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About The Asian reporter. (Portland, Or.) 1991-current | View Entire Issue (April 3, 2017)
OPINION Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER April 3, 2017 Volume 27 Number 7 April 3, 2017 ISSN: 1094-9453 The Asian Reporter is published on the first and third Monday each month. Please send all correspondence to: The Asian Reporter 922 N Killingsworth Street, Suite 2D, Portland, OR 97217 Phone: (503) 283-4440, Fax: (503) 283-4445 News Department e-mail: news@asianreporter.com Advertising Department e-mail: ads@asianreporter.com General e-mail: info@asianreporter.com Website: www.asianreporter.com Please send reader feedback, Asian-related press releases, and community interest ideas/stories to the addresses listed above. Please include a contact phone number. Advertising information available upon request. Publisher Jaime Lim Contributing Editors Ronault L.S. Catalani (Polo), Jeff Wenger Correspondents Ian Blazina, Josephine Bridges, Pamela Ellgen, Maileen Hamto, Edward J. Han, A.P. Kryza, Marie Lo, Simeon Mamaril, Julie Stegeman, Toni Tabora-Roberts, Allison Voigts Illustrator Jonathan Hill News Service Associated Press/Newsfinder Copyright 2017. Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication. Member Associated Press/Newsfinder Asian American Journalists Association Better Business Bureau Pacific Northwest Minority Publishers (PNMP) Philippine American Chamber of Commerce of Oregon TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA n Polo Correspondence: The Asian Reporter welcomes reader response and participation. Please send all correspondence to: Mail: 922 N Killingsworth Street, Suite 2D, Portland, OR 97217-2220 Phone: (503) 283-4440 ** Fax: (503) 283-4445 News Department e-mail: news@asianreporter.com General e-mail: info@asianreporter.com The Safety Pin Best intentions, solemn commitments SUBSCRIPTION RATES (U.S. rates only) Individual subscription (sent bulk rate): q Half year: $14 q Full year: $24 q Two years: $40 Individual subscription (sent first class mail): q Half year: $24 q Full year: $40 q Two years: $72 Office subscription (5 copies to one address): q Half year: $40 q Full year: $75 q Two years: $145 Institutional subscription (25 copies to one address): q Half year: $100 q Full year: $180 q Two years: $280 NEW SUBSCRIBER / ADDRESS CORRECTION INFORMATION FORM: Subscriber’s name: Company name: Address: City, State, ZIP: Phone: Fax: E-mail: Mail with payment or Fax with credit card information to: The Asian Reporter, Attn: Subscription Dept., 922 N Killingsworth Street, Suite 2D, Portland, OR 97217-2220 Phone: (503) 283-4440 * Fax: (503) 283-4445 q q q For VISA, Mastercard, or American Express payment only: Name (as it appears on the card): Type of card (circle): VISA Mastercard Card number: American Express Security code: Expiration date: Address of card: The last four issues of The Asian Reporter are available for pick up free at our office 24 hours a day at 922 N Killingsworth Street, Suite 2D, Portland, Oregon. Back issues of The Asian Reporter may be ordered by mail at the following rates: First copy: $1.50 Additional copies ordered at the same time: $1.00 each Send orders to: Asian Reporter Back Issues, 922 N. Killingsworth St., Portland, OR 97217-2220 The Asian Reporter welcomes reader response and participation. If you have a comment on a story we have printed, or have an Asian-related personal or community focus idea, please contact us. Please include a contact name, address, and phone number on all correspondence. Thank you. was bone tired. I was slouched at the exhausted end of one of those nights when your workday just won’t quit. Not with so much still undone. I pulled on my boots, believing a walk would help, but Oregon rain was falling straight and hard from clouds not half as high as downtown’s Wells Fargo. Then, as if on cosmic cue, a Facebook notification buzzed my sleepy iPhone. Kathleen D. Gunnell Saadat was posting about the Portland Safety Pin. The Safety Pin, if you haven’t heard, lets anxious families who fled cruel states, failed economies, or rising oceans, know they’re safe near the pin’s wearer. “Safe” from our super-nationalist leaders and their suddenly enabled followers. Ibu Kathleen Saadat, if you haven’t met, is living history. One of our River City anchor elders. On this moody Tuesday night she was using social media to set out what her muscular generation expects from the next one. From us. In her post, Ibu Kathleen wrote about a couple gathering her in their arms when an angry man yelled all kinds of racial awfulness at her. It happened before our current turn toward societal instability, well before our Safety Pin. “No one helped,” she said, “until I called to a passing couple and asked for help. They were white. They did not hesitate.” “People who choose to wear a safety pin,” Ibu Kathleen continued in the tone characteristic of all elder aunties on all continents and on every lovely island in between, “should understand the commit- ment they make to get directly involved.” “I took my chances that whoever I asked for help, would in fact help.” Long pause. And inside her pause lies the solemn social compact of our times. Inside this moment, must reside both your promise to act and her trust in your sincerity. I Executive Order 9066 anniversary Ibu Kathleen’s gamble that night was big. The biggest. Indeed, ask any River City ethnic-stream elder and they’ll recount seven decades of fumbled foreign-policy promises, our constitution’s amnesiac episodes, local civil society’s silence, even gentle Jesus Christ’s urgings — living in the broken hearts of Native and African America — chilling the broken bones of our Nikkei, Korean, Khmer, Lao, Hmong, Iu Mien, Lao, Afghani, Iraqi, and Kurdi “No one helped, until I called to a passing couple and asked for help. They were white. They did not hesitate.” -- Kathleen D. Gunnell Saadat neighbors. These families asking for help again, from Anglo America, is big. Sharing a nation made of our best intentions, has never been enough. Portland ideals will not do. This year we sorrow the 75th anniversary of Japanese America’s forced removal from their homes. From their homes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 elders, parents, and their children to barbed-wire compounds. Portlanders’ babies were born under the guard of U.S. Army riflemen. Only those of us committed, as Kathleen Saadat said, “to get directly involved,” can mend these neighbors’ hearts and bones. Pronouncing policy statements is not enough. You and me gathering to cheer them, is not enough. President Donald J. Trump’s authoritarian ethos has already turned into hard hits. On us. On Native, settled, and new Americans, alike. How each of us acts on the Safety Pin’s promise, is a personal commitment. Drawing a crowd to protect a Mexican or a Muslim from an immigration officer or an ugly bigot, is good. Good also is civil disobedience in the tradition of don César E. Chávez and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Mastering a simple jujitsu trip is good. Those of us safe in our households and work floors telling our elected officials that declines in public services in exchange for protecting vulnerable families, is necessary. Bottom line: The Pin requires some pain. Commitment is like that. But there’s a big prize. The biggest. At the end of Ibu Kathleen Saadat’s essay, she says the five sweetest words you’ll ever hear during your short stay on our shared little blue planet — “I will never forget them.” Meaning, that kind couple who em- braced her fears. Meaning those lovely Portlanders ready to close the awful distance between best Continued on page 7 Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.
