Portland’s Lan Su Chinese gardenis still thriving. Don’t miss it.

One of my favorite places in Portland is the Lan Su Chinese garden in Chinatown — Old Town, the city marketers are trying to call the area now, but Old Town is south of Burnside, Chinatown is north to an old Portlander like me. When you pass through the red Chinese gates, you know you’re there.

It was always kind of a seedy place. A lot of dive bars, dance places, small curious shops that never seemed open. It never seemed like the streets themselves were as clean as the rest of Portland. There were more street people, some drinking from bottles in paper bags.

Then there were the Shanghai tunnels….

I loved it.

At its heart, for decades now, is the Lan Su garden. It covers a city block, and was built in collaboration with a sister city in China. It is a scholar’s garden.

When China invented bureaucracy, it created a class of city administrators who passed very stringent tests. Those at the top were expected to be proficient not only in administration, but in the arts: poetry, painting, literature. And gardening. A scholar’s garden incorporates all of that.

I do wonder how our society might be different if our leaders aspired to be scholars, artists and gardeners.

The koi pond through a pine tree. The orange paper lanterns reflected in the pond below.

That form of administrative governance no longer exists in China of course, but the garden tradition does. And Portland is fortunate to have one, designed with the city and the neighborhood in mind.

The tough times have been hard on Portland, and Portland’s leadership has failed in providing basic services. (Haven’t talked to a Portlander yet who didn’t describe the mayor as having his head up his ass. Or sometimes, if they’re polite, he’s in over his head. My mind tried to combine the two images, of course. Don’t do it.) And that’s apparent in Chinatown. The streets are dirty, the garbage is overflowing.

And the Garden is struggling because people have been put off by media portrayals and the Cassandras of the police department, and the mayor who has his head up his ass.

Shortly before I visited Portland in August, Steve Duin, a long-time columnist at the Oregonian had this to say:

Elizabeth Nye always imagined Lan Su Chinese Garden as an Old Town oasis.

A monument to the endurance and grace of Asian immigrants. A tea-house window into Chinese culture in an age of rising anti-China rhetoric. The inspirational ground-zero for the revitalization of Old Town.

A showcase.

And that’s precisely what the garden block is this summer, only in ways Nye never envisioned

Lan Su is hostage to the twin plagues of rats and methamphetamines in downtown Portland. It’s testimony to the cavalier abandonment of community policing by a demoralized, understaffed police bureau. And the Chinese Garden finds no relief in the defensive, uncoordinated “leadership” at Multnomah County and the city of Portland.

Continued here.

I could spend a column just picking apart Duin’s opening paragraphs (demoralized and understaffed police bureau, my ass). Instead, I made a point of visiting the garden. It had been a while since I was there — like most people, I hadn’t traveled much during the pandemic. A trip to Portland the summer of 2021, and again this summer is about it. I miss traveling.

Back to Lan Su. I drove around the neighborhood, parked in front of the garden, which told me a lot about the lack of garden visitors. I usually had to hunt for parking. I got there in time for a tour, led by an excellent older man who looked like he ought to be on the docks in Winchester Bay telling sea stories. (And my dad would have been right there, matching him story for story.)

The tour guide at Lan Su garden in August.

I pried a bit into his background, but he was more interested in talking about the garden. Informed, witty, gentle, he was a man with a passion for the garden. It was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon. After the tour, I talked to some clerks in the gift shop. And like most true Portlanders, they shrugged at the increasing number of street people, and fumed about the government’s inability to provide basic services. Not the people’s fault, the young woman said. Her older coworker nodded.

The mayor has his head up his ass, she said. He’s so overwhelmed, he doesn’t know what to do. And hiring Sam Adams isn’t going to help. We gossiped about city politics and Portland’s colorful and often contentious politics.

They too loved the garden. And they thought the tour guide was wonderful: He’d lived in the neighborhood for years. Raised show dogs for a while. He said he learned Chinese culture, because he’d married young into a traditional Chinese family in Portland. Damn, I want more of his story. I think the two women had a mild crush on the man — fair enough, so did I.

Leaving, I drove through the maze of one-way streets. Dirty streets. Overflowing garbage cans. Those are things the city of Portland could do something about. The fact that they don’t — and then blame the problems on homeless people — is disturbing.

So, I came home, and knew I where the next Newsroom PDX story had to be located — Chinatown. Ellison Lee, one of the TV anchors, takes center stage in Who Can I Tell?, book 18 in the series. He’s living a double life, well triple, if you count the one he tells his parents. His alter-ego, E. Lee, dances at the Stag, a gay bar in Chinatown. Miguel Garcia is back, still covering the homeless community. And their lives converge because someone is throwing lit hibachis at homeless camps. (Truth, it was a thing in Portland a while back.) Rumor has it, it’s a frat initiation stunt.

If you get the chance, visit the Lan Su garden. Take a tour. If you’re lucky, John will be your guide. Have tea. Celebrate the heart of Chinatown.

And you can pre-order Who Can I Tell? wherever you buy your e-books. Always best to read a series from the beginning, but you can drop by the EWN Newsroom in Portland at any point. They won’t hold it against you. Might put you to work.

I left the garden, had Thai food at Peacock Thai (wonderful) not far from Powell’s, and then went up to the art museum for its show of photos from Black and Indigenous photographers during the 2020 George Floyd protests. Also wonderful. I encourage you to visit there too.

Portland is a great city, and doomsayers miss its resiliency. I hope I capture that in Newsroom PDX. Enjoy.

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