12th and Jackson

On 12th and Jackson, in front of what used to be the New An Dong Chinese Herb and Grocery Market, there’s a strange little open-air market run by old Chinese women. I can’t really remember when it started because it was something of a natural expansion of New An Dong. There would be a few bins of oranges or onions or bananas outside the entrance to New An Dong, and then one day, there was a woman sitting there next to them on an upturned plastic bucket with a few heads of cabbage, some green onions and some other vegetables spread out over the tops of three plastic crates. Sometimes there would be buckets of vegetables swimming in various colored pickling liquids, or little plastic bags of mixed indeterminable chopped and sliced vegetables. It sits against a wall directly behind a sheltered bus stop, so there would be the crowd of people milling around waiting for the 14, or the 7 or 36, and then behind them and interspersed with them the people, mostly older women, standing around the market talking and buying vegetables.

I couldn’t tell whether or not this was actually a “part” of New An Dong, but with Chinatown’s tendency toward self-regulation the situation was probably looser and a little harder to define than that. More than likely I figured it was a woman who had a garden with some excess, and decided to sell it. In Rainier Valley there are a lot of Asian immigrants, and here and there you’ll see little vegetable gardens they’ve set up, and similar looking old women out there tending to them. Strange as selling cabbage on the sidewalk might sound, given that context it never really seemed out of the ordinary.

Over the years the little market expanded. In addition to the vegetables, it started selling things like the odd pair of shoes, cheap looking walkmen and old baseball hats, which for some reason old Asian men seem to always wear (I had a Chinese friend once whom I asked about this phenomenon, he couldn’t explain it, although did say that his dad always wore baseball hats, and sometimes would insist that he wear one when going out).

I always wondered how this little market was able to stay open, given that it surely was violating many health codes, and definitely wasn’t a licensed business. But, given the Asian immigrant community’s tendencies toward self-regulation, and the fact that no one seemed to be any worse off because of it, I just assumed that it was tolerated and given a blind eye.

The problem with Chinatown’s self-regulation and insularity is that while it allowed immigrants an underground network in which to set themselves up and prosper, it also left it vulnerable to infiltration by other nefarious, and often non-Asian people looking to take advantage of its lax rules in relation to the rest of the city. The neighborhood also sits on the south edge of Downtown, and is just north of Pioneer Square and the waterfront, which house a large number of the city’s homeless. Inevitably there has always been some spillover into Chinatown. Hing Hay park, in the center of Chinatown, is always filled with homeless people sitting around, usually drinking. Occasionally I’ll see the odd Chinese person doing Tai Chi there, but it’s more often than not an al fresco watering hole for the homeless drunks., Brandt Morgan says of the park in Enjoying Seattle’s Parks that “The protective societies, craft halls, and secret rooms that were once vital to survival are no longer necessary, and in their place a vital spirit has blossomed. Hing Hay Park, with its ornate pavilion and outgoing air of conviviality, stands a symbol of that spirit.” Unfortunately, what Morgan doesn't add, is that by and large this “vital spirit” is not embodied by the neighborhood's Asian residents.

In the five or six years that I've been hanging around Chinatown, the problem with homeless substance abusers hasn't necessarily gotten worse, it's just gotten more organized. At a certain point it became apparent that there were “leaders” and a hierarchy emerging from the groups of homeless people who hung around there. There also started to be more people hanging around with them who were not homeless, but nevertheless seemed comfortable on the outskirts of society. You would see these guys come in, talk to one of the homeless people who was more together than others, maybe hand something off to them, and leave. Then you would see the same homeless guy hanging around back with the rest of them in Hing Hay park or on the corner of 6th and King, and he in turn would hand off whatever had been handed off to him, until all of it was gone and they did the same thing again.

Inextricably tied in with the drug trade was prostitution, which brought drug addicted women whose desperation was just as frightening as the mens'. I remember once walking under I-5 and coming across a man and a woman, both of whom looked like they'd been forced through the cogs of homelessness a couple of times by something or other. The woman had a bizarre gait that I've come to recognize in people, but women especially, who are addicted to crack, wherein she would violently swing her alternating stiff-straight and akimbo limbs as she walked, and had a look on her face like all her features were about to fall off it, and she kept having to succumb to grimacing tics to keep them in place. The man, who I gathered was the pimp, came up to me and asked if I had any money. I said no, but I gave them some limes, and he tossed one to the woman. She didn't really say anything but started peeling it. “She's CRAZY, huh?” he said suggestively, and tilted his head back at her. She continued to peel her lime without noticing what he was saying, then the two of them headed off in the other direction with the woman following the man silently eating her lime, reduced to the level of an animal in the way she obediently and thoughtlessly walked behind him.

Of course this behavior isn't limited to non-Asian homeless people. Drug addiction and mental illness were the reason most of these people were on the streets, and they are also blind to ethnicity. I'm sure the Asian homeless act as liaisons between the rest of them and the Asian immigrants who shop and work in the neighborhood. Most stores and restaurants will tolerate the homeless people hanging around, but others seem to be in some kind of secret complicit conspiracy with them. One deli on 12th, tucked into a small storefront on a strip mall, had a constant stream of homeless people coming in and out, never buying food, but always disappearing back into the kitchen. Some were black, or white, and others were Vietnamese. These ones would speak to the workers in Vietnamese. The non-Vietnamese ones would just go silently back there – whatever they did there required no instruction from the workers at the deli counter.

So it came about naturally that the organized drug trade in Chinatown found its way into the little open air market on 12th and Jackson. The people were conspicuous at first, but their products were showing up for sale. Each time I would walk past, there were fewer cabbages and more shoes, or sunglasses, or whatever the drug addicts had probably pawned off on them. Then came cigarettes, bootleg DVDs, more cheap electronics. It had officially gone from under the radar farmer's market to black market.

And the people who hung around there changed too. At its core, it was still run by the older Asian women, whom one couldn't really hold responsible for the downfall of the corner or the neighborhood. What might have seemed inexcusably shady to us was probably not so different from the corruption that's far more common in China and Vietnam, and therefore represented a much smaller moral hurdle. Regardless, it became apparent that these women were basically a cover for the organization that spread itself around the intersection of 12th and Jackson. Most of the guys who seemed to be behind the operation were black, but there were also a few white and Latino guys, and the mainly Vietnamese guys whom I saw checking in with them often, but who didn't seem to be major players in the structure of the organization.

Then one day I walked past it and in place of the Asian women and the shady guys were six cops and two sheriffs. It looked like they had just cleared it out. I was walking up toward Saigon Deli on Rainier and Jackson, and I noticed a couple in their mid-twenties with a baby arguing and walking hurriedly in front of me. I took my headphones off and quickened my pace so I could catch up to them. Clearly they were talking about the bust of the market. “It's bullshit that people can't go and sell their food stamps or buy illegal cigarettes anymore,” the guy said. I couldn't catch the rest of the conversation, and they turned the corner as I went into Saigon Deli.

On my way back down Jackson, I saw them again across the street in the parking lot of a Vietnamese grocery store. The man was anxiously pacing around while the woman stood with the baby draped over her shoulder with inattentive indifference. The man tried to help people coming out of the grocery store carry their groceries, at times going so far as to nearly grab the bags out of their hands, but none of the people seemed interested, or to speak English, and brushed him aside. He kept pacing around, clearly becoming more agitated and impatient, and at one point starting to faint, and leaning into the arms of the woman, who held him up with one arm while the baby stayed face down on her shoulder.

They were soon joined by more desperate looking people from the 12th and Jackson market diaspora, and they were all standing around talking, trying to figure something out. The group kept growing until there were about a dozen people standing around, and others would come in and out, then go back to panhandling or sitting at the bus stop. Later that night, as I was heading back on the bus from downtown to the U. District, I saw one of the guys who had been in the anxious group earlier. He got on at the Westlake station and rode out to 47th and the Ave. The people who hung out in Chinatown, at Westlake, and on the Ave all seemed to be part of this interchangeable group of drug addicts and dealers, with many of them a combination of the two.

Every time since then that I've walked past 12th and Jackson there have been cops standing at the corner. The same characters who were part of the open air market (aside from the Chinese women) are still hanging around the intersection, conducting their business more discreetly between mutually suspicious glances at the cops. I found a post a few days later on a Seattle crime blog saying that a big meth bust had been made there the day I saw all the cops and sheriffs. The bigger dogs on the street may have been busted, but clearly the addicts were all still there, and more dealers would come. The cops can only stand guard at that corner for so long and soon enough I'm sure the market will return in one incarnation or another.