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Talking Story |
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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #19 (May 8, 2007), page 7.
Sorrow, love, then party it up
Last week — it was a Tuesday — I went to a little elementary school. Which one is not so important. Why I went is more so — it was Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I went because Nita asked me.
Nita is my younger brother’s wife’s middle sister’s husband’s oldest girl. Nita’s daughter’s teacher sent home a nice note asking her to (you know) talk Asian, and maybe do some Asian stuff to her third grade class.
"I don’ know what to say," Nita said to me. "I don’ know what to do," she said in that Filipina way. Meaning: HELP. More to the point: Please go for me.
Because it was APA Heritage Month — actually because there’s no Indo way out of saying yes to my sister, and saving my niece from having her ma embarrass her in front of 22 classmates — I went. Sure I did.
I went with a two-mast Arab sailing ship, long as my arm, made of fragrant cloves. I went with a leopard conch shell, loud and low as a Newport foghorn. I went with a little black butane stove and wok, some peanut oil, and a pile of pink, green, and gold krupuk shrimp chips, for the kids to fry and eat. Yum.
This works every time. All kids like to sniff stuff and listen to loud sounds and eat savory foods. We love the same things — I mean us Indos and Filipinos, us Malay and Hmong, us Nikkei and Nepali. Sure we do. So I went.
Behind the party mask
APA Heritage Month does this to us. We cannot help ourselves. Newspapers can’t resist printing spring roll recipes. Dancing Lions make TV, Viet ladies in ivory ao dai are essential to parties all over town all over the month of May.
Make no mistake about it, we Han and Hong Kongers, our Khmer and Koreans, love to eat, want to doll up, will karaoke until someone yanks the plug from the wall. It’s in the genes.
But that’s not all we’ve got in there.
There’s another side to Asian-ness. A more soulful side, often not as obvious as our eager American face.
It’s about how we got here.
Sure, lots of Asians crossed over in an orderly way. Some came for more study, for better jobs, to marry well. They traded up, as my cousin in the car biz would say.
But many, if not most of us, came out of chaos. We showed up after traumatic familial and personal discontinuities. Folks lost a lot. We are, on the whole, a rather sad crew. Wounded.
Chinese fled hungry floods and failed crops and fanatic politics. Koreans got crushed by grinding war, by numbing poverty, by arrogant dictators. Tibetans got swallowed by The Dragon. Indeed, every April marks the collapse of the Cambodian Kingdom, the fall of the Republic of Viet Nam, the ugly end of the Lao Monarchy.
Let us remember all of that.
While arguments over whether those fallen leaders were good or awful continue to cause bitter conflict among brothers and sisters from a common weeping mother — let us agree on what happened after each country’s transition to tyranny, is above dispute. Terror beyond belief. Remember.
April is the anniversary of executions en masse; of death in slave labor, from starvation, from disease; of death in political re-education; of death by temper tantrum or by mistaken identity; of death during escape, caught by a bullet in the back, caught by an anonymous landmine, or claimed by the deep dark sea.
April precedes May
We are those memories. You and me. And also our children downstream, where rain and tears and rivers of both always flow. Oh ampun’allaah.
April memorializes all that loss. Our grief. Let us remember together. Feel our deep loss, together. And when we argue — because we will quarrel, because we’ve buried so much pain, because old anger will rise unexpected and uncontrollable — maybe a warm hand on his red-hot cheek, maybe a kind arm around her trembling shoulders, will bring our burning betrayal a bit closer to closure.
Shouting back at him, shutting down her sorrow, makes us only more rage. More loneliness in our loss. Less likely we’ll be ready to let it go, and party, come May.
By May it’s time to celebrate. Morning follows night. Joy follows pain. Peace follows acceptance of our ancestral, our familial, and our personal, sorrow.
Dancing follows dinner. Then we’ll eat and drink to excess some more.
Ah, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
So I went, like I was saying earlier, to that little elementary school last Tuesday. I went to talk Asian, like I was asked by that nice third-grade teacher. I went with my clove boat and big spiral shell and little black wok, all in a Safeway cardboard box.
Those kids sniffed the sweet spice as we passed around my ship; that teacher covered her ears when I trumpeted our conch; the fire alarm rang crazy when I burned the peanut oil.
Everyone scowled at me as we huddled outside. Oregon April, windy and wet, swirled around us. Big fire guys arrived in thick asbestos suits, under heavy helmets, battle axes in hand. Then they left, mumbling unkind things. At me.
We shuffled back inside. I thought about concluding my APA Heritage Month lecture with a word or two about the good old Yin & Yang, or about Lord Vishnu the Dreamer dancing with Lord Shiva the Destroyer, or maybe about autumn shadowing summer. Aaall that Asian stuff playing out right there in their tidy little elementary school. But I thought I better not.
I got my cardboard box, I got my jacket, I got in my quarter-million mile Toyota and got the heck out of there.
I bet they don’t ask me back.
* * *
About Asian anger, help for Asian sorrow:
Talk to me, or talk to family, talk to community associations,
or talk to temple buddhas, church ministers, or mosque elders.
Talk we must. And, we must be responsible for those reluctant to talk.
More listeners:
Asian Family Center
(503) 235-9396
<www.irco.org/locations/index.html>
Asian Health and Service Center
(503) 872-8822 or (503) 641-4113
<www.ahscpdx.org>
Oregon Health & Science University,
Intercultural Psychiatric Program (IPP)
(503) 494-4222
<www.ohsu.edu/health/clinics-and-services/clinic.cfm?id=11391>
* * *