Not long ago I had my eyeballs checked. It was my first time since junior high, 40 ferocious years ago. Back then, I held a white card against one eye and strained the other at a chart thumbtacked to the back of an examining room door — A Z Y. E U W Q. M N D H R .

It was not long after we arrived here. Here in America.

I got my second vision test, the one not so long ago, because I just got health insurance. Also for the first time. Eyeball care came with my great government job, another first.

I left that visit with corrective lenses, with very cool frames and my clear vision back when I walked out of Dr. Thuy Tran’s tidy clinic in Hollywood. That’s Hollywood as in northeast Portland, not in sunny Southern Cal.

Our Hollywood is at the west end of those 40 vigorous N.E. Sandy blocks we proudly call Little Saigon. Proudly, because of the Republic of South Vietnam’s colors flying every April, flapping in Oregon’s blustery spring. But proudly too, because Portland’s IRCO (Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization) — today a national model for integrating newcomer communities — was also a Hollywood business back in our difficult 1980s. Back when a surge of Southeast Asian, East African, East European, and energetic Caribbean refugee families changed Portland’s aesthetic and ethos. Forever. And for good.

Proudly, because back then, back during economic times dark as today’s, IRCO scored us a big Ford Foundation revolving loan fund. One million dollars for seeding all that entrepreneurial immigrant energy along N.E. Sandy. Up sprang cozy cafés and packed little grocery stores; optimistic jewelry shops and beauty salons; essential insurance and money wiring agencies. Just like main street in any city, on every continent.

That mainstream loan fund, stirred well into our ethnic stream ambition, made American magic. Tonkin and Thomason sold tons of Toyota Camrys and Honda Accords, half down in cold cash on account of newcomers not qualifying for credit. Resettling refugee families bought homes during a decade when settled ones idled. First-generation parents did 20-hour workdays to set sons and daughters up for college. OSU’s schools of engineering and pharmacy were transformed by it. Indeed, we all were.

And yeah, we’re still proud of all that.

About those firsts

Back when I got that very first vision check, back when I was at Judson Junior High, our vice principal appointed Arthur Chinn and me to be sergeants-at-arms. Nobody ran for that student body job. And we couldn’t say no.

Not counting an adopted Korean kid, Arthur and me were Judson’s only Asians. Including my best bud Tony Pacheco and his chocolate-eyed sisters’ household, we were South Salem’s only ethnic minority families. It was therefore, a rather risky political appointment for our school. For our times. Times when we watched America’s handsome young president, his sensitive little brother, and this nation’s Buddha soul the Rev. Dr. King — all get shot. Murdered.

Junior high sergeants-at-arms: it was the first and remains the only time anyone in our ever-expanding family has ever held any kind of popular office.

Politics has never been a thing we do. Not in our community. Not folks who fled here, precisely because of bad politics back home. Really bad politics.

Democracy is also new for American Asians. Leaders in our homelands — colonialists or autocrats or communists — wouldn’t have it. None of it.

If you add our Old World ancestral memories to our recent anxious immigrant experience, it’s easy to figure why our communities are not enthusiastic about getting into New World politics.

Engineers make a good living, our parents say. Pharmacists too; Freddies and Walgreens are aaalways hiring. Everywhere. But politicians — ?

So when Thuy Chu Tran (the optometrist who made reading and driving right again) told Portlanders she’s running for a legislative seat in Oregon’s House of Representatives, I had to hurry over to ask her: "It’s all so new, doc. I mean, to our families. What do your parents say?"

First steps are hard

"Well you know," she answered thoughtfully then confidently, "anything new can be risky. But what you learn always benefits you, your family, your community." Smart answer. Responsible leader.

Dr. Thuy is an east Portland resident and a David Douglas School District parent of two likewise bright and brave daughters and one baby brother. She recalled for me how she similarly informed her war-weary Viet Kieu parents that she’d joined the military. "A lot of unknowns, a lot of preconceived notions ... about guns and war and all. Even though I deploy as a medical officer.

"So I told my parents that in the service I get to love, I get to care for, a military based on volunteers putting their lives on the line to protect the freedom and justice we have."

In 2010, Oregon Air National Guard Major Thuy C. Tran deployed to Bangladesh on the Pacific Angel mission. Recently, she returned from native Alaskan villages above the Arctic Circle.

"You’ve got to step up when you’re there, though it’s new, though it’s risky, to promote the system that’s been there for you."

Dr. Thuy talks about the turning point, last fall, when she heard from her daughter’s teacher’s aide that their school district was holding a public hearing that very evening about dropping five more days from the current class year. It was Halloween night, not cool for trick-or-treating parents.

She stepped up, she said, because she had to. Thousands of families and her community’s economic health depend on quality education. She stepped in because it’s a system she believes in, one that’s impacted badly by east Portland’s economic hard times.

Unhappily, Dr. Thuy was unable to do anything to prevent this loss of precious learning time for her community’s kids. She’ll tell you she was saddened and disappointed, but rather than getting discouraged, she decided to take a bigger bite, an even deeper responsibility for the schools, for the staff and students, for the neighborhoods, she loves. Funding decisions for Oregon’s public schools take place in Salem, in the Legislative Assembly, and Dr. Thuy Tran made up her mind to campaign for a seat there.

It’s all — if you step back a moment — both a bold and natural step for a Portlander who fled Vietnam between her proud pop and her pregnant mom and their four other children, with one suitcase.

It’s bold because she’s participating in the politics of securing the kind of community my elders and yours simply could not, and totally believing in her ability to shape all that, like only shamelessly optimistic immigrants can. And will.

It’s natural because Dr. Thuy is a business owner locked into our local economy; she’s a citizen soldier committed to her country; she’s a parent pulled into the democratic process because that’s the only way it’ll work for us.

About my eyeballs, about my first and only political appointment, let me bring you current. Today there are no more 3" x 5" cards, no more thumbtacked letter charts. Modern docs have you rest your chin on a leatherette pad then they swing something sciency in front of your peepers. About Arty and me during America’s darkest decade: as much as we tried and tried, we failed to stop bad boys from smoking behind the baseball backstop; we failed to freeze kids in their tracks while he and me raised the flag and Greggy Lonigan blew his bugle. So much for my political science experiment.

But you know 40 years have since passed. Many of them deliciously slow, most of them ferociously fast. And today, not a lot of Americans think cigarettes are all that cool. Not anymore.

And now, 50 miles north of that junior high, here in River City, depending on where you live, your neighbors are between 1-in-6 and 1-in-2 foreign born. Seventy-seven robust languages and distinct dialects are spoken by kids between classes at David Douglas High — that ridiculously ambitious part of Portland that our Dr. Thuy wants to protect and promote in the Oregon House of Representatives.

That part of town where the American flag and our American anthem and everyone’s American dreaming bring each of those robust kids’ tough and tender parents to tears. Every time.

New ideas, new ideals are risky. For democracy they’re necessary. To the parents of Tran Chu Thuy, thank you for raising your daughter and doctor. To her husband and children, thank you for lending us your wife and mother.

Editor’s note: Polo refers to Dr. Thuy Chu Tran in the traditional Asian way as Dr. Thuy because by using her personal (first) name he is expressing familial intimacy. By using the honorific (Dr.), he expresses respect for her learning and for her place in our community. Most Old World cultures do not address people by their family (last) names, i.e.: Dr. Tran, Mrs. Tran, Major Tran, or just Tran.