On May 27, 2007, at 1:12 PM, John Howell wrote:
Case in point. I grew up 30 miles north of Seattle. If there was
any defining ethnicity there it was scandinavian. Lutefisk and
leftse were not consumed in quantity, but were sung about by such
as Stan Boreson, and the nearby Smorgasbord was a real treat after
church on Sunday.
Last time I spent several weeks' time there, big changes. No sign
of scandinavian culture, but entire shopping centers where all the
signage was in Korean without translation.
Sounds like Lynnwood, right? That's where I work. When I bring
doughnuts, I buy them from a Korean shop a few blocks from the office.
Scandinavian culture still thrives in Ballard, and if you look
carefully you can find signs of it in some neighborhoods in Edmonds.
Probably elsewhere, too.
Now there have always been a good number of orientals in the
Pacific Northwest (making it the only place my wife could buy shoes
that fit!), but that kind of thing is self-ghettoization and really
surprised me.
The self-segregating groups are generally the newer ones --
Vietnamese, Cambodian, etc. In contrast, Chinese, Japanese and
Filipino are more integrated.
Some parts of the Pacific Northwest are more Asian than others.
Tacoma expelled all its Chinese in the 1880s and has been the least
Asian city on the West Coast ever since. I once read a serious
argument suggesting that this was a key cause of why Seattle
surpassed Tacoma as the dominant city of the Puget Sound. (I forget
who it was. Dave Neiwert, maybe?)
mdl
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