OPINION
August 17, 2015
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
What’s troubling about
America, our otherwise kind
and creative new country,
is our mainstream’s systemic
impatience with beautiful
cultural complexity
in favor of institutional
commitment to “Race.”
n Polo
River City
Our Ethnic streams and our Race boxes
ast night, I was energized by an
event at the Asian Pacific
American Chamber of Commerce.
Last week, elegant community elders
discussed social policy at the new offices of
Latino Network. Last month, we prayed
among optimistic parents, their bright and
beautiful children, breaking Ramadan fast
at the Muslim Educational Trust.
River City’s ethnic streams are robust.
According to Portland Public School
District 2010 data, about a hundred run
through here. Each, a blend of Old World
civility and New American ambition. Each
also, distorted a little or distorted a lot, by
our new homeland’s destructive habit of
racializing everything. Of racializing us.
Of course, our sending countries also
institutionalize discrimination. Russian
and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists daily
incite new cruelties among old neighbors;
Myanmar’s Buddha priests burn out her
Rohingya Muslims; Guatemala’s light-
skinned elites remove families indigenous
to their beloved soil. Indeed, like many
Portlanders, our family’s ethnic identity
got us evicted from our home and expelled
from our homeland.
Ethnicity has a million meanings, but at
its simplest, ethnicity is an intricate weave
of historically shared values and presently
lived beliefs. A rooted and shared culture.
What’s troubling about America, our
otherwise kind and creative new country,
is our mainstream’s systemic impatience
with beautiful cultural complexity in favor
of institutional commitment to “Race.”
Four or five check boxes of it. It’s all a bit
crazy-making.
L
How’s that working for you?
At our schools and workplaces; for our
licenses to drive, to do business, to marry,
to welcome a baby, we’re directed to
“self-identify” as this race or that race. You
can of course, call yourself “2+” or “Other”
— though one sounds diluted and the other
feels like you don’t count.
I did a survey. Okay, it wasn’t very
sciency, but I did earnestly poll those
dignified elders and civic activists I
mentioned at the top of this essay. I did
another in front of Nordstrom Rack, last
Saturday morning — where and when
you’ll find super hardworking immigrant
Oregon. All elbows.
How super? — the American Immigra-
tion Council reports that Oregon’s Asian
shoppers spent $6.1 billion, our stubbornly
optimistic Spanish-speaking families
added another $8.4 billion (2012).
And you know, not one of my tired
though proud respondents reported feeling
comfortable with this race thing. Not at all.
We are an American gateway city. 1-in-5
Portlanders are foreign born, and that’s
not counting our kids, dressed well every
September, as an expression of our respect
for their teachers. And here, on the
confluence of our region’s two river
matriarchs, on silty shores that convened
vigorous politics, commerce, social and
spiritual life, for 12 centuries before
President Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery
paddled up — here of all places, our
hundred robust ethnic streams are
directed to channel our identities into five
or six Race boxes. It’s like damming our
living rivers. It hurts us.
I will never forget how hurt and
confused our mother was when she noticed
a University of Oregon Affirmative Action
form among my homework on her kitchen
table. The “Asian” box was checked. I
marked it because doing so further coded
me as “Socio-economically Deprived.”
Which got me all kinds of college help.
Money too. Immigrants are a practical lot.
Immigrant teens are even better than
their American-born buds at maneuvering
inside the space left by exhausted,
distracted, or absent adults.
I remember how our mom scolded me
about how blessed we are, recipients of 75
generations of muscular and elegant
Javan civilization. She insisted, if
Japanese and Chinese and Koreans are
Here’s another: Recent immigrant and
refugee families — urban professionals
from Mother Africa’s rich west coast;
migratory herders from her arid eastside;
resourceful subsistence farmers from her
humid, thick middle — cannot settle
themselves into the “Black or African
American” check box. Arab- and Persian-
and Punjabi-Portlanders would really
rather not be White or Black or Other or
2+. Really not.
As applied to any of River City’s
ridiculously optimistic ethnic streams,
Race and those damning attributes that
word assigns to those thus described, are
terms out of touch. No stubborn elder, no
tired parent, no eager teenager, from Dove
Bar chocolate to Baby Grand ivory, around
our east Portland Sunday dinner table
wants to be a “Minority“ or “Under-
privileged.” Really. It’s not working for
New Americans. And unless our policy
leaders are committed to sealing a
self-fulfilling prophecy by linking this
language to robust New Americans, it’s
not working for settled Americans either.
It will never work.
If kind government proposed dumping
the Race box next week, surely each of us
would happily contribute a hundred hours
to rethinking and restructuring all that
negativity, to better inventorying our
newcomers’ enormous assets. Because you
know, just as living rivers will outlast
Army Corps of Engineers’ dams, American
dreamers will work around those check
boxes.
But you must also know, that between
now and then, we worry a lot about the
excruciating costs in treasury and in
misery, we’ll pay for the awful distortions
in our cultures, and for the consequent
bitterness between us. Between us all.
74.8% — White
13.6% — Black or African American
5.6% — Asian
1.7% — American Indian & Alaska Native
0.4% — Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific
Islander
7.0% — Other Race
Source: U.S. Census, 2010.
“Asians,” then we certainly are not. We had
no such notion (Asian) back home, back
then.
Dump the check box
It’s likely that otherwise competent
policymakers in President Nixon’s Census
Bureau just didn’t know that there are not
a lot of shared attributes among Hmong
and Magar, among Malay and Mongolian,
among many-many communities sharing
our vast Eurasian continent and her big
broken-off tectonic pieces. Except maybe
loving rice and bok choi. In fact, just our
mom’s world, our sweaty 3,000-mile
Indonesian archipelago, has always been
an unmanageable mélange of about 700
resilient ethnicities, none of them “Asian.”
“Oh aduh’illaah” (OMG) our mom
finally-finally finished. “If Opa see you do
dis,” waving my awful U of O Affirmative
Action form, and stabbing my duplicitous
heart. She walked away mad and sad.
Fast-forward 40 years. Though less
cringy language like “Under-privileged”
and “Under-served” have superseded the
one that so rattled our mom, America’s
institutionalized ruts still rule. Today, for
example, six proudly distinct ethno-
cultural local communities, given asylum
here during the Soviet Union’s disintegra-
tion, are not happy about having to self-
identify as “White” Portlanders. They’re
outside the mainstream. Way out there.
ASTHMA
IS
ON
THE RISE.
Wildlife groups say 41 tigers have died in India this year
Continued from page 5
Coupled with the decline in deer, wild
boar, and other smaller animals that
tigers prey on, the loss of buffer areas
outside tiger reserves is increasingly
driving the cats to move outside their
established territory into human settle-
ments, Niraj said.
A century ago an estimated 100,000
tigers roamed India’s forests. Their
numbers declined steadily until the 1970s,
when India banned tiger hunting and
embarked on a program to create special
reserves and protected areas in national
parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Conserva-
tion efforts began to pay off around 2010,
when tiger numbers began to slowly rise.
India faces intense international
scrutiny over its tiger conservation efforts
as it has nearly three-fourths of the world’s
estimated 3,200 tigers.
The illegal trade in tiger skin and body
parts still remains a stubborn and serious
threat.
Tiger organs and bones fetch high prices
on the black market because of demand
driven by traditional Chinese medicine
practitioners.
India is also roping in celebrities to
promote its tiger conservation program. In
mid-August, the western state of
Maharashtra announced that it was
appointing Bollywood superstar Amitabh
Bachchan as the state’s tiger ambassador
to create awareness about its efforts to
save the animals.
Go paperless!
Read The Asian Reporter –
exactly as it’s printed here – online!
Visit <www.asianreporter.com>
and click the “Online Paper (PDF)”
link to view our last two issues.
2
6 4
8
2
6
1 9
9
8
6
2
1
3
9
3
5
5 9
3
7
4
2 6
4
5
7
1
6
Difficulty
EASY
Help us find a cure.
1-800-LUNG-USA
3
level: Easy
#26642
# 11
Instructions: Fill in the grid so that the digits 1
through 9 appear one time each in every row, col-
umn, and 3x3 box.
Solution to
last week’s
puzzle
Puzzle #25787 (Hard)
All solutions available at
<www.sudoku.com>.
3
5
7
1
4
2
6
8
9
1
2
8
9
3
6
5
4
7
9
6
4
7
8
5
3
2
1
6
1
9
8
5
3
4
7
2
2
7
3
4
9
1
8
5
6
8
4
5
6
2
7
9
1
3
5
9
2
3
7
4
1
6
8
7
8
1
5
6
9
2
3
4
4
3
6
2
1
8
7
9
5