Talking Story 
by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V22, #02 (January 16, 2012), page 7.

2012 is an election year. From chilly Atlantic to deep blue Pacific, we will elect new leaders. Executive leaders, legislative and judicial ones. New city and county, state and federal, governments we’ll vote into service this year, to express our country’s evolving strengths and needs.

Now, while new Americans know an awful lot about bad leaders — the kind who shoved us out of our homelands — we are still learning about good leadership here. Here on our chaotic new continent. Here in our naturally awesome state. In our splendid port city on the auspicious confluence of these grand rivers and that deep blue sea.

But, I hasten to add, most activists around town do know about The Chief, as we still respectfully call him. Portland’s former mayor Tom Potter. In fact, many of our current ethnic enclave clutch pumpers — those folks responsible for meshing city and county, state and federal, governments’ gearworks with our communities’ vigorous machinery — got schooled by The Chief. And every one of these savvy elders and advocates can set out in detail, with conviction, how mayor Potter’s leadership brought out the best in us. In us new Americans.

But because Portland’s Asians, Africans, Arabs, American Latinos (The A-Teams), plus all our Russian speakers often do better at telling a story than at articulating a tidy political science, please let me tell you one. A true story.

It’s a Sunday morning in April, an Oregon April — city song birds are back, bashfully back from wherever they go in late October; unkind arctic chills alternate with our suriya sun, sweet and low in Oregon’s southern sky. April always promises a lot. Then takes a bite of it back. Like democracy.

On this particular Sunday morning, not early and not late, I’m curbside in our achy old Toyota, sawing off my steering wheel lock. I borrowed this hacksaw from Big John, our apartment block maintenance guy.

"John," I said an hour ago, "Can I use your saw, again?"

"Yeah. Sure," thick fingers combing back his long hair. "Bike lock?"

"No man. Steering wheel lock."

My son and I had bought, then sawed off, umm, four, six, maybe eight chain locks, hasp locks, and loop locks over our three past years in John’s complex.

"Lost keys again," Big John sighs.

"No, just misplaced," I reply. Like I do each time. And each next time too, I promise him that next trip to Freddie’s I’m buying my boy and me our own hacksaw. Hang it handy in our hall closet.

On this particular lock-sawing April Sunday morning, before rousing John, I had called Dave’s Safes and Locks for help.

"Forty-five bucks," Dave said.

"That’s cra-zy," I said. To myself, of course. That cold-iron steering wheel lock bar cost me less than twenty.

Allow me a digression. A quick one. A necessary one, really, for this story.

It’s the backstory about what newcomers do for settled America. And how we do that. Indeed, it’s what makes our immigrant nation so cool during our best decades, and so bad during mean ones.

It’s more, much more than what we hear over and over, say, on the long Fourth of July weekend, when chirpy local news chicks stick live mics in the startled faces of obliviously FOBby Fubonn shoppers and earnestly need them to answer "Freedom!" or "Liberty!" — when asked what’s super-duper about the USA.

The real deal is more like this:

In June 2008, mayor Tom Potter opened wide the oaken doors of that downtown jewel, Portland’s 117-year-old Italianate Renaissance City Hall. Mighty Scagliola columns, pink marble floors, wrought-iron staircases. The works.

The Chief stood in front of City Council Chambers, packed that Saturday morning with African, Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern refugees — folks who wanted nothing to do with government back home, families that fled our planet’s worst regimes. And mayor Potter said "Welcome to your building, welcome to your house." Then he pointed to the empty city commissioners’ chairs and said: "When we finish class today, go try them out, maybe one day you will be sitting in one of them."

Everyone gasped in unison. From our hushed audience, someone let out, in heavily accented English, "Oh, my god."

At the end of that first session of Engage ’08, a series of ethnic minority and newcomer community civic engagement workshops funded by city government, smiling elders and smart-aleck activists, in traditional shash and garbasaar and in urbane suit and tie, took turns posing in those commissioners’ tall seats. Beaming vast as this beautiful continent.

What that broadshouldered, big-hearted, blue-collar mayor gave us was not access to downtown despots and their thugs, not like back home. He gave more. Much more. He was handing over something like a union card, a right-to-work card. He did it years earlier, too, when he was police chief, when he introduced us to participatory democracy. The duties of democracy.

He had told us that his cops (his government guys) work hard, and that they’re good men and women. Then he told us that we (our community clutch pumpers) work hard, and that we’re good men and good women. Democracy, he said real firm to public servants and to enclave activists alike, is all of us work, work, working this town together.

And we believed him, cops and community alike. We instinctively trust a big-hearted, broadshouldered leader. We know exactly what he’s saying. Or more to the point: What we need to do.

We got to work. We did no studies. We did no committees, we issued no white-paper findings or blue-ribbon recommendations. We tried hard, we erred a lot, we corrected. Together. And in that process we built trust. Trust just like The Chief’s trust in us. Together we secured our neighborhoods against home-invasion robberies, our cafés and markets we made free of gang extortion. Fear lifted, our families focused on success, Little Saigon prospered. Kids went to college.

Back to that Sunday morning. Back to that curbside.

I’m sighing at April’s occasional sun, still sawing at my steering wheel lock. I’m listening, window wide, for spring’s tentative song birds — when a tense staccato voice from behind me goes: "Put-your-hands-on-the-wheel. Where-I-can-see-them."

So I do. Slowly. Then I turn, just as deliberately, to see who this is.

"Don’t-turn-around," it goes through tightly clenched teeth.

I do anyway. Slow and even. There’s no way a guapo like me, from places and times I’ve survived, is going to obey that. That part about not looking straight at imminent danger.

She’s young and hyped and crouched outside my quarter-million-mile Toyota. Her gun is big and black and three meters from my face.

"I-SAID-DON’T-TURN-AROUND."

"This is our family’s car, officer," I respond in an even voice.

You don’t go crazy with crazy, any of us will tell you — any of us folks chased out of our respective homelands, any of us redeemed by Portland’s mayor’s belief in us. Tidak. You look for what’s familial in his or her eyes. Get conversational. Work together.

I know eyes like hers. In that place and time I’m from, we know all about jacked-up people. "Matah hitam," we whisper. You breathe deep and breathe slow. You keep lax your vocal cords, keep loose your tummy, shoulders, and thighs. Guys pumped on adrenalin will make the worst of your every jerky move. Little guys, all pumped up and pointing big cocked weapons, are even worse.

She takes a sharp step forward. She takes one hand off her Glock, jerks open my door, takes back her short advance, and says: "I-WANT-YOU-TO-STEP-OUTSIDE. FACING-AWAY-FROM-ME."

"Officer ... I have a hacksaw on my lap." I quietly count: one, two, three long seconds, then with unhurried eyes say into her unblinking ones: "If I step out, this hacksaw will crash on the pavement." I am negotiating for tone and for pace. My life, and this young policewoman’s life, not getting worse depend on getting these elements in my favor.

Lesson One at those ugly intersections we grew up in, is never giving everything up to predators, to lunatics, or to demonios. Never completely. Not ever. Dangerous types depend on our total surrender. Those of us blessed enough to sit around Portland cafés today, were not thus victimized. Not by them.

And now, at this curbside on this Oregon April morning, not by this. Al’hamdu’lilaah.

She’s relaxed a little out of her crouch. Out of her hypervigilance. She repeats her command, with a little less edge. So I do as she says. John’s hacksaw smacks the pavement like I said.

I lay facedown on a cold and wet Portland street as she orders. She plants her knee on the base of my neck and cuffs my wrists behind my back as she’s trained. My son gets out of his friend’s mother’s Volvo, as this happens. She’s returning my teenager from a Saturday night sleepover in her leafy westside cul de sac, as we’d agreed.

And our neighbors, our hard to befriend, quick to startle, elderly neighbors, are gathered outside, near the curbside where all this began on our alternating chilly and blessed Oregon Sunday morning.

Fifteen months passed.

A spring then a summer, then an autumn and winter, and another spring, passed before I quit trying to talk with that young woman. Or her sergeant. Or his captain. Or their commander. I only wanted to know what she saw in me. I still don’t know.

All I needed her to know is what she did to my son, to his school bud’s mom, to our neighbors’ sense of brown guys, guys like me on the asphalt, boys like my son living next door. I needed her to understand though I am a lawyer, and a journalist, and a community clutch: I will not harm her. Not like she hurt my family and our neighbors.

That’s it. That’s all.

And all my wild swerving from our city’s auspicious place on the shores of these grand matriarchs to the excesses of our awful leaders in Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and Eastern Europe; all my meandering from City Hall’s Tuscana pillars to the westside’s suburbs and our eastside’s Sunday shakedown, has been a longhand way of rendering how this broadshouldered, big-hearted leader held it all together. Worked us together.

End of story: No longer police chief, and not as mayor, but as a true leader, Tom Potter took me out to coffee. He listened to me. He looked straight into my heart and said: "I am sorry about this. You are a good man. You work so hard. I know. And I am sorry."

And I trusted this man’s word, his final word on all of it. On us. Because of his trust in me. Because democracy begins there. Because he said democracy is work, work, and more work.

You’ve got to love it. The work.

You’ve got to love him. The Chief.

* * *

Al’hamdu’lilaah (Koranic Arabic adopted by Muslim communities worldwide): Only by god’s grace. All gratitude to god. Humbled submission that your own smarts did not deliver what’s good.

cul de sac (Catalan): bottom of sack. Suburban dead-end street.

demonio (Spanish, Indo and Pilipino patois): a blending of Catholica’s fallen angels and indigenous shamanic tradition of people who’ve lost or misplaced their souls.

Engage ’08: 2008 program of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO) and the Portland Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI). Training continues under IRCO’s Dr. Pei-ru Wang and ONI’s Jeri Williams.

FOBby (Pan-Asian): Fresh Off da Boat.

Fubonn: Asian mall on S.E. 82nd Avenue.

garbasaar (Somali): modest traditional married women cover shoulders and arms with garbasaar, heads with shash.

Glock (Austrian): semi-automatic handgun, favored by security forces worldwide.

guapo (Tagalog and Indo patois noun): good-looking dude. (Spanish adjective): hand- some.

matah hitam (Bahasa and Indo patois): eyes black. Vacant soul. A dangerous psychic state.

Scagliola (Italian): a technique for producing stucco coating.

suriya (Malay and Bahasa Indonesia): sun. Sun gold. Golden sunshine.

tidak (Malay and Bahasa): nope.

Tuscana: a region in Italia.

To learn more about Engage ’08, read former Oregonian reporter Gosia Wozniacka’s story at <www.gosiawozniacka.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Empowered-to-be-citizens.pdf>.