OPINION
January 16, 2017
TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
Fire Rooster Year 4715
How we’re going to do it
lection year 2016 is over. Now, new
national and state and local
governments are settling into
place. Put another way: Monkey Year 4714
is finished and Rooster Year 4715 is here
— a Fire Rooster Year, to be clear. One
bound to be hot, tempestuous, spectacular.
I paused a long moment when I left the
house today. Change was in our stilled and
chilled morning air. But a moment or two
later, our blessed sun rose, and along with
her rose every urban and barnyard rooster
on our grand continent’s western edge.
Each of them doing what roosters have
always done. 2016 or 2017, 4714 or 4715,
Monkey Year or Rooster Year, it’s all the
same to them.
These guys have gotten humans out of
bed, gotten us brushed and dressed and
breakfasted across time zones of every era,
across zip codes of all geographies, no
matter the day or the season. Roosters
don’t care whether it’s an election year or
not. They crow no matter who’s in office. Or
not.
Indeed, it doesn’t matter so much
whether your barnyard friends or your
cozy household follows the Greek or
Chinese calendar, the Egyptian or Mayan
E
one, the Persian or Hindu systems of
clocking our precious sun’s progress. It
matters more to note how much so many of
us, across our achy earth’s well-worn face,
want nothing more than to rise real early,
to make a lot of money, and to return at
workday’s end to the people we love. To the
people who love us.
2016’s awfulness
I’m not saying that these times don’t
matter. No one would say that we haven’t
just endured the most exhausting Monkey
Year in any grand auntie’s memory. A
long-long time. Because we did. We
weathered 12 full months of the ugliest
political theater. In daily bad acts. And
because what happens here, in our
immigrant nation, is inextricably linked to
what’s happening back home, our families
have faced constant turmoil no matter
which way we look.
Everywhere, 2016 was a year of sorrow
and humiliation. The worst. According to
the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees,
65.3 million children, parents, and elders
no longer have a home to rise early in, to
work hard for, to return to. In morning
papers and online, on evening news and
Facebook, Portland’s Asian and islander,
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
African and Arab, Mexican, Latin
American, and Russian-speaking house-
holds saw streams of people, their people,
trudging away from awfulness. We saw
Syrian baby boy Aylan Kurdi, our baby
boy, washed up on shore. So alone.
We know 2016 has been turmoil un-
precedented, both in raw scale of des-
peration, and for the enormity of wealth in
the world watching these families suffer
so.
Anxiety fills our River City homes. Fear
is through the roof. As we approach
Rooster Year 2017, many if not most of our
newcomer and minority communities
worry late into the night about what U.S.
President-elect Donald J. Trump will do to
them. To us. To a world of hurt no longer
segregated by wide oceans. Our world.
Sometimes, often times, it seems no one
knows where all this is going.
But you know, we do. We really do know
where we’re going. We know our families
have been through exhausted days and
awful nights before. Many times before.
Many places before. We’ve simply risen
every morning a moment after those
reliable roosters, who rose a moment after
our golden surija sun rose. We greet each
other warmly. We wash our faces. We
brush our teeth and hair. We went to work,
and we did well through years much
nastier than 2016 was, and even uglier
than 2017 can be.
2017’s goodness
The truth is, settled and new Americans
are tough and tender. Our ancestors and
elders, or you and me, had our hearts badly
broken by leaving our familias, by leaving
our beloved homeland’s soil and scents and
whispering trees. Then our bones got
broken by America — by the grim places
we worked in her unkind economy, and by
the daily battering of a mass culture so
These guys have gotten
humans out of bed, gotten
us brushed and dressed and
breakfasted across time
zones of every era, across zip
codes of all geographies, no
matter the day or the season.
Roosters don’t care whether
it’s an election year or not.
contrary to who and how we are. Still, in
truth, we made it. We cried and laughed
together, then we cried and laughed some
more. We prayed a lot. Every day we did all
that, reliable as roosters. We did good. We
are good.
The operant word in and out of all that
earlier awfulness, is we. We sorrow. We
persist. We celebrate us. Surely, this is
exactly how and why Rooster Year 4715
cannot do us any new harm.
We are a nation of stubborn immigrants.
Ridiculously optimistic. Creative and
kind. We know that if we’re going to stay
this way — no matter what kind of year
we’ve just wrapped up and no matter what
kind of new year is rolling in — we must
stay true to us. True to how we are around
our kitchen table; at this Friday mosque,
this Saturday or Sunday temple or church;
all over any crazy Costco, IKEA, or factory
outlet mall.
More than who’s in political office, we
have always minded more who we rise so
early with, who we work so hard for, who
we come home to at the end of another
exhausted workday, workweek, calendar
year. We nurture us.
That is how we are. And we are good.
North Korea is a bad trip if you’re looking to get high
Continued from page 4
Troy Collings, a frequent traveller
to North Korea and managing
director of Young Pioneer Tours,
offered a more mundane explanation:
It’s just hemp.
Ditchweed. Nebraska no-high.
“I’ve seen and even purchased
hemp, but it doesn’t contain any THC
and is just sold as a cheap substitute
for tobacco,” he told The AP in an
e-mail. “It grows wild in the
mountainous regions of the North
and people pick it, dry it, and sell it in
the markets, but it doesn’t get you
high no matter how much you
smoke.”
Hemp is grown in North Korea
with official sanction. It’s used to
make consumer goods including
towels, cooking oil, and noodles, as
well as military uniforms and belts.
It’s also used as rabbit fodder.
(Rabbits are grown for food.)
But industrial hemp is generally so
low in THC, the active ingredient
found in its cannabinoid cousins,
sativa and indica, that it’s useless for
medicinal or recreational purposes.
It’s even cultivated in a different
manner, focusing on male plants that
do not produce buds. It’s the buds of
female plants that recreational users
are most after.
The Pyongyang Hemp Processing
Factory actively markets hemp
products
as
“environmentally
friendly” and “perfect for the 21st
century.” An official at the plant told
The Associated Press that while
several varieties of hemp grow in
North Korea, all are very low in THC.
BAD TRIP. A saleswoman holds up a locally produced t-shirt made of hemp in Pyongyang,
North Korea, which has been getting some pretty high praise lately from the stoner world. The claim
that marijuana is legal in North Korea and that if any laws do exist, they aren’t enforced, is emphati-
cally not true, according to the North Korean penal code, which lists it as a controlled substance in
the same category as cocaine and heroin. Hemp is, in fact, grown in North Korea with official sanc-
tion, but it’s used to make cooking oil and military uniforms and belts. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)
“No one smokes this in our
country,” she said, requesting she not
be named because of the sensitive
nature of talking to the American
media. “It’s only used for making
things.”
North Korea grows something else
that might be confused with
marijuana: a mix of brown and
greenish leafy tobacco that is used in
pipes and sold openly in Pyongyang
and elsewhere.
Smoking a lot of that could
certainly give someone a buzz — and
probably a bad headache. But from
the nicotine.
Nevertheless, Simon Cockerell,
general manager of Koryo Tours,
another agency that specializes in
bringing foreign tourists to the
North, said the idea that marijuana is
legal in North Korea has become so
widespread that it’s not uncommon
for prospective tourists to ask what to
expect.
“We apologize, but have to inform
those enquiring about this that weed
is not legal. They are not going to be
able to get any there,” he said.
“The idea that the country is full of
stoners blissfully getting high in a
legal-weed paradise is not an
accurate one,” he added. “Not having
seen or done something doesn’t mean
it is never seen or done, of course. But
I have never seen this.”
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Difficulty
MEDIUM
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level: Medium
#37811
# 22
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 issue’s
puzzle
Puzzle #58452 (Easy)
All solutions available at
<www.sudoku.com>.
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