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About The Asian reporter. (Portland, Or.) 1991-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 6, 2017)
OPINION Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER November 6, 2017 Volume 27 Number 21 November 6, 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 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. When I’m sixty-four, oooh retty soon I’ll be sixty-four. There’s a fun Beatles song about this. About how abuelos like me can still be “handy, mending a fuse when your lights are gone.” And that’s true. I still can. Pero what’s also true is how — in neighborhoods rich in Native- and Spanish-speaking Americans; in cozy households from all over Asia, from Father Russia, from Mothers India, Africa, and China; around family tables from several Pacific and Caribbean island nations — at sixty-four, folks like me finally get some Respect. With a cap R. They say we’ve earned some perspective. We can see above housetops and treetops, and across borders supposedly separating peoples and places, over the immediacy of time rushing by you and me. And looking back, over the relatively short time our familia has lived in this otherwise kind and creative country, here’s an astounding fact: the United States has warred fifteen times. That’s a lot. That’s five decades of our government crushing families where they sleep and school and work; where they shop and sit down for coffee or tea. All that awfulness, on the premise that we’re killing some very bad people. Threats to you and me. What’s evident to me now — and I say this with a grandpa’s great love for America — is what actually allows our policy leaders to war on faraway communities like that, is the same emotional and moral segregation that’s killing you and me in Ferguson, in Baton Rouge and Baltimore. In short: We’ve become a nation of consumers. And what we consume, disconnects us. The nation — once our achy earth’s expression of participatory democracy, of an idealistic people pitching in, shaping our world — is today a very passive place. When America meant it Here’s what I mean: When I was a squirrelly krotjong, our elders spoke fondly of slim and polite soldierboys nicknamed Red, Brooklyn, and Ski. Earnest Yanks who sent our enemy, Imperial Japan’s brutal army, running. Then they rebuilt our schoolhouse. They made us a seesaw and a swing set from construction leftovers. We shared Lucky Strikes and Hershey bars. Our grandparents and parents cried, these boys cried, when they sailed away, longing for their own moms, wives, and girlfriends. Ultimately, we sailed away too. To here. Thank P Instead of worldliness, our settled neighbors seem locked into much smaller universes. Sworn to newsy networks. Stuck among agreeable Facebook friends. God. But unlike past era migrants who had to break with their elders and ancestors, my generation of newcomers participate in a robust circulating systems of peoples, products, and ideas. We jumbo jet, Facetime, and ATM round and round. This connectedness matters a lot. In quiet conversation with any New American from any of those energetic communities mentioned earlier, it’s not uncommon to hear about a time she was sharing a bad or a beautiful moment she has lived with her settled American co-workers, and have them turn that conversation to a Huffington Post article or a New York Times bestseller. The disconnect startles us, every time. Instead of worldliness, our settled neighbors and co-workers seem locked into much smaller universes. Sworn to newsy networks. Stuck among agreeable Facebook friends. Sure, they’re less exposed to sorrow, to joy and our inevitable loss of it. But thus disconnected, they seem so vulnerable to curators of niche knowledge. To distributors of shallower experience. And containers of narrower selfhood. What results is a shared narrative that’s so intellectually and emotionally affirming that actually acting in a dissonant world of “others” becomes unnecessary. Indeed, unlikely. This outcome is bad for Afghanis and North Koreans, both homogenous folk locked into small, poor countries. This is really bad for Americans. How we got so small Stanford’s best MBAs are on it. They’re on to us, every time your peepers touch your iPhone. About 80 times per day. “Like” someone or something and tightly tailored commerce closes in even more. Their rapid cycles of research, development, and distribu- tion are making real time (painful familial or com- munal or national history) irrelevant. Their prod- ucts, like cliché characterizations of rural Republi- cans or un-understandable Islamic clerics, make real people unnecessary. The truth of real places Continued on page 8 Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.