Natural as northwest rain

Portland does many things well. Ask anyone.

We’re envied nationally for thoughtful urban transportation, for splendid parks & rec programs, for our careful stewardship of rains to rivers to that big blue sea just beyond Astoria’s turgid bar — for our reverence of generation after generation of Chinook, Coho, and Sockeye salmon circulating as perennially as all that rain feeding all those cascading streams flowing into these two grand river matriarchs intersecting here. Right here in Portland.

There’s another thing we also do well. And if this one’s not as settled in local high school texts, not as apparent in our mainstream’s morning papers or on evening network news, then it’s probably time for us ethnic streamers to point it out. To point out this natural phenomena as persistently as Portland’s conservationists have mapped out the intimate relationship between healthy rivers and prosperous cities, between plentiful salmon and happy families.

I’m writing this essay as we’re sitting at one of Ong Kiet Van’s big family’s restaurants, this one in inner-eastside Hawthorne. But you know, we may as well be laughing around a raucous table at don Pedro’s northside taqueria, or at Ah Siu Bunketh’s palatial Legin out on S.E. 82nd. Because I’m talking about River City as a point on a natural clockwise sweep a lot like those rains and streams and salmon. I’m talking about the "port" part of Portland, about our place as a cycler of people and products and ideas.

Joined-at-the hip Portland

So here are three examples of how our city cycles, and I don’t mean earnest Stumptowners pumping across swollen Willamette’s Steele Bridge early weekday mornings.

Before Portland business and education leader Sho Dozono’s lawyer-daughter took on an ugly local law denying Latinos work and frustrating folks after their economic muscle, long before Big Uncle Sho brought us "From Oregon with Love," both the nine-year Fuji TV series filmed in Eastern Oregon and his more recent Thailand and Japan tsunami relief efforts — long before all that, Mr. Dozono’s mom sailed back across our Pacific to study, only to wake one morning to news of her current country (the United States) declaring war on her ancestoral nation (Imperial Japan). Needless to say: a lot of sorrows cycled to both sides of our deep blue sea. A lot of joy too. It’s what made us how we are.

Long before last summer, long before civic activist, civil engineer, and media publisher Jaime Lim got his name etched into the base of the Portland Immigrant Statue, Manong Jaime’s kitchen table buzzed as the nexus of resettling families and circulating business between the Philippine Republic and here. In jumbo jets packed alternatingly with typhoon relief and trade delegations, he sailed that same loop of cold Pacific current that has carried two centuries of ambitious Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese; vigorous Koreans, Viet Kieu, and Khmer; optimistic Indian Desi and Pacific islanders of all kinds. It’s how we are.

Okay. So when one of the Honorable Kiet Van’s sons — Lam Van, the one managing S.E. Hawthorne’s version of his family’s four Portland-hip, heaven-scented, Viet Kieu cuisine houses (the one I’m noodling and writing at) — announced that he’s steering a humanitarian medical mission right back to where it all began for his robust family, our gossippy ethnic enclaves were pleased and proud. But not surprised.

We’ve come to expect it. This cosmopolitanism. It’s what we do.

Ports R us

This is Portland.

Of course it’s our shipping terminals and iron steamers. It’s Portland’s worldly Port director, Bill Wyatt, sending out boatloads of potash and Pendleton wheat, while off-loading acre after tidy acre of Hyundai’s lovely new lines. And certainly it’s Mercy Corps and Medical Teams International, circulating our compassion.

But still not well inventoried, and not yet integrated into our mainstream’s policies and programs, is Portland as a confluence of our several national, racial, and ethnic communities. Each cycling and recycling just like our rain and rivers and ocean currents do. Naturally and perennially. Beautifully.

Cambodian Portlanders blend their Khmer cultural capital with what American wealth they and their neighbors accumulate here, and ship it right back to where their journey began. Portland kindness builds Golden Leaf Education Foundation village schools, buys kids’ uniforms, and salaries teachers to end national failures that sent them here 30 years ago.

And now Lam Van is taking it to Saigon. Between now and September, when Operation of Hope packs a planeful of smart doctors and their careful operating room staff, Lam and wife Elizabeth will be fundraising. "I was so touched," says Lam, recalling daily blogs on Operation of Hope’s surgeries in Hanoi, last year. "It’s a great thing they’re doing, bringing American expertise to kids who otherwise will never get this kind of help."

Lam will be on the ground early, interviewing anxious families and making hard decisions on kids’ eligibility for surgical procedures that change faces and change lives. According to Lam, there are issues of post-operative care, of these patients’ poverty, and of local facilities’ capacity for adequate aftercare. Vietnam is a rapidly developing nation.

He will also be there, Lam says, to care for Operation of Hope’s kind personnel. "I felt bad," he goes on to say, "following their blog last year, out of the North (of Vietnam). Someone should properly host them, take them out to eat, bring them into homes. Hospitality is so important in our culture."

Lam and Elizabeth Van will be setting a local table for their northwest-inspired Vietnamese banquet on Sunday, May 20, 2012. The Operation of Hope benefit event will be at their family’s popular Pearl District restaurant, Silk. Dinner is $50 per Portlander, all proceeds go directly to put a 13-member volunteer surgical team on the ground, to reconstruct 45 burned and deformed childrens’ faces.

"These are life-changing surgeries," Elizabeth Lam will tell you. "These are children too ashamed to show their faces at school. They’re kids who people on the streets whisper about."

Operation of Hope

Twenty-three years ago, Longview, Washington physician Joseph Clawson left his private practice to put together Operation of Hope, a nonpolitical and nonreligious medical mission serving developing countries. Since then, he and his board-certified reconstructive surgery teams have made hopeful lives out of more than 3,000 terribly deformed and disfigured ones. At no cost to their families.

That’s a lot of joy made, and a world of hurt mitigated, in Malawi and Zimbabwe, in Ecuador and Vietnam.

Dr. Clawson is now nearly 80 and has graciously passed Operation of Hope’s twice yearly overseas work to his son, Portland public relations manager Stephen Clawson; and to his daughter Jennifer Trubenbach. Ms. Trubenbach does the organization’s three-continent day-to-day management from Lake Forest, California. She is frequently featured, representing Operation of Hope, in national media including CNN International, People magazine, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

Proceeds of Lam and Elizabeth Van’s fundraiser go straight to Operation of Hope’s burn injury team for their September mission in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). According to Portland partner Stephen Clawson, next autumn’s work in Vietnam has an educational as well as a medical outcome. "There’s a hunger for learning in Vietnam, a determination for gaining the medical knowledge and surgical skills that they don’t yet have."

"Which we encourage and love," Clawson continued. Local physicians are engaged in observing and participating in the work of Operation of Hope doctors and staff. Educational seminars follow, and surely so will ongoing professional relationships.

And there you have it.

Portlanders do many things well. Thoughtful urban tripping, splendid parks, conscientious stewardship of rain-swollen streams all the way out to our big blue circulating sea. And there’s our participation in that grand clockwise Pacific cycle of optimistic peoples and inspired products and compassionate ideals.

Resisting all this is simply no longer smart. Sitting on our fertile shores is fine, but wading into this vigorous stream is better. The water’s warm. The company’s cool.

When Lam and Elizabeth Van set their table for a Pacific Northwest-inspired Vietnamese banquet on Sunday, May 20, when we sit, when we eat and laugh together — 45 burned and deformed kids’ lives will be redeemed. And so will we.

Things cycle like that. Like us.

Notas: Honorifics used to address Asian Portland elders: Ong (Viet), Manong (Tagalog), Ah (Chinese).