OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
June 1, 2015
Volume 25 Number 11
June 1, 2015
ISSN: 1094-9453
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TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
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Simply solid, Portland
A River City expression of sorrow, and gratitude, for Nepal
ortland is a complex place. Oftentimes,
accountings of how each of us got here, and
explanations of what we daily do to make
our homes here — are so painful. Our personal, our
familial and communal stories, are sometimes so
conflictful. So irreconcilable. And so often open to a
hundred irreconcilable interpretations. Endless
arguments too.
Take our shared history of the settlement of this
auspicious place, this confluence of our two river
matriarchs, just 60 urgent salmon miles from that
grand clockwise sweep of Pacific peoples, products,
and ideas that has enriched our interdependent
continents and island nations longer, much longer
than any grand elder’s memory.
Indeed, according to the archeological record —
that is, what’s etched into river rock and what’s left
in human, bear, and fish bones — vigorous families
have lived and loved here 140 centuries before the
afternoon President Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of
Discovery paddled into the metropolis of Celilo. U.S.
Army Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second
Lieutenant William Clark entered a congress of
nations and a mix of politics and commerce as
complex as any 19th-century capitol city. Ken
Burns documentaries notwithstanding.
An awful century followed Lewis and Clark’s
reconnaissance, deeply wounding native nations
and the nascent American nation alike. The
attempted ethnocide, so dehumanized both
oppressor and oppressed, so disabled both sides’
children and their children’s children, that today’s
descendants from their excesses are still unable to
feel or heal the wrong done. Done here.
Two centuries of migrant resettlement followed.
White families migrated east to west; Chinese,
Filipinos, Hawaiians, Punjabis, Japanese, and
Koreans sailed west to east; ambitious Mexican and
Southern Black families moved north.
A century of wild mainstream mood swings
followed each next ethnic stream’s arrival, terribly
distorting both our muscular majority society and
our vigorous minority communities. All of that, not
so different from damming our Pacific Northwest
rivers, and the damage done to our natural and
human environments.
Portland’s last half-century (along with estab-
lishing our nationally envied ethos of ecological
P
A silence followed, during which
Portlanders both settled and new,
rich and poor, shared a world
of sorrow and common cause.
Bhutanese Oregonians had
delivered a New Portland narrative.
sustainability) has been defined by wounded
families fleeing the ugly endgame of western
imperialism in Asia, Oceana, and Africa; in Eastern
Europe and our Arab world. Families escaping all
that cruelty, then made their homes here. The port
part of Portland.
A quick look at the Mexican-, Hmong-, Samoan-,
Somali-, Iraqi-, Viet Kieu-, Khmer-, Filipino-, and
Palestinian-Portlander faces around our family’s
Sunday kitchen table will affirm how grand our city
is. How difficult too.
Searching for a shared narrative
Portland is a U.S. gateway city. As such,
America’s past excesses and future promises reside
right here. Right now.
The present disparities between Portland’s
neighborhoods and our schools are shocking. The
task of reconciling into a single harmonious narra-
tive, what each of us has to daily do to nurture and
Continued on page 7
Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.
