OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
November 6, 2017
Volume 27 Number 21
November 6, 2017
ISSN: 1094-9453
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TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
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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.