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From The Asian Reporter, V18, #2 (January 8, 2008), page 7.
Parked between Solar and Lunar New Years
There are a thousand-thousand cool things about America. About living here. One of these is the space we enjoy between New Years — between Solar (Roman) New Year and Lunar (Chinese) New Year. You get about a month to think about stuff. Important stuff.
And this is a real gift, another nice benefit of being here. Of being American. Lots of choices. Extra holidays like Rev. Dr. King’s Birthday, St. (Ogh) Valentine’s Day, and Turkey Day are all, in effect, New World opportunities for Old World excesses in food, family, friends — to name three of the Four Big Fs.
But you know — and yes, there’s always a big bad but, as inevitable consequence of overdoing all those fried goodies, fine wines, and fancy desserts — American anchorless-ness has a definite downside. It’s called The Drift. Hati-hati.
The thing is: More choices do not always make more better. A zillion options, like surfing countless cable TV channels, often makes for sensory overload, short spans of attention, and ankle-deep understanding. Shallow people live in shallow water. It’s hard for spirit (Holy Spirit, ancestral spirits, spirits of deep rivers or hushed hills, you name ’em) to reside here.
I worry about our baby boys and girls.
In seas this uncertain, newcomers are vulnerable. The United States is one anxious social experiment. Since this young nation’s inception, our political and educational leaders have been very busy homogenizing energetic immigrants. More successful, more relentless, are those smart suits managing the tastes of America’s marketplace. These guys are good.
How Proctor & Gamble makes me feel in my bathroom mirror first thing every morning, what’s on Eddie Bauer’s sales rack, how General Mills sets breakfast tables coast-to-coast, how intensely the makers of my kids’ little personal media players and content have plied the packed corporate airwaves and persuaded our vulnerable families, amount to much more efficient ways of dissolving ancient beliefs and elegant behavior than any governmental mandate. Business takes care of business. Ours.
Our imbalance of trade
We need to mind much more carefully the trade, our trade, when exchanging Old World social and spiritual capital for American financial and technological assets. We give too much away. Ask anyone. Ask any immigrant mom about her son’s manners after school.
Once we trade off our elders’ respect for our generous soil in exchange for a Ford SUV, right after our traditional rituals for sending away perished parents are exchanged for a calendared commercial funeral package — Yellow Pages are crowded with competitors for your trade — we can’t buy any of it, any of them, back. There’s no return, there’s no refund.
Between Western and Lunar New Years we need to wonder why so few of us worry aloud about our cultural disintegration, while so many alert community activists, earnest university ethnic studies professors, and vigilant media watchers are so quick about railing against real or imagined insults to our sensibilities.
"Ching-chong Chinese," whether said by big man Shaquille O’Neal or smart mouth Rosie O’Donnell, doesn’t matter that much. Those cartoon caricatures of funny-face Asians on editorial pages or café menus, causing such uproar, mean very little when measured against what we give away in trade for becoming American. They are distractions. Like every magician’s trick, they redirect our attention while the real deal goes up a sleeve. Down the drain.
The "race card" is a virulent American illness. It’s a contagion born from awful ethnocide to claim this land then ugly slavery to lay her economic foundation. Stolen soil, stolen lives, are terrible-terrible karma. America is sick with it. With anger.
But we don’t need to be. Asians and islanders, Arabs, Africans, and Spanish-speaking familia from all our Americas need not participate in this disease. We don’t need the distraction.
Our cultural cache
We need love. America longs for the ways we love — our responsibility to ancient duties (so different from Yank insistence on individual rights); our respect for elegant elders; our reverence for our world, deep with joy, vast with mystery, alive with us.
Responsibility, respect, and reverence are not assigned homework, ask any dad looking over his dizzy daughter after a Saturday at Clackamas Town Center. He knows it. We know it. Only America doesn’t know it, quite yet.
Parked between New Years is a good place to sit and think about what American immigrants know. And 2008 is an important year to start acting like it. If neighborhood schools fail our values, let’s elect a school board that won’t. If city cops, if county prosecutors, parks, or kids’ rec programs don’t enforce our cultural expectations, we vote for leaders who will. If state law doesn’t provide us wages high enough, or work absences long enough, to be good parents, let’s make ourselves some new law. It takes only a committed minority to lead local electoral politics. It takes focus. It takes us.
There are a thousand-thousand cool things about America. Lots of choices. And by now we’ve seen American anchorless-ness is not one of them. America’s race craziness, we also know, need not be ours. So many distractions, so much disconnection, and all that anger all over the place.
It’s time for us to live here. Not just reside here, not only work-work-work here. Our American kids need us connected. Need us leading. Taking responsibility for our elected leaders is how we start. Respect for our ancient and elegant selves is what it will take.
Reverence for all this, for our America, is where we will end.
Ayoh, saudara saudara. The morning after New Years day, we go to work.
Nota: All Asian caricatures above are similar to ones stirring protest over this past year. These three, however, are from mainstream Asian contexts — in Hawai’i, Japan, Thailand. No offense.