The field trip we took on October 3rd gave me an inside look to Asian American culture specifically located in Washington, where I was born and raised.

It wasn’t even until I was in high school that I learned that the Puyallup Fair Grounds that I knew so well were used for Japanese internment during World War II. This came as a shock to me at the time, to think of my home state as a place of hatred where people were interned for no other reason than their skin color and race.

On Tuesday, we visited the Washington State History Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum where we viewed the works of Takuichi Fukii and Zhi LIN, respectively. Fujii’s work seemed to depict a variety of things from the simplistic life he and his family lived farming, using his daughter as the subject of his paintings and sketches as she did every day things like brush her hair and of the flowers in their garden. It was obvious from the paintings and works of art that Fujii loved his daughter dearly as she was the muse for many of his pieces.

Photo taken by myself, of Zhi Lin’s work. Text on piece says, “19th century Chinese graves. 26 wooden sticks marked on the very north-east edge of the cemetery on the mountain top town Iowa Hill.”

Zhi Lin’s pieces were more abstract, some of them being sketches of life. He seemed to focus more so on nature and the setting of where he was at the moment. Zhi LIN and the Tacoma Art Museum worked together to create art that showed the “ethnic cleansing,” as Zhi LIN called it, of the Chinese migrants of Tacoma. He described the cleansing as the Chinese were expelled from Tacoma and forced to walk up to 8 miles to reach the train station in Lakewood as they were pushed out.