OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
August 6, 2018
Volume 28 Number 15
August 6, 2018
ISSN: 1094-9453
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TALKING STORY IN ASIAN AMERICA
n Polo
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American disability in
a world of hurt, and joy
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am a refugee from Indonesia. And I’m
American too — a beneficiary of our shared
continent’s abundance. Being this blend means
a lot. For families like ours, it means today’s long
summer days are very different from July 2016, six
months before our otherwise kind and creative
nation went into one of those recurring mood
swings. The ugly kind, our kids’ history books tell
them all about. Sure they do.
Today, roughly 1-in-5 Portlanders are foreign
born. Beaverton is 1-in-4. And these stats don’t
include indivisible parts of us — our U.S.-born
wives, our bright children and grandchildren. And
you know, this mix means so much too. Healthy
American
schools,
businesses,
faith
and
civil-society associations, require a vigorous rub of
Native, settled, and New Americans. Sure we do.
Surely we always have.
Our elegant Indo ethnic community is part of this
beautiful noise. In fact, we’ve contributed to that
transnational love affair with America since 1944.
Since polite soldierboys named Red (Lakota) and
Tex (Mejicano) and Guinea (Italiano) and Detroit
(Polsk) crushed Imperial Japan’s brutal occupation
army. Since Yanks rebuilt our school, then made us
swings and seesaws from construction leftovers.
Our first playground. Ever.
Seventy years later and 17,000 miles west, our
elders still weep about the Sunday morning these
guys, also crying, left us. For home. Home, where
moms and girlfriends missed them so. These
idealists, those elders still insist, are our “real
Americans.”
Two dark decades of civil warring shamed our
nascent Indonesian nation before we finally fled our
home. When at last we arrived in Hoboken, N.J.,
“small, sweaty, and brown” — pirating a quote from
Multnomah County commissioner-elect Susheela
Jayapal on her 1978 U.S. arrival — customs cops
only inspected our two hastily stuffed steamer
trunks. They didn’t document our Costco shopping
cart-sized cache of social and spiritual wealth.
Those very assets that secured our health and
happiness through three preceding centuries of
Netherlands colonial cruelty.
Two sides of our American coin
When our train pulled into Salem, and we rested
I
Maybe unlike me, many Portlanders
don’t weep shamelessly, don’t stumble
for days after — no matter how many
oceans or decades, university degrees or
regular paychecks, separate my debilitating
memories from our shared present.
Maybe we all better get this together, today.
in a tidy house generously filled by Westminster
Presbyterian Church elders, Mamma carefully
unpacked all our humbling pain into our bottom
dresser drawers. Into top drawers, she neatly folded
800 millennia of uninterrupted love for kualarga
(family) and comunidad, our bond with our pretty
planet and mysterious God. Together, we are this
hurt and this joy. This wealth, not transferable into
24-hour ATMs, is what lab-jacketed social scientists
call “cultural capital.”
These sacred bonds are easily missed by U.S. port
officials. Portland policy leaders don’t include their
value to municipal budgets. But, when our wealth
stirs well with Oregon banks of staid institu-
tionalized capital, this merger accounts for our
envied nation’s uncontested place on our achey little
earth. For our shared future. For sure.
Here’s how it works: Our Salem-born kids are Old
World-raised and U.S.-educated. Their polite
daughters are brave and beautiful. Traditionalism
fused with American hipness makes us as fluent in
River City’s mainstream as we are in our vigorous
ethnic streams. We arc over oceans east and west,
confidently solving problems. We jumbo jet to
continents that took weeks to cross when I was our
eager granddaughter Jettaya’s age. Back when only
shaman Auntie Kris, peepers squeezed tight, could
communicate over time and space. Today, any tolol
with two thumbs, an iPhone, and okay credit can
FaceTime anywhere, anytime.
Today tambien, Portland’s 70 ethnic-stream
elders worry late nights about our more settled
neighbors who don’t live inside family histories of
bottomless sorrow, of blessed joy. About how these
Americans don’t reminisce about fragrant rains or
gossipy Eucalyptus who eased us into sleep, back
home. How they don’t long for patient aunties
translating all that living into meaning.
Continued on page 11
Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.