INSIDE:

NEWS/STORIES/ARTICLES
Book Reviews
Columns/Opinion/Cartoon
Films
International
National
NW/Local
Recipes
Special A.C.E. Stories
Online Paper (PDF)

NW RESOURCE GUIDE
Archives
Consulates
Organizations
Scholarships
Special Sections

Upcoming

The Asian Reporter Eleventh Annual Scholarship & Awards Banquet -
April 2009

May, 2009

Asian Reporter Info

About Us

Advertising Info.

AR Merchandise
Contact Us
Subscription Info. & Back Issues

Readers Map on Frapper

ASIA LINKS
Asian Studies
Currency Exchange
More Asian Links
Public Holidays
Time Zones


Copyright © 2000 - 2008
AR Home

Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #13 (March 25, 2008), page 7.

I became adult in America. It’s an important thing. Becoming big. Because grownup here is different from adult back home. It really is.

What’s different in traditional societies back there as well as in ethnic minority American enclaves right here, is how much others expect you to act it. To act adult. To be big-hearted and broad-shouldered. Emotionally responsive to people around you and responsible for what power you own. Traditional types notice right away when you fall short. And we don’t like it. Soon enough, if you continue failing to act your age, you lose face. And our respect.

Take for instance, the examples of Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Ogh.

You can see their fall in your friends’ eyes. We can hear it in our family’s disapproval. Folks just want to tell those two to knock it off. Their awful demise under the pressures of our extremely competitive political process has been disappointing.

It has been disclosive. It is not what we’re entitled to expect from those we want to respect. Our elected leaders.

Not so long ago, everyone was hopeful. So jazzed about these two. Either a brown guy or a white woman would surely unpack his or her bags along with our anxieties at the Big House on Pennsylvania Avenue. New Americans and young voters were walking around as if wearing just-off-the-shelf Nike Airs. Heaven.

Indeed, I have fond memories of President and Mrs. Clinton holding hands at Saigon’s Ben Thanh marketplace, their Secret Servicemen nipping around nervous as macaque when leopard’s in morning’s breeze, while those two squeezed between early morning aunties, sniffing papayas and sucking scalding noodle soup.

Just the other day, my son — one of those energized new voters — grabbed my arm. "Pop, you’ve got to read his book," he said, all breathless about Dreams From My Father. "Barack Obama talks just like we do." Sure he does. He’s nurtured in Indonesia, educated in Hawai’i, and degreed in Anglo-American law. He muscled up as an urban organizer. Me too.

In short, these two: Mrs. Clinton — the good wife, that dutiful ma, everybody’s strict and super-smart auntie — and Bong Barack, so naturally clad in his Asian ethos and an islandboy aesthetic, are both ohana. Family.

But shorter still has been these two familiar leaders’ tumble from our fond dreams, from our high expectations. And they’re falling hard.

"That woman’s a MONSTER," Saturday morning’s dim sum café crowd reported the Obama camp characterizing their competitor.

Ogh.

"Sure, I’ll let him be my Vice President, but FIRST you gotta vote for ME" — folks were quoting Mrs. Clinton.

Crude.

It’s all coming down to what our ma used to do at times like these. "Ooo, don’t youuu make me have to use dis!" she’d hiss between clenched teeth, dropping a rubber slipper from her foot. And us bad boys knew ex-xactly what she meant. And we did not want her to use it. Not on us. No way.

Now I’m thinking about dropping a silapa myself. Maybe its familiar smack on our old linoleum will wake up Senators Clinton and Obama. Make them cut it out, or get knocked silly. Because I’m close to losing it. Losing the love, because we expect much-much more from family after times like these. Times like ours.

It’s been a dark decade.

Many of us are ready to end an era of little leaders and big fat fears. We long to reconnect with an edgy world embittered with America. With us. And we can make it so, but adults will have to lead.

Democratic leaders, mature ones, do not reduce loyal followers to adolescent brawlers by casting political rivals as monsters or as amateurs incapable of protecting us from all that ambient evil. Out there. That’s so low. Red phones and Soviet rockets are long gone. Osama and Saddam and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright are, at their best, how bad parents frighten kids while tucking them into bed.

Leaders habituating us to every kind of imagined menace, need to knock it off. And of course, those of us followers drawn into this kind of dependency, into their kind of drama, need to grow up.

We all need to move along. A lovely future, our precious blue planet, needs us optimistic again. American dreamers.

* * *

bong (Khmer, Malay): brother. An affectionate address. Need not be an actual brother by birth or law.

ohana (Hawaiian): family. A broader definition of family in feeling and in law than commonly intended in mainstream America.

silapa (Hawai’i patois): slipper.