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Talking Story |
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A.C. GOES TO D.C. Oregonian race and ethnicity writer Angie Chuang has accepted a teaching position at American University in Washington, D.C.
From The Asian Reporter, V17, #32 (August 7, 2007), page 7.
About our Angie’saya
It’s true. Ask anyone. Oregon Indians and Asians and Islanders, Muslims and Latinos, Africans and African Americans alike, are appalled and a-blubbered by the recently leaked news that Angie Chuang is leaving us for an American University teaching post in Washington, D.C.
It’s hard to be happy.
From her Oregonian race and ethnicity desk, Ms. Chuang changed who we are. And that’s no earnest overstatement. I’m just reporting what’s obvious.
The truth (with a small T) is that media are central to modern mass culture. In words and in images, on TV and in movies, by newspapers and magazines, mass media’s task is defining for you and for me, as individuals and as groups, how we see and feel and think about each other. About ourselves.
Modern media have taken the traditional place of our parents at bedtime, of aunties in the kitchen, of mullahs at mosque, priests at temple and church. It is an awesome social responsibility. It’s easy to abuse.
Back in the bad old days, those years we darkly refer to as the time B.C. (Before Ms. Chuang), Oregon news reporting on our tribal, ethnic minority, and immigrant families was typically cartoonish. We were often cardboard props for white folks compassing their own social and emotional oceans.
In middle sections of local or feature sections, we were "Isn’t it awful" or "Aren’t they quaint" stories. Viet refugees packed in little wooden boats bobbing on our deep gray sea. Murder and mayhem and Kerby Street Crips. Lots of foodsie stories: egg roll recipes at Chinese New Year, Taco Day on the fifth of May.
But as the 2000 U.S. Census approached, Big O Public Editor Michele McLellan began developing the idea that dramatically shifting demographics were shaping who Oregonians actually are, and, more to the point: who we are going to be. It was a bold idea. Indeed, it was true — West Coast America was, and is, Asianizing and Latinizing. Wonderfully. Ask anyone.
Angie arrived in Portland in May 2000 to report on our emerging Oregon. And immediately we started seeing ourselves in the morning paper. Imagine: just as immediately, white folks starting to see us — seeing us daily in print and in pictures, as we see ourselves.
We were becoming a bigger "us" — made so by urban media. The Monday morning fresh-chicken truck pulling into Rose Villa, hens clucking, feathers flying; angry Shi’a mothers at mosque wanting Saddam’s limbs yanked off before or instead of trial; a pretty Afghani refugee vowing to be a proud American citizen, but still a bit ambivalent about "bearing arms" against America’s alleged enemies; a bright and brave young Lao woman holding heaven and earth at arm’s length for her peers, our "Lost Generation" of Southeast Asian youth.
Since the Angie Decade (A.D.) — as result of her award-winning Oregonian work, the mainstream narrative of our communities has been transformed. Every morning paper is now a complex and dynamic reflection of how we define ourselves, where we want our families to go, and what we want to make of America. Our America.
At one of several community bon voyage dinners — this one held at Mr. Siu Bunketh’s palatial Legin banquet hall in Southeast Portland — Filipinos and Persians, Chinese and Japanese, East Indians, American Indians, American Jews, Hmong and Lao, Koreans and Cambodians, said it again and again and again: We trusted telling Angie’saya our story.
She whispered at our kitchen tables, she bowed in our temples and studied at our mosques, she elbowed through our Saturday mercados and wept through our Bollywood movies, she travelled to our homelands, she always-always returned to her tidy news desk to argue with her editors about how to tell it. Our story. Packed with fact, billowing with nuance. Enough for casual travellers to our enclaves, deep satisfaction for those of us living there, inside these bones, inside our histories.
We have trusted Angie with our families’ troubled stories, with our sons’ and daughters’ tender dreams. We will miss her when she’s gone.
Angie has accepted a teaching position at American University in Washington, D.C. We trust, we have to trust, that we are sending her away to nurture a new generation of broad-shouldered, open- hearted, cross-culturally capable young journalists.
The Asian Reporter and our readers thank Michele McLellan, we thank Angie Chuang, her newsroom editors and The Oregonian publisher for all of this. We congratulate them for that generous body of work we made together.
We wish you salamat djalan, Angie, in your life away from our energetic familia.