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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #20 (May 20, 2008), page 7.

I work with immigrants. And refugees too. We do exiles and sojourners, many from bad politics, most for better tomorrows, for their families. We occur in families, immigrants do. We’re determined dads and muscular moms, and we make pretty children.

This is an especially important time for immigrants. An election year. We will select leaders — makers of new laws and new budgets who can either make our new American families miserable or make us happy and healthy. It’s a time for everyone to pay attention.

I’ve worked with newcomer families for 25 years now, before generous judges and discerning senate committees, in cozy church and temple basements, around kitchen tables crowded with Khmer and Koreans, Palestinians and Pilipinos; we’ve wept and we’ve laughed with tough and tender Hmong and Moroccan and Mexican families.

About all that time, about all these folks, two big things are true. One big truth has to do with our broad-shouldered men. The other one is about our nonyas, our open- hearted women. Let’s save the first one for Dads’ Day in June. Don’t worry, there’ll still be plenty of hot politics going on. For now, on the backside of Mothers’ Day, let’s talk a moment about our madres.

Our Indo elders have an old saying — I know, I know: all our elders are old and aaall their sayings are older still. But give me a break.

That big old proverb goes: Wobbly women — Wobbly world.

It’s not really news, it’s not really profound. It’s simply True.

When women sleep well and rise bright, we all have a good day. When our wives, when our mothers, worry about their men, anguish over their children: oh sh*t. We will have no peace. Period.

From this fundamental truth, what follows flows like rain from an Oregon roof — wobbly women make agitated families — which aggregate into unstable societies — that make war on nervous neighbors. Without peace in my home, I am easily angered in school or at my job, I aim my frustration at targets opportunistic politicians pick for me.

In the short time our family has lived on our chaotic new continent, the objects of socially sanctioned targeting have been, in chronological order: negroes, spics, commies, gooks, Iranians, Mexicans again, Chinese, Arabs, and now Mexicans again.

Moms matter that much.

What this basic mommy-talk means to folks eager for elected office, is the point of this column.

Politicos will get our newcomer votes, and we will all get happy and healthy households, by taking care of our women. Caring for our mothers.

Here’s how it works:

When you listen to Somali or Russian or Viet Kieu women, when they get down to worrying aloud, they’ll talk about their dread when dropping off their baby girls in childcare, when leaving their little boys in afterschool care; they’ll tell you about it costing more to pay for their kids staying with strangers than they’re making per hour. Anxiety on top of anxiety. "What’s the use of me working?!"

It’s not really a question. It’s the same in every language.

Our wives will talk about their emotional distraction and exhaustion at work. Summer times, moms stress much more about what their teen girls and boys are doing with their new American "freedoms" than anything any supervisor can possibly do to them during a work shift.

Evenings, when our weary women walk into their kitchens, it’s not just to cook dinner, to nurture their men, their sons, their daughters, and then clean up after us all — women’s work is also absorbing their husbands’ and boys’ humiliation.

Being a man here, any newcomer will tell you, is not like back in Samoa, Malaysia, or Venezuela. We’ll tell you about what happens to our dignity in school, at work, on the American street, and what monsters we can be when we get home, close the front door, and get a chance to predate on smaller people, just like we’ve been predated on. All day long.

Want immigrant votes?

If you’re an aspiring leader eager for immigrant family support: support our women.

1. Alleviate mothers’ anguish about budgeting childcare on Oregon’s minimum wage. Back neighborhood or workplace daycare centers. Keep moms close to kids.

2. Get women salaries that makes peace possible.

3. Get all newcomers (foreigners and new American families alike) rents or mortgages that make mothers healthy and happy.

4. After school hours and during our long summers, prepare their adolescent daughters for American complexities, discipline their teenage sons. If you don’t know how to deliver ethnically effective youth services — ask an immigrant mom. But be ready to listen. And act. Do not betray your promise. We will all suffer for their disappointment.

5. Out of your high offices, over Oregon’s frantic media, do not villainize, not for another day, any other dark "others." Fearful Americans harm us. Here, there, everywhere.

America is a young nation of very agitated immigrants. Of tense households, of exhausted mothers. Used by bad leaders for what fear gains these guys. Having peace on our precious blue planet, embracing acceptance of vigorous newcomers, warming up our classrooms and production floors, depends on settling down our mothers. Colorful Bantu and white Ukranians, immigrant and mainstream, moms all the same, too.

Ibu manis all of them.

Chinese: from the 1860s to the 1940s (when Japanese took over the role), Chinese were repeat offenders in anxious U.S. moments, particularly when American jobs and white women needed protection. Chinese were cool for 50 years until "Chinese spying" drove shrill national security politics in the 1990s, until Arabs and Muslims superceded all that.

Ibu manis (Malay and Bahasa): dear mother. Any woman of mothering age we call Ibu. Mother. An expression of respect and intimacy. No, she doesn’t have to be your mama.

Indo: a mix-blood. In part, one of any of Indonesia’s many ethnic or racial communities, the other part European.

Iranians: recipients of U.S. anxieties during President Jimmy Carter’s Teheran Hostage Crisis; minions of President George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil.

madre (Spanish, Indo patois): mother.

negro: what Americans from Africa were called in the 1960s, when we arrived in the U.S.

nonya (Malay and Bahasa): local lady.

spic: what Mexicans were called during our family’s first decade in Salem. What I was called in high school.

gook: what Asians were called when the U.S. warred in Southeast Asia, during my college years.