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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #39 (September 30, 2008), page 7.

I used to kid around that Portland Mayor Tom Potter kept a tiny office — actually an abandoned broom closet under City Hall’s basement stairs — especially for us. For us immigrants and refugees. It was officially deemed the Office of FOB (Fresh-Off-da-Boat) Attitude. OFOBA for short. It was just a joke. Really.

I thought readers realized it was all in jest until we got a letter quite concerned about the injustice of it all. Of our FOBA Office.

For the record (as our lawyers are wont to say): That fictional bureau was so minimal not because of little respect between us ethnics and downtown types, not at all. Nope. On the contrary, there’ve been boat loads of solid regard, firm as Ota Tofu, between City Hall and our newcomer enclaves since Vera Katz became mayor, Sam Adams was her chief of staff, and Tom Potter was chief of Portland community policing. Tons of optimism too.

Tidak, we talked story about that tiny custodian’s closet because us immigrants are a practical crew. We’re all about getting deeds done, not leather furniture and wooden ducks. We fly fast, we fly low. Efficiency R Us. Indeed, we screwed a simple, Office Depot-bought sign ($14.99 on sale with Sunday coupon) on that basement office door. FOBA, it read.

ALWAYS ON DUTY. KNOCK HARD, I wrote right under it, in thick felt-tip Sharpie.

Okay-okay, allow me a small digression. I do it, I assure you, for some of our readers’ benefit.

For those of us who did not arrive by rusty Shanghai steamer; for those who jumbo jetted all nice and dapper straight into PDX and cannot know what FOBbie Attitude is. Or, for those Portlanders living in leafy Ladd’s Addition, folks who’ve had no use for FOBbie notions of economy and efficiency and familia — please, do not go looking for a Hmong or a Mexican sister, do not go asking a Kosovar cousin or a Korean auntie: "Uh excuse me, what’s FOBbie Attitude."

Sideways eyes and polite smiles, or pointy elbows or dope smacks, may happen.

I will tell you here and now.

Fresh-off-da-Boat Attitude is different from the attitude you get from our more complacent resettled immigrant types. You know, those folks who traded up a perfectly good Toyota Camry for a perfectly rapacious Nissan Armada.

There’s more. A true FOB, with Attitude, will get physical with you if you get shrill about U.S. immigration policy (we tend toward protecting familia — yours, mine, all da same). A real FOB will regard our more suburbanized buds the way you do a foul-mouth pirate’s parrot from the moment they slip into sloppy sloganeering like "We waited in line, so should they!" As if there’s an orderly waiting line into America. As if any of us actually waited in the same line. As if "their" family’s sorrow is any different from my family’s suffering.

A real FOB knows there’s no "They" different from "Us."

For aaall these reasons, Portland’s Office of FOBbie Attitude insisted on a humble broom closet with a single dangling energy-saving light bulb, a straight-back Quaker rocker, and a Goodwill Sanyo AM-FM radio, for our City Hall digs. For all those reasons, we stayed open 24/7. You never know when some city bureau might lapse into a sudden lack of common sense. Or common compassion.

The record is clear. For example, when zillionare Paul Allen threatened he and his overpaid, undisciplined, and unloved cry-baby Trail Blazers would leave P-Town unless the city chipped in to bail the Rose Garden out of bankruptcy, OFOBA was speechless. Real FOBs do not negotiate with spoiled kids or terrorists. Period. We wave bye-bye. We do not bring Kleenex.

That was then, and this is now.

And here’s what’s happened since: In the winter of 2007, after a half year of studying and discussing immigrant and refugee family strengths and needs, a careful task group of 20 Portlanders from Africa, Asia, Arabia, Europe, Central and South America, together with expert city bureau reps, presented four big recommendations to Portland City Council. The first of their recommendations was that city council create an Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs. In early 2008, city council did just that. Over the past month, staff for that new office was hired.

So here we are, on City Hall’s third floor, in the Mayor’s Office, looking out after all those years of wanting in.

And now, now that we are in — as Mayor Tom Potter initially lectured us, and as our new Mayor Sam Adams continuously advised us all along this process — being in requires a really serious level of responsibility, from us.

Being inside City Hall is hard. Democracy requires participating in cooking up policy, in working out decisions, about Portland. About us.

As a matter of fact: Democracy R Us.

Right now too, right under those same City Hall stairs, we’ve got a broom closet-sized office suite opening up. Opening up the way America opens to new ideas. New ideas, good or bad depending almost entirely on you and me. Insh’allah. Whether we’re passive or passionate about Portland. Our Portland.

Ayoh-ayoh. (English: let’s go, let’s go).

* * *

Notas:

1. Portland had a refugee coordinator position, based in a series of city offices, from 1981 to 2003.

2. Some of the community elders and activists contributing to the 2007 Immigrant and Refugee Task Force included, family names in alphabetical order: Amalia Alarcon, Dr. Entisar Azouz, Dr. Bruce T. Bliatout, Lee Po Cha, Abdul Fofanah, Kayse Jama, Maria Lisa Johnson, Victoria Libov, Richard Louie, Dr. Shirish B. Patel, Alice Perry, Pam Phan, Summer Saad, Romeo Sosa, Kilong Ung, David Wynde, and Rahel Yared. Full roster, including bios of Task Force contributors, can be found at <www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=156301>.

3. "New Portlanders Speak: Recommendations of the Immigrant and Refugee Task Force" (December 2007), our communities’ report to Portland City Council can be found at <www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=180720>.

4. Polo (Ronault L.S. Catalani) was selected as Portland’s new Immigrant & Refugee

Affairs coordinator earlier this month.