing, Sabado says. But what bothers him just as much is that for decades, this predominantly white city of about 15,000 people capped off its annual Feast of Lanterns with a fictional stage production that appropriated Chinese culture.
Residents dressed up in Chinese-style robes of silk brocade and slanted their eyes with makeup and tape.
