Expanded Wing Luke Asian Museum's treasures are its stories

This certainly can't be the most efficient way to get something done: Spend more than 10 years planning it, do a dozen separate studies, and collect input — at each step — from virtually every interested party.

While you're at it, set about transforming a century-old building showing its age, with vacant upper floors dusted in pigeon droppings.

And don't forget to raise $23.2 million, tapping not just a few deep pockets but more than 1,500 individual donors, in the hope that each will feel a sense of ownership in the final result.

At the Wing Luke Asian Museum, opening in its new location in the Chinatown International District on Saturday, staffers take pride in the fact that they didn't choose the simplest way of doing anything.

"We are not curator-driven," executive director Beth Takekawa said. "We're community-driven."

Being "community-driven" means that since its inception, this new museum was crafted not to be a collection of stuff, or a sterile repository of information, but an organic, functioning part of a multicultural community.

It means the stories told here are shaped, at least in part, by the people who actually lived them.

It also means that when the massive teak-and-glass doors swing open, the museum will still be a work in progress, with displays to be added over the coming months.

"Our exhibits are really ambitious and a little more complex than we expected, so some of the parts of it are going to come in later," said Michelle Kumata, exhibits manager.

Even so, the installations already in place in this building represent a massive undertaking.

Video, audio and interactive touches enhance the look and feel of the 42-year-old museum's new home, the four-story East Kong Yick Building, built by Chinese immigrants in 1910.

The distinction of being the country's "only pan-Asian Pacific American museum," as Takekawa describes it, comes with built-in challenges, starting with defining that bulky term.

"Asian Pacific American" is not a race, ethnic group or nationality. It's a census category that historically combined people from more than 40 countries making up a vast portion of the globe, stretching from Tahiti to Pakistan, Japan to Indonesia, Hawaii to India.

Those groups account for nearly 14 percent of King County's population, compared with 4.5 percent nationally, a reflection of the Northwest's perch on the Pacific Rim.

A symbolic display of the museum's celebration of diversity will greet visitors as they set foot in the "Honoring Our Journey" gallery.

A changing array of shoes — Asian and Western, formal and informal, kids' and adults' — will be shown in a video projected onto a circle on the floor.

It's a welcoming gesture, Kumata said, drawing on the custom in many Asian cultures of taking one's shoes off when entering a home.

The gallery, which Kumata calls "physically and metaphorically the heart of the museum," examines five themes: where Asian and Pacific groups came from; how and why they immigrated to the U.S.; the kinds of work they did; their struggle for social justice; and their development of community.

For each of those themes, visitors will see something personal and tangible and learn its historical and social context. A display of Chinese, Japanese and Korean wedding gowns, for example, connects to the story of immigrants who came as brides for men who had come earlier.

Nearby, chests of drawers take on a deeper significance when one realizes they were built in relocation camps by Japanese Americans forced from their homes in World War II.

In a very real sense, the gallery will never be "finished." One section called the "Memory Wall" will have a changing display of video, poetry, photos and text telling area residents' individual stories of identity and journey, and inviting people to submit material through the museum's Web site.

Another video feature in the room, to be completed this summer, will transform a bamboo circle on the floor into a pool of water, while an audio track adds the sounds of wind and birds.

The "pool," Kumata said, grew out of community advisers' preference that the gallery have the feel of a garden. Benches around it, providing a place to rest and reflect, also stem from a community request.

Five smaller "Community Portrait Galleries," still in the works, will offer closer looks at certain ethnic or regional groups.

One, opening this summer, will include material from the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, formerly in White Center. Another, to open in September, will have rotating content, starting with a look at people of mixed race. Others will showcase Vietnamese Americans, South Asians and Filipino Americans.

Behind each significant feature of the museum is a community advisory committee, tapping people of various occupations and ages, and of different Asian or Pacific origins.

Maria Batayola, a committee member who has also served on the museum's board, said the emphasis on wide input is the "legacy" of Ron Chew, who directed the museum from 1991 until retiring at the end of last year.

When Chew arrived, Batayola said, the museum was largely "a collection of fabric and artifacts. Ron's focus was on what's the story behind the artifacts."

Andrew Cho, another community adviser, said the museum didn't just want his ideas, it wanted his shoes. He lent about 10 pairs to help create the video display.

But Cho, a college instructor who has taught race and ethnic relations and sociology, said his main role was helping ensure the museum provides a solid educational experience. He's particularly gratified that committee members were consulted not just at the project's outset, but while exhibit prototypes were being created.

"We could see they were serious about embracing our suggestions," he said. "We weren't there for a symbolic show."

In addition to its contemporary displays and galleries, the museum will offer "Historic Immersion Tours," taking people into parts of the building re-created to suggest the early 1900s, when one-room apartments on its upper floors were the first U.S. home to many immigrant workers from China, Japan and the Philippines.

An import-export shop, communal kitchen and a top-floor room where residents gambled, socialized and honored their ancestors are included in the one-hour tour, and in the months ahead, a two-story family apartment along Canton Alley will be added.

The museum has an additional important dimension: providing tours, maps and other information to help visitors explore the surrounding Chinatown International District. That's one reason the museum itself won't have a cafe.

Ultimately, Takekawa said, the museum's success depends on its ability to explore both the similarities and the distinctions among Asian and Pacific groups:

"When the opportunity is there to have a common voice, and yet you don't force people to lose their own ethnic voice, that is good not just for the community, but for what is being recorded as the American story."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com