Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V20, #8 (March 2, 2010), page 7.

This is not May. We’re still months away from Mother’s Day. But some things about our women can’t wait to be said. They’re that important.

Portland is now working on a 30-year comprehensive development plan. Working hard.

Mayor Sam often says that half of Portland today was not here in 1980, 30 years ago, the last time local leaders drew up a plan for our energetic city’s development. He’s talking about people, not just buildings and streets and water pipes. He means Portlanders.

I’ll bet a hundred bucks that 1980 city bosses were not planning for folks like me and my Thai wife, our kids or their Paisano and Filipina spouses, our crazy cousins’ Mexican wives, or aaall those marvellously mestizo kids their marriages keep making and making and making. But I’m just as sure today’s policy leaders are taking a good long look at our city’s increasing ethnic mix. And are realizing the inevitability of it. Of us.

Mother Mexico’s children will not become less ambitious over our next 30 years. Asia’s displaced families are not staying stuck in grim refugee camps. Our developing world’s urban educated will not stay put so long as America’s employers eagerly put them to work.

Families will move. Folks will migrate here. And that’s good for everyone.

So let me get back to our moms, even if it’s not their big day. The thing is, they make us and they can break us. And that’s a year-round proposition.

Now, this is probably bad science, but I’ve done some careful asking around town, around those growing neighborhoods of new Portlanders mentioned a paragraph ago, and I’m itching to report what’s hurting our households. Okay, it’s actually not really news. It follows an old Old World deductive loop.

Our women are stressed out. Chronically.

And, as any elder auntie will tell you: Nervous moms make shaky kids.

And as every grandpa will affirm: Unhappy wives make really unhappy husbands.

Put another way: If we worry women to their bones, their health will be in peril. A healthy household — ask anyone at any family kitchen table, predictable Old World or bewildering new one — depends on healthy moms.

Again, it’s not big science, it’s not even breaking news, but you’ve got to hope our experts are planning these simple propositions into our next 30 years of city life. Along with pretty buildings, tidy streets, and of course, crystal clear water.

When we ask our women why they’re so anxious — after they’ve had that stormy moment to march out of the room, to bang pots and pans in their kitchens, and slam cupboard doors, after they’ve returned, perched on a chair edge — they’ll look you straight in your eyes and tell you.

They’ll tell you in stressed Russian, in harsh Chinese, in shaky Somali, in pained Arabic, that they worry every frantic morning to every exhausted bedtime about the costs of their babies’ culturally erosive daycare; they worry about the ugly manners kids bring home from their chaotic schools; they worry about the un-parented hours their teens spend between 3 and 6; they worry about the harm done their husbands by bad jobs or no jobs at all. And the bills.

The good thing about these not-so-newsy items is that these propositions, indeed those households, should not be mistaken as another needy community’s list of grievances. Not at all. Think of them as an invitation to rethink our mainstream’s thick magic marker lines separating the western disciplines of urban planning from community development. Think of our rather muscular newcomer families as contributors to a broader-shouldered and bigger-hearted approach to building a better city. Our city.

New Portlander communities already own many answers to America’s big-city problems. We have the relief. We always have.

More money is not key. Treasuries of that kind of capital squandered on New Orleans, misspent in Baghdad, misdirected at Port Au Prince, make it plain that truckloads of spending on bricks and mortar will not return a healthy and happy community.

Just as essential as surveying standing buildings and congested streets, is inventorying existing social and cultural capital. Planners need to build a bigger and better city, around that. Around us.

Take daycare. Back home we don’t have daycare centers in our humbler neighborhoods. Kids don’t get care at a place. They get loved by people. Patient elders care for kids while ambitious youngers make money. Family culture stays intact. Moms worry less. It’s an old calculus.

Imagine municipalities engineering public policies that build out from here (from us) as much as from traffic and water main grids. Enlist and train our shovel-ready elders, offer existing neighborhood association infrastructure. Imagine.

Take our schools. Imagine engaging families’ social and cultural capital instead of making our parents feel irrelevant. Disempowered. Disrespected in their kids’ eyes.

Imagine having our teachers and parents as one seamless world of adults directing our kids, instead of letting kid culture rule. Imagine our parents taking away some of our adolescents’ unearned autonomy and restoring our teachers’ authority, instead of our teachers burning so much of their enthusiasm and credibility on "classroom management." Chaos management.

Imagine putting our cops into play with our teens after school, instead of after they’ve already dropped out. Social capital is fun. Cultural capital makes more. And with a little support, these are constantly renewed, locally grown resources.

Critiquing government’s easy. Even fun. I could do it all day long.

Men and boys looking inside our own homes, our own hearts, is harder. But even more necessary. Ask any community mechanic.

The truth is, our guys are equally responsible for our ladies’ blues. These are not public infrastructure matters; these are personal. As anyone who works with broken parts and broken hearts will tell you: Most of the damage inside our newcomer communities is done by bad boys and bad dads. Bad news but good science — I’ve got the child-welfare, juvenile-justice, and adult-criminal system stats to prove it.

Newcomer dads, husbands, partners, sons: It takes even more, much more to be a man here, in supposedly gender-neutral America, than it takes back home. Protecting and providing (our old school rule about what men do) requires us to be a lot more, here and now. Providing for women’s emotional security we can no longer leave to our wives’ mothers, to her sisters or cousins. In Portland, it’s our job.

Your job is getting one and keeping it. No matter that it’s below your education or social station. No matter if it’s dirty and the guys there treat you like dirt. Mark your dirty work under the column called "protect and provide." Then show your sons and nephews, that’s what good men do. That’s how we love mothers.

Working those boys is all our jobs. Teaching our sons. No matter how tired. Weekends too. Us leaving what masculinity means to contemporary kid culture will kill us. This is not an overstatement. I have the bad stats. America has the ugly history.

And if heart-stopping graphs don’t get you, maybe our daughters marrying outside our communities will. Maybe grandchildren living way outside our cultural values will. Because good women will not marry losers. Asian or Arab, African or American, all the same.

In short, nurture your worrier. Our women.

It’s about all that social and cultural capital our community mechanics, our elders and activists, keep nagging America’s mainstream about. It’s bad grammar, but a good place to end this column.

And a good place to start building a better us, a bigger city. Where’s that shovel?