Talking Story 
by Polo

Cultural capital is what’s suddenly missing when tidily treed, red-bricked downtown Portland shuts down at night. It’s the jazz absent between all that cold black glass and still cement.

From The Asian Reporter, V20, #01 (January 5, 2010), page 7.

We talk, we talk a lot, about what us stubborn Old Worlders bring to our chaotic new continent. About what social and cultural and spiritual capital we bring to the mix. Indeed, about what we must give and give and give to America. Our needy America.

So let’s subtract the 12 minutes this column will take from the rest of your workweek, let’s set out what Old World newcomers’ve got, then spend the rest of 2010 putting it into play.

Some subtext first.

We’re not talking about the obvious here — we’re not bragging up big guys like Yao Ming or supersmarts like Lewis & Clark professor Zaher Wahab or extraordinarily able folks like U.S. Army Colonel Sonny Tan (or his pop, Colonel Tan of the former Royal Cambodian Army). Right out front, we’re taking out of consideration the contributions of émigrés who didn’t stand in decade-long lines outside tall-walled U.S. embassies.

For purposes of making the point of this column, let’s exclude those families not beneficiaries of blessed politics, bored or bribed border guards. Because, even after we cancel them out of our calculus, America will still rank the biggest of our wobbly little world’s banks of ambitious human capital.

Okay, so what’s so cool about cultural capital? And why is making us numero uno important?

Good questions. Don’t be too proud to ask.

Lots don’t know. Banks can’t lend it. Feds won’t insure it. Mortgagers don’t accept it as collateral. So although plenty of folks can’t quite put a finger on what it is, many-many more Americans wish they could get their hands on more of it. On that precious capital our Old Worlders hastily unpack when we resettle, ambitious as April sparrows and spring starlings in Portland, Oregon.

Because it’s so normal among us ordinary urban birds, this most basic kind of human capital may be best described by what it is not.

Cultural capital is what’s suddenly missing when tidily treed, red-bricked downtown Portland shuts down at night. It’s the jazz absent between all that cold black glass and still cement.

Social and spiritual capital, our daughter reports from Cameroon, is what World Bank field auditors fail to note on their clipboards when they breeze through morning market, marking down pickup trucks and fruit carts, calculating numbers of earthy yams and hens’ eggs, and hard cash changing hands.

They don’t count mothers and daughters walking early morning hours to and from their river, water tubs on their heads, women’s working songs between them. They don’t count elder uncles keeping harmony among families. World bankers cannot quantify the value of school kids on their skinny knees and on their tip-toes, cleaning their barebones schoolhouse every afternoon.

To be clear: Women working hard, elders keeping peace, and kids keeping it clean, are not the reasons for leaving home. For our families coming here.

The Push out the African, Arabian, Asian, or Latin American door is almost always bad politics — bad leaders getting us into bad wars, or leaving us vulnerable to bad famine or droughts or disease. The Push is bad leaders gobbling up the proceeds from the sales of all those red yams and brown eggs. And of course, the big bites they take from the tops of all those bad loans and aid grants world bankers drop into our developing countries’ accounts, on account of the bad politics mentioned earlier.

And the pull, the Pull of America, is hope. The Pull is our babies no longer vulnerable to all that awful local and international behavior.

"Imagine," émigrés from all over say to each other once on this side of all those Homeland Security cops. "Imagine what we can now do with our undeclared Old World capital on this uncultivated new continent." Think of what we can do with our women’s responsibility. With our men’s respect. With our children’s reverence. Our 3-Rs.

Picture what we can make of America.

And so we unpack our cultural and social and spiritual wealth. Unabashedly optimistic, we go to work the very next morning. And the day after too. Then the next week and the workweek after that. Year in and year out.

But then something happens to immigrants. It happens, as new Portlander and Old Iraq psychiatrist Baher Butti will tell you: when American dreaming wears down. It happens, according to shelf after shelf of the socio-psychological literature on the subject, with clocklike predictability.

Old World jazz just wears down.

It gets unplugged. Home Depot’s endless aisles don’t stock extension cords long enough to keep émigrés connected to ethno-cultural banks rooted in our ancient earth. Elegant human capital — unnoticed by those global suits strolling that noisy African market, undeclared to those customs inspectors in the belly of PDX — will not be affirmed or nourished here. Old World currency (responsibility, respect, reverence) does not get managed and reinvested. Not by U.S. Bank or Wells Fargo. Not by America’s consumer culture. Neither Dow Jones or the NYSE trade in it, in us.

Objects count here. Those things still as death when night falls and downtown empties — those locked-tight bank towers and those confident firms insuring the things sequestered there, the courts sworn to the order between those owning their things and those wanting to steal them.

Evaluating it, affirming us, can only come from us. We need to work our good old human capital on the rest of our new country.

This New Year, let’s open Portland’s banks of precious cultural capital. Let’s swing our vaults wide. And start being how we are.

Of course there’ll be dopes not knowing how to respond. There’s that tall dude from accounting; when we pass in the hall, he acts like I’m a potted plant. He grunts at his shoes when I wish him salamat pagi — may you have a blessed morning. He doesn’t matter. My sincerity does. Our mindfulness of another marvellous morning on mother earth, in her richest nation, matters.

There’s that Korean gentleman, who dashed across northeast Broadway just to share his big black umbrella, just to re-cross that crazy boulevard with our old and ill uncle and me. All under his care. Affirming this elder’s pricelessness. And our humanity. That matters. Let’s do that. Reverence.

There’s that Mexican guy in 24 Hour Fitness’ packed locker room. The man shook my hand, said his name’s Gustavo, and said sorry for hitting on my wife. Acknowledging his masculinity and mine, and binding respeto between us. That hits home. Let’s be that. Respect.

There’s that Viet Kieu kid-counsellor who, with his Asian Family Center crew, threw together what they hastily named their "Winter Giving Festival" — thinking they’d pass out a few winter coats, woolen caps, and gloves.

Hundreds of winter wear items, settled Portlanders gave. Then hundreds of new Portlanders came. Anxious Asians and Arabs and Africans and American Latinos. Families left out when those downtown institutions invested in material and financial capital cut our bottom-rung jobs right out of their accounting. Shrinking their umbrellas.

Capital economies contracting is bad news. Old World hearts shrinking is even worse. Let’s not do that. Or be that. Responsibility is us.

And America needs this. Our chaotic new continent needs what we own: Old World 3-Rs.