The C-ID Archives | South Seattle Emerald

by Emerald Staff

Community members across Seattle are celebrating Ron Chew for a career totally dedicated to his community as a journalist, advocate, and fundraiser for Seattle’s International District. Since the mid-1970s, he has worked as editor of the International Examiner, director of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific Experience, and currently as the executive director of the International Community Health Services Foundation (ICHS) for Seattle’s Chinatown International District (CID). Chew will retire from ICHS on Jan 1 after leading it the entirety of the past decade.

In a recent Emerald article, Glenn Nelson aptly described Ron’s journalistic focus: “Chew practiced his craft largely on a concrete island isolated from the rest of Seattle by railroad tracks and the I-90 and I-5 freeways.”

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by Sharon H. Chang

It was back in February — what now seems a lifetime ago — when Bill Tashima first heard people were avoiding Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (ID) because of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. It was still winter, COVID-19 was not yet a pandemic, and only one known U.S. case existed in nearby Snohomish County (in a man who had visited Wuhan). But because Seattle’s Chinatown, a historically Asian immigrant community, was being perceived as directly connected to China where the outbreak began in December, businesses in the ID had been experiencing decline as early as January. Restaurants were getting hit especially hard.

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