OPINION
December 21, 2015
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
“We as Portlanders,
Oregonians, Americans,
and human beings need to
remember that refugees are
fleeing the senseless violence
that has taken so many lives
recently. I will be greeting
Portland’s first Syrian refugee
family at the airport, and I
expect the community will help
make our city their new home.
It’s the Portland way.”
n Polo
At year’s end
What we do, and who we are
A
va is photocopying piles of papers.
Papers in Arabic and French and
English. Yellowed and folded and
refolded papers. Papers of paragraphs
neatly masoned in blocks of tidy MS Word
font. Papers in the universally awful
scrawl of rushed physicians. Important
papers, all of them.
Ava is 10. Her big brother Jude is 11.
She’s in fifth grade, he’s in sixth, and they
both like school a lot. Their mom, Diana
Nuñez, explained this demanding docu-
mentation task — their entire Saturday —
just a couple of evenings before. During
dinner.
“They need to see another perspective,”
Ms. Nuñez says, “an example of the
generations that came before them, what it
took so that they can have their com-
fortable lives now. I am a first-generation
Mexican American,” she says. “And they
are second generation.”
Exhausted Iraqi and Afghani parents,
wounded Congo and Burma women,
brought those important papers real early
this Saturday morning. Bright Somali
teenagers brought them by the Safeway
grocery-bag full. Four generations of brand
new Portlanders of 14 Old World commu-
nities packed them to Catholic Charities of
Oregon’s four-story block on still hushed
S.E. Powell Boulevard, between Wendy’s
and Cleveland High, near East Portland
Locksmith. Those hardy little English
sparrows, here even in gloomy November,
were singing their hearts out.
What refugee means
These families arrived by TriMet’s first
morning busses, when Catholic Charities
was dark and locked. I shared a Turkish
smoke with Iraqi Kurd brothers Jassim
and Dar. Around us, our growing crowd
chatted anxiously in about a quarter of
Portland’s 90 or so languages, worrying
whether they brought the right papers.
Whether they even had them. Ever. They
are refugees. Like our family and I were —
meaning, none of us had the time or
presence of mind to sort and pack anything
before shoving out to sea, or striking out
across the frontier.
Meaning, the U.N.’s High Commissioner
for Refugees plus the president of the
United States of America, separately
determined that each toddler and teen,
each parent, grandparent, and great-
grandparent, gathering here at Catholic
Charities, is a scared-to-death asylum
seeker. It is a fine-toothed legal process.
This Saturday morning’s crowd are the
lucky ones. “Tentu, kasihan’illaah,” surely
God loves you, we say back home, because
many do not get out alive. Most still sit in
neighboring nations’ squalid holding
camps, or have surreptitiously slipped into
their general populations. Stateless illegal
aliens, forever.
I see our mother in many-many women’s
faces here. I see our father too. She’s
looking hard at him, and he’s turned away.
She’s extremely anxious about whether
he’s collected the requisite quantum and
quality of evidence of each of our family
member’s reasonable fear of persecution,
as the legal standard reads. She’s worried
sick, whether each of our respective paper
piles will verify that each of us is moral
enough to remain in the United States. Or
be shipped back, to hell.
Our mamma, and consequently her
entire household, indeed our entire com-
munity of likewise open-wounded families,
lived at this exhausting emotional high for
only four years. Folks gathered here today,
have hummed with this communal dread,
depending on which nation they fled, for
anywhere from two to 22 years.
Our pop did not return her gaze. Not
because he’s not the mightiest man out of
the Ouwe Batavia neighborhood their
families shared back home. Because he is.
The blessed fact of us breathing Oregon air
and living American dreams, proves it.
Less muscular and less quick-witted dads’
families never got out, or they’re still
sitting around miserable refugee commu-
nities in humid Malaysia, in arid Kenya, in
suburban France.
No. These men aren’t returning their
women’s looks because of shame. Out of
humiliation. Because they’ve failed to
properly protect and properly provide for
their families. Like each promised. Seas of
this shame are rising everywhere, oceans
as dark as those dividing families
burdened by last century’s colonialized
economies and the beneficiaries of our
accelerated west.
Humiliated men are not good. There’s
risk that some will harm themselves, and
maybe others, usually those they love —
our Anglo-American legal standard for
locking them away.
“It’s the Portland way”
About 1,200 refugees resettle like this in
Oregon each year. Every month about 100
survivors of our wobbly world’s worst
regimes take a deep breath here. Here, on
the generous banks of our two river
matriarchs. Our city (America’s 52nd
largest) ranks eleventh for numbers of
refugees. Our percentage of kind people is
much higher than most U.S. cities. Terima
kasih banjak (I offer our love) for your
-- Portland mayor Charlie Hales
Diana Nuñez and her daughter Ava are seen at Catho-
lic Charities of Oregon, first- and second-generation
New Americans doing what Portlanders are nationally
envied for doing. Civil society. (Photo/Ping Khaw)
rants. I mean, grade-schoolers Ava and
Jude, and their proud New American
mom, Diana. Back in Indonesia, we called
these folks tetangga penuh kasih (kind
neighbors).
Civil society made Portland a nationally
envied model of neighborhood activism,
from the time our family resettled right up
to now. Affirming this extraordinary
ethos, while dismissing those shrill
narratives linking terrorism to families
fleeing ferocious armies, mayor Charlie
Hales recently said: “I will be greeting
Portland’s first Syrian refugee family at
the airport, and I expect the community
will help make our city their new home.”
“It’s the Portland way,” he said. A
certain attitude, backed by solid acts.
Ava says that when she walked into
Catholic Charities’ crowded community
room, she felt curious about so many
different families from so many different
places, and then she felt sad about their
really hard lives. Her mom explained what
it means to be a refugee, and what hope
means to lost parents and kids. Ms. Nuñez
says she’s teaching her children that
helping at Catholic Charities gives these
families hope. That their help makes these
parents and kids feel cared for. That it’s
about both feeling others’ sorrow and
doing something about it.
So what are Ava and Jude doing next?
Helping mom organize a pillow and tooth-
brush drive at their school. Simply and
solidly acting on a kid’s understanding of
what it takes to feel comforted, and to start
a new life. Doing what Portlanders do.
Nota: To view facts on U.S. refugee resettlement,
simply and solidly stated, visit <www.immigration
policy.org/just-facts/refugees-fact-sheet>.
goodness. Portlanders are like that.
How this continuously cycling flow of
our achy earth’s most resourceful and most
optimistic families successfully integrates
into River City, is really the core of this
column. Coincidentally, it’s also central to
this season, the one of miracles celebrated
by all children of Prophet Abraham. Jews
and Muslims and Christians alike.
Mainstreaming Portland’s 70 or so
newcomer streams is mostly the work of
local civil society. Of course, our federal
government directly assists refugees
(though not immigrants) for eight months;
county government looks after health and
wellness; city hall engages elders and
activists in getting valuable city services
into our ambitious neighborhoods. But the
thousand-thousand things newcomers
need to know and say and do daily — like
shopping and driving, like speaking to
your son’s teacher or your grandma’s
doctor, like filing forms necessary to be a
driver, a patient, or a legally present alien
— require caring people. Our civil society.
By civil society, we mean that second
wave of Portlanders arriving at Catholic
Charities this early Saturday morning:
those still-sleepy neighbors, lawyers, cops,
social workers, community activists,
lugging spouted boxes of hot Starbucks,
Costco-sized flats of croissants, bagels,
tubs of cream cheese, and enough bottled
water for, well, a humanitarian crisis. We
mean: Asian Pacific American Chamber of
Commerce’s president Ping Khaw carry-
ing tray after tray of fragrant entrées
donated by Chinese Portlanders’ restau-
Band favored by North Korean
leader cancels Beijing concerts
Continued from page 3
have been related to stories
circulated by South Korean media
about a rumored past relationship
between the married Kim and a
female member of the band, which
also made rounds on Chinese social
media, said Yang Moo-jin, a North
Korea expert at the University of
North Korean Studies in Seoul.
North Korea has built a cult of
personality around the Kim
family, which has ruled for three
generations, and sees any outside
criticism or mockery of its leader as
an attack on its sovereignty.
“There are few things the North
takes more seriously than an
attack on the dignity of its supreme
leadership, and it might have
decided to bring the female
members of the band back quickly
to cut off such reports,” Yang said.
While China continues to
provide crucial economic support
and diplomatic cover for Kim’s
impoverished communist regime,
the North Korean leader appears
to have used defiance of Beijing to
shore up perceptions of his own
power and independence of action.
Relations appeared to be on the
mend following a well-publicized
visit to Pyongyang by high-ranking
Chinese official Liu Yunshan in
October. However, Kim’s unwill-
ingness to visit China and his
government’s refusal to restart
denuclearization talks have frus-
trated the Chinese leadership.
Associated Press writers Louise Watt
in Beijing and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul,
South Korea contributed to this report.
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#41268
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Instructions: Fill in the grid so that the digits 1
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Solution to
last week’s
puzzle
Puzzle #12548 (Medium)
All solutions available at
<www.sudoku.com>.
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