This photograph of Ivan Mui outside his family's restaurant, Republic Cafe, is part of Dean Wong's exhibit "Made in Chinatown USA: Portland," at the new Portland Chinatown Museum through Sept. 2. (Courtesy of Dean Wong)

When Seattle photographer Dean Wong began documenting Portland's Chinatown a couple of years ago, he thought, "Well, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on."

But as Wong talked to the business owners who remain in what was once the second-largest Chinatown on the West Coast, he heard a common refrain: "They're all very proud that this is Chinatown, not Southeast 82nd."

Their portraits, which Wong called "proud and a little bit defiant," are among 22 photographs lining the walls of the new Portland Chinatown Museum as part of Wong's exhibit "Made in Chinatown USA: Portland," which opened this month and continues through Labor Day weekend.

Related: Secret tunnels, not-so-secret gambling, great food: Old Town/Chinatown pics capture dramatic history

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Photographer Dean Wong's exhibit of photographs he took in Portland's Chinatown is the first exhibit in the new Portland Chinatown Museum. (Amy Wang/Staff)

Wong, who grew up in Seattle's Chinatown-International District, has spent four decades exploring that neighborhood and other Chinatowns with his camera. The Portland Chinatown History Foundation invited him to the Rose City "to give Portland Chinatown the Dean Wong treatment," said Jennifer Fang, the foundation's assistant director. He's the museum's first visiting artist in residence.

The resulting images depict sympathetically, in Wong's words, "what's left of Portland's Chinatown," including scenes from inside buildings held by the tongs, or community associations, that once supported thousands of Chinese American residents.

"To me it's like the Alamo, you know. This is our last stand," Wong said one recent afternoon as workers prepared for the exhibit's opening.

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Photographer Dean Wong has been documenting Chinatowns on the West Coast for four decades. (Amy Wang/Staff)

Portland Chinatown Museum

The exhibit serves as the soft opening for the still-incomplete museum, which the foundation had hoped to open last summer. Fang said the museum will present not only historical exhibits but also artistic and cultural events. Wong's exhibit is to be followed by a group show curated by Portland artist Horatio Law and a staged reading of playwright Lauren Yee's 2017 Chinatown comedy "King of the Yees."

Meanwhile, the foundation still has a cluster of galleries to fill in the museum's 1920 building on Southwest Third Avenue. The cornerstone will be the "Beyond the Gate: A Tale of Portland's Historic Chinatowns" exhibit that ran at the Oregon Historical Society in 2016. The exhibit's original designer, Portland native and Seattle scenic designer Carey Wong, has redesigned it for its new home, Fang said. And it'll have some new elements.

"We have this one vignette that we're really excited about," Fang said. "We were approached after the 'Beyond the Gate' exhibit closed at OHS by this person whose grandfather owned an import-export business down here and he was like, 'Yeah, we had this store in Chinatown and I still have all the inventory from my grandfather's store. Do you want to come down to Salem to look at it?'

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Jennifer Fang is assistant director of the Portland Chinatown History Foundation, which runs the new Portland Chinatown Museum. (Amy Wang/Staff)

Portland Chinatown Museum

"And it was like a time capsule of things that would've been in a Chinatown store in the early 1900s. Boxes of embroidered silk shoes, still in the shoeboxes, still in original wrapping. Ceramic jars of candied kumquats that had not been opened. We took a truck down to Salem, we boxed up a good sampling of the things that were in that store and we're recreating that store," Fang said.

Other noteworthy attractions will include a visual installation by Portland animator Rose Bond and artifacts from the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site, which preserves Chinese American history in eastern Oregon, said Jackie Peterson-Loomis, the museum's executive director.

The foundation hopes to have the museum fully open by October.

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A worker tests a poster's placement in the window of the new Portland Chinatown Museum. (Amy Wang/Staff)

"Made in Chinatown USA: Portland"

Hours: 3-8 p.m. Thursday, 1-6 p.m. Friday, noon-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday through Sept. 2

Address: Portland Chinatown Museum, 127 N.W. Third Ave.

Admission: Suggested donation of $5 through Labor Day, portlandchinatownmuseum.org or 503-224-0008

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