OPINION
January 6, 2014
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
The Hon. Soualee Cha
and his grand generation
Our duties since theirs is done
e are like generations and gen-
erations of woodland animals, I
suppose. Shy Asian sun bear,
bashful babirusa, easygoing orangutan. A
generous canopy of lush treetops has
always sheltered us from our suriya sun,
from monsoon raindrops as rhythmic and
irresistible as Muhammad Ali’s fists.
Shadows deep as sleep have always kept
us safe from hungry harimau, prowling for
you and me, by name.
We are generations grown used to the
cover of careful giants. Broad-shouldered,
huge-hearted elders who’ve protected and
schooled us with an understanding they
earned in places and under pressures very
different from the afternoon shade you and
me have grown used to. Elders who
whispered oaths about never exposing us
to the despair they survived again and
again.
Ugly colonialism and brutal local
regimes, our caretakers outlived. They
endured modern warring — those long-
long moments of mass psychosis during
which every imaginable technology is
determinedly mass-manufactured then
rushed across deep seas to splinter every
last place an enemy’s kids study, their
parents work, their grandmas and
grandpas make households.
W
When they leave, what?
“Hard times make strong hearts,” our
aunties used to tell and tell and tell us —
toughening us up, down in milk-toast
suburban Salem. “You can’t really trust
people who’ve never suffered,” our uncles
always said, looking sideways at TV news,
at earnest American presidents, at smart
congresswomen and confident congress-
men.
And now these grand elders are leaving
us. They are tired. This life has worn their
bones thin. Their minds stray from you
and me. God calls them, by name.
As each passes, then what? An inventory
of our policy, business, and civil-society
leaders, is not reassuring. Not at all. Not a
rugged face in the room. No sincerity of the
sort our elders might recognize. No
muscularity of the kind that has always
made our immigrant nation the real deal.
Real to her ideals.
Great Grandpa Soualee Cha left us, the
morning after Christmas Day. He
departed during those most serene of
moments between this mysterious world’s
night shift and our day shift. No longer
thick night, but not yet another blessed
day. Grandpa’s big family was near.
Generation
after
generation
of
Grandpa’s family had prepared for his
departure, for days and nights — rubbing
his village farmer’s sturdy calves and sure
feet; massaging his stubborn guerilla
fighter’s knotted shoulders and arms;
tenderly kissing gratitude and whispering
regrets onto his furrowed brow; smoothing
the etched sorrows and joys of this grand
man’s beloved Lao highlands turned so
suddenly into a furious kill zone;
smoothing the strain of stewardship of his
people’s safety in Thai frontier refugee
camps; erasing the evidence of his
resettlement and reconciliation efforts in
Hmong communities from sodden St.
Johns to Fresno neighborhoods left behind
by the American economy.
How he did that
Grandpa Soualee Cha did so much. He
did it so well. Let me tell you about three
times I worked with him, with Portland
Hmong elders and activists. Let me tell
you what it meant and what it still means
to us. To us Portlanders, Oregonians, and
Americans.
Some years ago, there was a bad Hmong
shaman who — like those bad Catholic
priests who likewise believed they were
also above punishment — was using his
central California community’s trust for
personal gratification. He hurt a girl
belonging to Grandpa’s clan. She was too
afraid to testify in criminal court, her
family knew they would all suffer violent
consequences in their lawless Fresno
neighborhood. We left Portland, packed
into a red Toyota 4Runner, right after local
Hmong civic activists’ day jobs. We drove
all night.
We went straight to the prosecuting
district attorney and told her we would
secure the necessary trial witnesses, but
only if she and her city’s patrol officers
personally guaranteed the victim’s and her
extended family’s safety from that corrupt
shaman’s angry relatives and all those
Asian gangsters eager to have their
business. Predators.
No one had tried dealing that directly
with Fresno law enforcement. No one
expected any good from them. There’s an
awful history of local police getting their
bust, of earnest prosecutors getting their
conviction, then government abandoning
those who made it all possible. Hit-and-
run policing.
Moreover, the Honorable Soualee Cha
promised the D.A. that he would refute the
Hmong defendant’s expert witness, a
university professor ready to testify that
this so-called “sacred sex” with teenagers
was a culturally-acceptable shamanic
practice. Grandpa’s sure-footedness in all
that uncertainty, put everyone, that
frightened family and this inadequate
system of justice, at ease. That abuser got
17 years in prison. He did not survive that
sentence.
Grandpa was playing his central part in
Portland police chief Tom Potter’s style of
community policing. Civic activists and
cops policing their community, together.
We did it a hundred times in Portland.
Grandpa restored peace without govern-
ment, when possible. He did his part in
partnership with mainstream muscle,
when we could come to accord on sharing
burdens and benefits. He expected our
best.
Why we respond
Grandpa Soualee Cha modelled how to
expect tip-top drawer behavior from
everyone. When this wasn’t enough, as is
often the case in the asymmetrical power
relationships between our ethnic minority
streams and our mainstream — we called
in media. Like traditional Hmong elders
gathering all those possibly impacted
when making important moves, western
democracy operates best under bright
light. Sunlight or camera light, all the
same.
TriMet opening its Westside MAX line
In the late ’90s, four hundred feet under Washington
Park, Grandpa Soualee Cha made peace with the dis-
turbed spirits of this grand continent and with those of
the deceased buried above the TriMet Westside MAX
line. (AR Photo)
made it much simpler for our eastside
immigrant moms to get to their very cool
Silicon Forest jobs. No more two-hour
carpooling of kids to schools and dads to
their workplaces. It all would’ve been
another brilliant example of western
urban engineering, had that light rail not
been so confidently laid under Sunset Hills
cemetery. Or had they drilled that deep
tunnel in consultation with another kind of
civil engineering. Every major religious
tradition reveres sacred ground. Sure we
do.
Four hundred feet under Washington
Park, Grandpa made peace with the
disturbed spirits of this grand continent
and with those of the deceased buried
above. We did it at dawn, in the company of
the City of Portland’s ombudsman.
Transportation officials stood near, transit
police too. Producers for WNET New York,
Religion & Ethics had cameras whirring,
Oregon Public Radio was on. In the
following weeks, clerics of other religious
traditions followed. It all made the front
page of The Oregonian; it was in The New
York Times Magazine; we made national
television. Participating in democracy,
Grandpa taught us, requires a certain kind
of toughness and tenderness.
Another example of Grandpa’s kind of
work that Portlanders still talk about, was
an urgent Black/Asian neighborhood
reconciliation, after a Hmong kid’s very
bad behavior. The Public Broadcasting
Service’s WNET, producers of the
Imagining America series, filmed a
segment titled Hmong American Justice.
It was about our Hmong community
taking responsibility for a cognitively
disabled and recently laid-off young man’s
assault on his family’s elderly African-
American neighbors.
What we do now
Imagining America documented Hmong
civic activists making right what their boy
did wrong. The program clearly shows
Portland’s Police Bureau supporting
community discipline, and all that in
support of the kid’s defense against
deportation to the Lao People’s Democratic
Republic. The regime responsible for the
ethnocide that sent our Hmong here. But
the episode doesn’t mention the intense
negotiations between Portland’s Hmong
and our African-American church elders.
The peace they made. The peace that
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What we do now,
now that Grandpa’s
grand generation
of big-hearted and
broad-shouldered elders
are leaving us, is
make mainstream
their muscular work,
their humble work.
makes neighborliness possible in those
parts of town not served well by
mainstream institutions.
What we do now, now that Grandpa’s
grand generation of big-hearted and
broad-shouldered elders are leaving us, is
make mainstream their muscular work,
their humble work. We need to share
better the daily burdens, the enormous
social and the cultural benefits of our
ethnic stream work.
Passively assessing our staid insti-
tutions’ abilities to leave their racialized
ruts is less, much less, than those careful
and committed giants require from us.
They protected, they schooled, you and me.
Never mind for a moment our elder
aunties admonishment about “hard times”
and “strong hearts.” It no longer matters
whether or not Portland’s or Oregon’s or
even America’s leaders have earned that
level of trust — Grandpa Soualee Cha’s
generation already paid, well in advance.
Our elders paid up, so you and me must get
down to business.
The business of building a better
neighborhood, a bigger Us.
w
The Asian Reporter’s
Expanding American Lexicon
Babirusa (Bahasa Indonesia): Wild pig.
Please see our local wild guys at the Oregon Zoo,
<www.oregonzoo.org/discover/animals/north-s
ulawesi-babirusa>.
Harimau (Bahasa Indonesia): Great cat.
Grand spirit. Tiger or panther.
Modern warring: Grandpa’s story is told
within the 1962-1975 U.S. foreign policy
context. More explosive tonnage was dropped on
the little Laos Kingdom inside those 13 years
than the aggregate of all aerial bombardment in
all preceding wars. Unprecedented destruction of
both natural and built environments. U.S.
military and CIA covert command made a sacred
brothers-in-arms promise to ferociously loyal
Hmong SGU (Special Guerilla Unit) fighters that
together they would defeat Communist Viet and
Laos armies. Hmong freedom fighters kept
theirs, down to their last teenaged boys. When the
U.S. did not, the Lao Hmong ethnocide was on.
Muhammad Ali (American Muslim): World
heavyweight boxing and American civil-rights
champion. The Greatest.
Orangutan (Bahasa Indonesia): Man of the
forest. Long-red-haired arboreal ape.
WNET New York, Religion & Ethics:
Portlander Tom D’Antoni’s documentary is
found
online
at
<clip.hmongplus.com/
ZnRkMHRfcDBhWmsz>.
Killingsworth Station Food Cart Square
1331 N. Killingsworth Street (at N. Maryland), Portland
Food cart pod features:
w Heavy foot traffic on a busy street w Electricity w Water
w ATM w Garbage/recycling w New restrooms w Internet
w Graywater dump station w Security cameras
w Covered dining area w Pod is located 1 block
from the MAX Yellow Line & 4 blocks from
Portland Community College’s Cascade Campus
Inquire for more information:
(503) 381-3749 w ksfoodcarts@gmail.com
Mark your calendar!
The Year of the Horse begins January 31, 2014.
Our special issue celebrating the Lunar New Year
will be published on January 20, 2104.