The mystery of China’s port is actually just racism, it turns out

China Harbor has been on the western edge of Lake Union for thirty years: a huge black box surrounded by moored yachts and boat rental companies.

But until last week I had never been to the gigantic Chinese restaurant. Every time I drove by, the large red letters in the stereotypical font literally called “wonton font” shouted “CHINA HARBOR,” drawing my attention to the building and the stairs leading up to the circular entrance. I tried to catch a glimpse of what and who was inside, until the bends in the road took my eyes away.

The former Elks Lodge building on Westlake Avenue has been occupied for three decades. China Harbor is embroiled in a conspiracy. It has been a myth maker, an object of fascination. Everyone I asked about the restaurant talked about it conspiratorially. “It’s a front, you know,” they would say. “It’s always empty there. The Chinese mafia owns it.” They talked about bad food, poor health ratings and rampant rat infestations. They threw around theories about prostitution, drugs and gambling in the basement. None of them – friends, colleagues, strangers on the internet – had ever been. The mystery grew. Then, less than a month ago, the restaurant’s team posted on Facebook that China Harbor would be closing. Finally, during its last week of operation, I ate at China Harbor.

I arrived at 6:30 PM with two friends and waited in a long, motionless line just to chat with the hostess. People were dining in the banquet room, which I could only glimpse from my spot in the empty lobby. Behind me, the line grew larger as more and more people showed up to pay their respects, or to whet their appetite for curiosities before it was too late. Many seemed surprised to find a line, to have to wait. They probably also bought the rumors from the ‘mafia front’ and expected an empty ballroom.

In the main dining room, a wall of windows snaked around the perimeter, framing views of South Lake Union and the Seattle skyline with ornate red lattice work. The light of the room shone through the painted ceiling tiles between the carved wooden beams. Tables and tables full of people filled a dining space the size of a football field.

The hostess seated my group at a table next to the window overlooking the lake as dusk fell over Seattle. A tired waiter, with his disposable mask slipped under his nose, took our order and advised us to order everything at once because ‘it would take a long time’. We could barely hear him over the noise of the guests and only ordered snacks.

The crab rangoons came first and were gone within seconds and a matter of bites. My stomach growled gratefully as the moo shu pork came out. I wasted no time spilling hoisin sauce on a pancake while piling the pork in the center. I groaned as I took a bite. Yum. We piled steamed green beans with garlic on our plates and consulted the menu for our main courses.

In the hustle and bustle of the closing festivities we couldn’t find a waiter. When a busboy came to clear our dirty appetizer plates, we begged him for a drink menu.

“Oh, I don’t know what we have,” he said. ‘I’m going to get someone. Today is my first day.” The restaurant was scheduled to close in three days.

Soon a waitress came. She took our orders. When we asked for beef chow mein, she said, ‘No. Get chung fu. It’s better.” We trusted her. When we ordered dim sum, she shook her head. “There’s no one left.”

We stuffed ourselves with almond chicken and slurped down beef chungfu. By the time the beef and broccoli came out, we decided it would make a good lunch tomorrow and divided it into to-go boxes. We all left China Harbor satiated and impressed.

Most of all it seemed like a normal Chinese restaurant. Where did all the noise come from?

After eating there, I wanted to delve into the mystery surrounding the building. And boy, would you believe it? That mystery that has haunted the company for decades? It’s really just racism.

If you want to know something about what White Seattle has thought about China Harbor over the decades, look no further than the Naked Loon, an early aughts satire blog that now reads like the conservative, unfunny uncle of The Needling. A farcical tale of the Naked Loon, called “China Harbor Probably Not Just a Restaurant,” includes, I assume, a made-up story about the Loon staking out the building:

Most people agree that the 31,000-square-foot facility is actually a front for a large-scale drug smuggling operation. The waterfront location and enormous storage space make this virtually a done deal. In an attempt to confirm this, our researchers called the restaurant and tried to make a reservation for “Cocaine, 2 kilo lot” in a fake Chinese accent. The outburst of mixed Chinese and English profanity that resulted from this question was considered sufficient evidence to support this claim, and we felt that it had been worth making the previous thirty phone calls where the person answering just hung up without responding.

Although China Harbor technically meets the qualifications to be considered a restaurant – in that they serve things that are supposedly food – the food served is unnaturally shiny and, according to a lab we sent it to, could in fact could be made of plastic.

The Loon piece goes further, but it hits a few key China Harbor myths: the restaurant can’t possibly afford all that space just by being a restaurant, illegal things have to finance this desirable piece of real estate, and the food is gross. .

Maybe The Loon is an artifact of a bygone era where punching down stereotypical racist jokes could get you a Comedy Central special, but 2008 wasn’t that long ago and this racism still exists, evidenced by all the still lingering China Harbor Rumors.

It doesn’t take a genius to put this all together incredibly racist There are things that are common in anti-Asian rhetoric, but let me explain.

According to a PBS story published in the wake of the pandemic during the height of anti-Asian hate, “persistent false narratives… that Chinese American neighborhoods or Chinatowns are dens of vice send the message that Asian people are less civilized are.” The suggestion that China Harbor houses a brothel upstairs or a gambling den in the basement is not only racist, but also unoriginal! Theories that Asian companies are not legitimate businesses, but that fronts for illegal activities are common nationwide. And that goes for the whole dirty food thing too.

Assuming that Asian food is “nasty or disease-laden” is a trope we can trace back to the 1850s, when white people spread the false rumor that Chinese immigrants ate rat and dog meat. In reality, these lies—which should sound very familiar to us now—were white people’s way of expressing their fear of the new, the unknown. For white workers in the 1850s, this mockery of Chinese immigrants was white workers using them “as a scapegoat for their economic woes,” Ellen Wu, a professor of history at Indiana University, told PBS. This has another name: xenophobia.

Think of monosodium glutamate or MSG. The chemical compound, which was created in the early 20th century as a way to enhance the umami flavor in food, was vilified in the late 1960s when a doctor blamed the seasoning for the bad feeling he got after eating Chinese food. This spawned a whole ailment literally known as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Despite no actual evidence that MSG was harmful, the stuff all but disappeared from Chinese food in the US.

“That MSG causes health problems may have thrived on racially charged prejudice from the start,” an article in Five Thirty Eight explains. This “fear of MSG in Chinese food” was just one example of “the US’s long history of viewing the ‘exotic’ cuisine of Asia as dangerous or dirty.”

In reality, there’s a good chance that China Harbor didn’t make a living by smuggling drugs from one side of Lake Union to the other or whatever people think, but by being a unique, multi-use space in this otherwise commercial part of the city . Their event space was extremely popular in Seattle’s Asian community. In their closing announcement, they wrote that on their busiest days they “served more than 500 guests.” On weekends, the restaurant’s event space is fully booked for salsa nights and other multicultural dance spaces. There is a massage company and a basement pool where people take swimming lessons. It is a hub for non-white Seattle. Is there a place that doesn’t specifically cater to white Seattleites? Does this kind of thing always arouse fear or suspicion?

I regret not giving China Harbor a chance before it closed its doors due to staffing issues, high rents and construction costs. Although the rumors about the Chinese Port always seemed far-fetched to me, I felt guilty for even entertaining them without ever entering the building; For entering the restaurant and looking for drawing mob activity. I wonder if anyone else who packed the dining room to catch a glimpse of a Seattle mystery realized the conspiracy part of the popular conspiracy theories when they took China Harbor out of dim sum. I wish I could eat some dim sum. The next time that craving comes, I’ll head to the restaurant’s new venture, Vivienne’s Bistro.