Docent honors his ancestors at Portland Chinatown Museum

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Darby Li Po Price’s great-grandfather had a store in Portland in the late 19th Century. When his wife died, he needed help with his young children. So he returned to China to find a new wife.

But the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stood in the way of his return to Portland and his children.

“He came back from China a month later after finding a wife, and they told him, ‘You can’t come back in because you don’t have proper documents saying that you ever entered the US legally,” Price told KOIN 6 News. “He said, when we arrived here in 1872, we just walked off the boat and nobody asked us for any documents at all. Not even an ID.”

Despite living and working in the US for many years, Price’s great-grandfather Joe Chin and his new wife were forced to go back to China.

“For a lot of us it’s easy to be like, ‘That’s a painful part of my family’s past. I don’t want to touch that.’ You look at it a different way,” Price said. “I grew up not knowing much about the Chinese family history and I encountered elders who didn’t want to talk about it. They said, ‘Well, that was really unpleasant. That was then, this is now, let’s just talk about now and the future.’ But then there were other elders that would talk about it and I would ask them a lot.”

That curiosity grew into his career — a professor of Asian American studies at Merritt College.

It’s not just his family’s stories. He discovered many others are also well documented.

“I was really fortunate to get enough information from elders to get names and dates that I could bring up to the Seattle archives, and they have an incredible collection of immigrant records on Chinese. Because of the Exclusion Act and the intensive interrogations and documentation required record keeping, the Chinese in America are the most documented ethnic group for immigration purposes,” he said.

Price poured through documents that chronicle troubling times for many Chinese American families. Yet he saw they also opened up personal accounts that provide insight into who they were.

“I found hundreds of pages on them. I found all these incredible photographs and now read the interviews and just get full histories,” he said. “I was approaching it like a detective, like an investigator, like wow, like a researcher.”

Through that research, Price also discovered his great-grandfather’s determination to return to the US.

“He found white witnesses that had done official business with him, like the tax collector, the person who had collected the bill for the cemetery for his wife. And they came forth and they said, yes, we’ve known this man for 15, 20 years. He is who he says he is. So two years later he was allowed to come back in.”

But his children, who had been without parents for two years, had already been placed with others to take care of them. It tested his resiliency.

“Resiliency is something that we can learn from the difficulties of the surviving family that we had,” he said. “And it was a great opportunity for America because of the contributions that they have made and continue to make.”

Darby Li Po Price is one of many docents who lead tours at the Portland Chinatown Museum , which is open Tuesdays through Sundays.

“The more I learn about the past, the more I appreciate the sacrifices and the challenges that my ancestors overcame to come across to a whole new country and become successful here. So my working at the museum here is to me, honoring the ancestors.”

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com.