Oregon Humanities

Remembering the Dead

Film tells story of Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants.

Caroline Cummins

They came by ship. They worked gruelingly hard. And when Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants died, they were dumped, anonymously, into graves at the city’s Lone Fir cemetery.

“Chinaman, Chinaman, Chinaman”—that’s who was buried in Lone Fir according to a list kept by Multnomah County. A man reads these names aloud—or rather, these non-names—in Ivy Lin’s 2009 documentary film about the fate of the workers, Come Together Home. He continues, “The funeral home knew their names. The Chinese Benevolent Association knew their names. But the county just never thought it was important.”

The nameless dead were unearthed more than half a century ago and shipped back to China, where their remains got stuck in the limbo of a Hong Kong warehouse. Lin, a filmmaker who came across the story of Lone Fir’s exhumed Chinese workers while working on an earlier documentary about Portland’s Chinatown called Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, traveled to China to see what had become of the bodies.

“I think it was my personal transformation from being an Asian in America to an Asian American that inspired me to become interested in the stories of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Portland before me,” says Lin, who came to the United States from Taiwan in 1989. “Early Chinese immigrants endured a tremendous amount of hardship to pave the way for newer immigrants like myself. The very least I can do is to tell stories of their lives and raise awareness of their contribution in helping to build the city of Portland and the state of Oregon.”

Trailers for both films can be viewed online (http://www.vimeo.com/6226018), but full screenings of the movies are rare. The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery showed Come Together Home in October 2009, followed by a December showing at Portland State University and a February 2010 screening at Portland’s White Stag building. But something more permanent may soon come out of Lin’s work: an official monument to the workers on the empty cemetery block where they used to lie.