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Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #5 (January 30, 2007), page 7.

I wonder if Barack Obama lies wide awake, at the end of another chaotic work week, worrying when it all will end. Love’s affair with America. I did, I still do, and let me tell you true: not only him and me, but a swelling part of our nascent nation’s demographic does too. Mira, let me tell you what I mean.

I am one of those ethnically ambiguous guys like that guapo Obama, like that Tiger Woods, like Keanu Reeves, like aaall those kinda Black, could be Latina, certainly hapa Haole girls grinning those Great White Shark smiles on Mervyns’ Sunday sales page ads.

America loves us.

At least occasionally.

It’s wild, it’s wonderful, but hati-hati boys and girls, there’s an inevitable arc to this dizzy love affair.

Sure, for Barack, for now it’s, "Gosh, his mother’s Kansan, his father Kenyan, he grew up in Hawai’i and Indonesia" — the network newsladies, the fellas too, are practically breathless.

Well, you know, I was sprouted in those places, too. And what’s more, both Barack and that lot of us I described above grew up during what happened next to America. Our America.

And that was not always pretty.

Love is like that. Ambivalent. Adoring at one end; bitter, even betrayed, at the other.

Things could not have looked better when me and 300 other affirmative admits landed on U of O’s fall campus, 1972. The spring of our state’s racial integration effort. Mr. President set us a big banquet, college deans and department heads had us over for dinner. Speeches were a little long, always about remedying Wrongs of the Past. But the food was great. Butterball turkeys and hickory hams. A bit uncomfortable for Muslim boys, but we knew they meant well. Once we even had rice.

And our dates in those days. Oh. Tip-top-drawer. They stood in line. Girls couldn’t get enough of us. Ethnic was so in. We were, as they used to say, ver-ry "happening." I cannot tell you how many Sundays I was taken to Sweet Home or Cottage Grove to meet chatty moms and chilly dads. (I kid you not, these are actual names of small towns. Once, only once mind you, I was driven to Lebanon. Yah, Lebanon, Oregon.) They, those chicas’ parents, were not happy.

" — Showed them," one pretty blonde said sideways, as we sped south on I-5. I said nothing.

The same happened when our wide-eyed cohort made it to Oregon’s workplace. Love-fest. Expectations so high. Unreal.

An educated brown boy, in a white button-down and an olive Giorgio Bruntini, real polite, too. No time was wasted inviting us onto every red-hot committee and commission, I even made a blue ribbon task force or two. I said little. I still have that sash in my bottom desk drawer.

"Our precious world’s too unpredictable to leave to love, Anak," our Elder Auntie Kris used to say. And say and say. Not only because she spoke true, but also because she knew we weren’t listening. Love is like that. Both the adoring and the adored get a little full of themselves. Maybe like a comet, lovely in our eastern heavens — until earth’s atmosphere burns it out.

Love’s trajectory is like that. Maybe artillery is a better analogy.

We blast out of a cannon, out of a projection that puts aaall our failed affairs and all our squirmy wishes into the object of our love — now Barack Obama, that mix of America’s thick middle and Africa’s long sorrow, his mélange of Western savvy and Oriental mystique. Oh ampun’allaah, you’ve got to hope he’s better at this thing than you and me. The burden of a cannonball.

Because, I tell you true: I let down most of my erudite professors, I disappointed many squeally college girls and every dreamy employer. Verdah, I am at bottom, one of those colored pencils. A regular tolol. Lots of dents. Plenty of anger. Not like my lovers imagined or expected. Or hoped.

Ándale, my brother Barack, and selamat djalan — may your way be more blessed than the way we’ve been.

* * *

ampun’allaah (Indo patois, from Arabic, the language of the Family of Islam): Lord have mercy.

anak (Malay, Bahasa, Indo patois): child.

ándale (Indo patois, from Spanish): let’s go.

chicas (Spanish): girls.

guapo (Tagalog and Indo noun, Spanish adjective): handsome.

hapa Haole (Hawai’i patois): half white. Haole, in original Hawaiian meaning, was a foreigner. Popular meaning now refers to an Anglo. Not always with negative connotation, may just be a statement of fact. You can be white, but also a local or ‘ohana (family), then calling you a foreigner is, for sure, not nice. Very mokaki (messy), yah?

hati-hati (Indo patois): watch-watch. Beware.

mira (Indo patois, from Spanish): look. Take note.

Oriental (or Orientalism) reference to that fond historical Western wish that exotic things are somehow different, better. And the unfortunate linking between the exotic and the erotic.

selamat djalan (Malay, Bahasa, from Arabic): may God bless your journey.

tolol (Indo patois): woodenhead. Stubborn.

verda (Indo patois, from Spanish, a language of colonial Asia): in truth.

yah (Indo patois): secularized contraction of yah’allaah: yes Lord, it’s hard to believe but it’s so.