Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V20, #3 (January 19, 2010), page 7.

I am an island boy. The kind with a koa fishing hook necklace. The kind looking early-early mornings, over our heaving sea. The kind throwing nothing away. Ever.

Islanders know that what we see is all we have. And all we own, our moody ocean may suddenly take back. Indonesians, Melanesians, Polynesians, all know that there is no more than what’s now on my hook, who’s now in my arms. Inside our precious moment. Forget Wall Street’s pinstriped 2010 financial forecasts. There just may be no tomorrow. Ampun’illaah.

So okay, based on this old premise and promise about our lives, I want to point out something about Portland — actually about some Portlanders. About some locals not making daily headlines.

About how hard our elected leaders work, you know enough — commissioner Amanda e-mails near midnight. Mayor Sam rises, bikes, and arrives before his hens stir. You can read Big O articles about Nike’s Mr. Knight or Intel’s Mr. Otellini keeping us hot in the global marketplace. About Big Uncle Sho and Old Ah Siu and Sandy Boulevard’s shepard Father James, you can ask any family at any Saturday morning noodleshop.

But there’s another kind of big guy in town. The kind just as essential for our city’s success. For our community health. So as an islander much aggrieved about letting anything, especially people of precious metal, get squandered — I am obliged to talk them up with what remains of my 1,000-word essay.

Our chaotic continent needs them. We need them more than I need another sleek sneaker, more than anyone needs an even tinier PC chip. Oregon needs them as much as we need our valley’s chocolate soil. Portland needs them, Portlanders settled and new.

Four generations of them live here. And love here.

In the short time our familia’s been here, in soil so rich that millions after millions of our wobbly world’s most ambitious families race to work and work and work here — America has warred 13 times. Sometimes on cities energetic as Seattle. Sometimes on seaside towns lovely as Newport. But always far-far away. Once every three years.

That’s not counting grim institutional cruelty against certain American communities, the ones distorted into miserable minorities — our women dependent on welfare, boys and men packed into juvenile justice and adult criminal industries. In the aggregate, those ugly policies and awful acts us islanders, for simplicity sake, call "war."

Because that’s how bad we treat our enemies. Bad people not sharing your island.

This constant warring, this American policy and practice, abroad and at home, cannot continue. Of course it’s hell for those far-off women hoping their men get home from work, and for those fathers praying their wives and daughters will be exactly where and how they left them early Monday morning. But it’s also bad for those Americans who sent their boys and girls to drop that anonymous ordnance on those faraway neighborhoods, to post those deadly roadblocks between home and school and work.

But it’s killing us too.

You cannot participate in ugliness, and not bring it back. Not bring it into your bones, into our families’ homes, onto our island. The stink, the sin, is us. The consequence, the karma, spreads like a virus. Warring has consumed America. The War on Poverty. The War on Drugs. The War on Terrorism. The Battle over the Border. The Battle over Healthcare. The Assault on Marriage.

Lucky thing: The answer’s inside the problem. The solution is those quiet Portlanders not so often on radio news on my morning commute. Those common folks proposed a few paragraphs ago.

We have four generations of survivors of American overseas warring, in Portland. They must be heard. They must be healed. Then maybe, if we listen kindly and love them carefully, we can end our individual and institutional addiction to mass destruction.

A bit down our street there’s an elegant Nisei great grandma who lived through daily American aerial bombardment of Japan’s densest cities. And early mornings, you’ll pass a Hmong grandpa preparing his garden’s sleeping soil. He kept alive most of his highland Lao clan by keeping everyone moving-moving-moving, out from under earthquaking B-52 raids.

They are Americans, these two learned elders. They know bitterness and betrayal.

Maybe our handsome generals should ask their thoughts first, before sending our ferocious Air Force over another busy city, over anyone’s sleeping garden. Great humanity these bowed Portlanders will lend them.

Saturday afternoon I worked with a Khmer sister. She and my big brother recall nothing of what bad happened and happened to them back home. They’re not playing coy, those books are closed. Their memories light up beginning here, only here, since their Oregon lives started. Sunday evening I sat with a Viet Kieu brother. He, like me, remembers every minute. Every murder. Push his or my play button and watch it run across our faces.

Maybe those gray iron fleets should hold their angry steam until our proud president and his loyal sailors have heard us out. Our anguish and our amnesia are equally true.

Last summer, we sat hushed, listening to a pretty Iraqi teenager’s poetry at a Colored Pencils Art and Culture Night. Her face was blown off when an IED blew up a school bus of 11 girls like her. Her story is terror and scars. Last summer too, we worked with a crew of Burma kids just off the boat; teens born to a generation living in guerilla camps; their generation raised in squalid refugee camps.

These kids’ bones are still at war. Their eyes are all weariness. Their teachers were already exhausted before these newcomers bashfully took their seats. And when our teens fail, institutions hungry for them will make enemies of them. More war.

Maybe we need to take a good long look at them sitting there — our teens, their parents, our elders. And maybe pass up on new Nikes, and ease off our wireless keyboards. Maybe we need to stop the warring. Not another day of it. Not over there, not right here.