By Leonard Chan (except where noted)

Ahh, summer is here and I’m sitting at home thinking about the places I’d like to check out if I had the time.

This is our latest installment in our AAPI related summer travel series (checkout the prior years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2021; please note there are still a lot of broken links, sorry about that).

I was recently browsing the book “Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now.”  In one map, the book listed places of interest/significance for AAPIs. One location listed was the Morro Bay plaque marking the landing of Filipinos in California in 1587.

To my surprise, they had Morro Bay as being north of San Francisco (note that we sold our copies of the book and I didn’t have time to follow-up on what I thought was a glaring mistake). I was very familiar with this site because I wrote about it for our 2006 summer trips article. I went to find the plaque not long after and took some pictures of it (I can’t find my photos, but if you do a google search, you can see other people’s photos).

It’s been 16 years since I covered that location. Because of the time that has passed and from research that I have uncovered over the years, I thought I’d revisit (if only in words) a few of the locations we’ve covered in the previous articles. The Morro Bay location is one destination and the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, is another (I mentioned this school in our last newsletter about Humehume as well as in the 2007 summer trips article). Two other locations, one in Hawaii (Waiola Shave Ice) and the other in Oregon (Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site) were graciously shared with me by our other editors Philip Chin and Susan Tanioka.

When we last left off, Mas was telling us about how the Hongo family farm was selling flowers to the lei makers in Honolulu.

L: (Jamie Miracle, one of our board members, sat in for a short time during this portion of the interview) We were talking about vanda orchid… he was a vanda orchid grower in Hawaii. He grew vanda orchids and…

J: Oh.

M: We were one of the larger…largest vanda orchid…

L: So when did the business expand into selling in the States?

M: Well, we were shipping some orchids and ti leaves to Los Angeles market. I used to go to LA market, San Francisco. I flew to Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Michigan, Chicago.

So I would sell to one guy. I didn’t want to sell to three, four guys in the market because they’re going to compete against each other. When they get somebody, the...you know, so to speak, you know, the franchise, I sell to only one person. Then I come to San Francisco, I sell to one person. Then I go to Seattle, I sell to one person. I go to Vancouver, I sell to one person. I go to New York, or Philadelphia, I sell to one person.