‘It’s time.’ Chinese American immigrant contributions to Yosemite get recognition
Chinese American’s historic contributions to Yosemite National Park is new information for many visitors, including Chinese Americans.
Lifelong Yosemite visitor and a former California State Park superintendent, Jack Shu, learned about them just over a decade ago through a video by the National Park Service and Yosemite Conservancy, featuring Yosemite Park Ranger Yenyen Chan.
In his search to help make that information a regular part of the park’s origin story, a park ranger friend showed him an old building originally used as a laundry by Chinese workers at Yosemite’s Wawona Hotel.
“It was symbolic,” Shu said Friday morning, standing in front of that 104-year-old building. “It was symbolic of how the stories of Chinese in Yosemite was not being noticed. … This building was a storage facility for the stagecoach program. A sign, right over there, hung that said, ‘Carriage Shop.’”
There’s a new sign now, marking it as the Chinese Laundry Building – the joint project of many organizations and individuals. New exhibits inside tell the story of early Chinese contributions in Yosemite. It was unveiled Friday during a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by officials and many members of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, who supported the effort.
Several attendees held handmade signs thanking the park and its partners. One read, “IT’S TIME!”
Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon saw it and agreed.
“It’s past time,” Muldoon added, met with a round of applause.
“This is going to become normal now. We will always tell this story at Yosemite,” Muldoon told the crowd. “This is what we need to do across the National Park system, and it is people like you that have made this possible.”
Those people include Franklin and Sandra Yee, who donated $100,000 for the building’s renovation, and others who have given to Yosemite Conservancy, the park’s main philanthropic partner. The Yees have a cabin in Wawona just up the road from the Chinese Laundry Building, purchased in 1953 by Sandra’s father. Sandra said their donation is to honor the Chinese who came before them in Yosemite, including her parents.
The Chinese Laundry Building will be open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. through Oct. 14. There aren’t regular fall or winter hours after that because interpretive park rangers in Wawona are seasonal employees. The building will be open regularly again beginning in spring 2022, likely from mid-April through mid-October.
Beginning of the new Yosemite History Center
The event made Friday an even more significant day in Yosemite’s history. Oct. 1 was also the park’s 131st birthday, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said, and the first day this fall that day-use reservations weren’t required to enter Yosemite.
Gediman called the unveiling of the Chinese Laundry Building a “longtime coming” and “just the beginning of telling more stories and really jumping into the complete and full history of Yosemite.”
Park Ranger Adam Ramsey, who oversees park interpretation in Wawona and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, said the recent renaming of the Pioneer Yosemite History Center to the Yosemite History Center, where the Chinese Laundry Building is located along Forest Drive, will help make that possible. Yosemite’s leadership team approved the name change this summer. New signs are expected to be installed next year.
“Chinese people have been a big part of communities throughout the Sierra Nevada for a really long time, and it’s about time that we started sharing that history here in Yosemite,” Ramsey said. “The new Yosemite History Center shares the histories of people, mostly immigrants, who made the park what it is today.”
Previous park documents described the history center – a cluster of historic buildings in Wawona, a relatively quiet corner of Yosemite – as a place for telling the history of Anglo-Americans, but research shows that almost no one associated with those buildings was Anglo, Ramsey said.
“The new Yosemite History Center is a place to share the stories of people who have lived in Yosemite, no matter the color of their skin, no matter the languages they speak,” Ramsey said. “They are all part of Yosemite history, and those people are all part of American history.
“Unveiling the Chinese laundry is just the beginning of a new Yosemite History Center. This ongoing effort will ensure the history that we share in Yosemite is as accurate, inclusive and inspiring as possible.”
The National Park Service plans to install more exhibits in the Chinese Laundry Building in the future.
Chinese contributions to Yosemite and California
Chan has done a lot of research to find the historic contributions of Chinese Americans in Yosemite. Those include building Yosemite’s Tioga Road and Wawona Road.
Between December 1874 and April 1875, at least 300 Chinese workers hired by the owners of the Wawona Hotel completed the 23-mile road between Wawona and Yosemite Valley “just in time for tourist season,” Chan said. They completed that difficult work with handpicks, shovels and wheelbarrows while living in tents along the side of the road.
In 1883, they built the 56-mile Tioga Road, then called the Great Sierra Wagon Road, in just 130 days, Chan said. That stunning route through the wilderness reaches nearly 10,000 feet in elevation as it crosses over the Sierra Nevada.
Chinese were also employed in Yosemite hotels as cooks, laundry workers and gardeners. Many first came to California during the Gold Rush, bringing with them skills learned in China about construction, engineering, agriculture, medicine and textiles that made a significant impact in America’s early success, Chan said.
“And yet, in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress to prevent any more Chinese from entering this country in search of work,” Chan continued. “That law, originally in place for 10 years, was extended numerous times, effectively blocking Chinese immigration for 60 years in this country.
“No wonder that I was surprised to learn about Yosemite’s Chinese history and their contributions. Their history was almost erased from our country’s memory. But today, we’re honoring this history with the opening of this new exhibit at a historic building that was the original Chinese laundry here for the Wawona Hotel.”
Diverse immigrant stories in the park matter
That new exhibit means a lot to Chinese Americans.
“Finally, Yosemite is reaching to me because of this center,” said Susan Sing, who added that she’s been searching all over the park for something about the Chinese.
“And I was happy to hear that it’s the new Yosemite that’s going to include and embrace everybody,” Sing said of what speakers shared during Friday’s event. “This is, indeed, a big step.”
Eugene Moy, a past president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, said his grandfather owned a laundry in Montana in the 19th century.
“Something like this really resonates with a lot of people in my generation,” Moy said. “We’ve been here since the 1870s, so to be able to see this has deep meaning, because a lot of us, oftentimes, are relegated to the margins. We aren’t always perceived as being full-fledged Americans when the reality is that people have been here for three, four, five generations, for 150 years.”
Mariposa County Supervisor Rosemarie Smallcombe, and a representative from Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office, presented proclamations to Superintendent Muldoon at the end of Friday’s event.
Linn Lee, a curriculum specialist of history and social science for a school district in Southern California, said she was “enthralled” by the event.
“I will definitely be coming more often” to Yosemite, Lee said.
The fifth-generation Chinese American said she hopes Yosemite continues its work of telling more diverse stories, including about the contributions of Native Americans, Mexicans and African Americans.
Yosemite Conservancy has given over $600,000 to the history center over the last decade, and will likely donate another quarter-million dollars to the center next year, said Frank Dean, Yosemite Conservancy’s president and chief executive officer.
Telling more diverse stories is increasingly important to the conservancy and NPS.
“We believe that the future of public lands depends on all of us caring about the natural world,” Dean said, “and about making people feel welcome, represented, and connected in outdoor spaces, especially in national parks.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘It’s time.’ Chinese American immigrant contributions to Yosemite get recognition."
