Good lessons from bad history

Remember, the Far East? Forget for a moment that all those exotic Orientals animating their mysterious cities are actually west of here. Ten jumbo jet hours due west, with two warm meals and two Hollywood blockbusters in between. Daily nonstop PDX flights daily will get you there. Each of them westbound.

Does anyone recall the inscrutable Far East? Those distant shopping adventures and spiritual possibilities even more novel than the Middle East’s elegant minarets and noisy sooks? The farther east last century’s western sailors went, the more their prejudices filled in their sketchy maps. Unkind ones.

Of course, our shared narratives have shifted some since Amsterdam merchants, London bankers, and Vatican scholars projected theirs on the rest us. Perspectives adding understanding of our energetic planet are now broadcast as deliberately from Dubai and Tokyo as they are from New York and Atlanta. The Old Far East has less and less meaning these days, as no places and no peoples are really that far away. Not anymore.

The city’s eastern edge

Pretty soon, east Portland will seem less foreign too.

By east Portland, I’m not talking about two to 50 tidy blocks east of swollen River Willamette — those cozy neighborhoods from which two kinds of rail, your choice of four-tired cars or six-tired busses, and any number of leafy bike boulevards, will get you to work on time every Monday morning.

By eastside, I’m not thinking about festive Hawthorne or Division or Sellwood — residential districts rich with Thai and Mexican menus, Tibetan shops and Mother India’s yoga studios. Several fragrant coffee shops per block.

I mean Far East Portland. Those chaotic city blocks carved by four-lane, 45-mph arterials where our elders and wheelchaired relatives need to go another quarter mile east or south before crossing one of those crazy streets. Those edgy neighborhoods where Portlanders who serve our inner-eastside’s shoppers, diners, and sippers can afford to raise their families. Those ambitious households that must either endure long-long TriMet rides or pay for painfully expensive gasoline to get to work. To get to school. To stores and banks.

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There’s a Starbucks on the corner of S.E. 121st Avenue and Division Street. Next to an abandoned Albertsons.

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To tell you the truth, I worry whether our present-day downtown policy planners and business developers are as distant from Portland’s far east neighborhoods as last century’s Euro-centrist leaders were, when western power and money were migrating east. The distant Far East.

Willy nilly natives

The thing about faraway places, odd peoples, and their unfamiliar ways, is that none of that is strange if you’re already living there. Moreover, newcomers not respecting different adaptations and determined to force outsider ways on those already settled, will cause both groups great grief. Check any high school history text. Or ask any Chinese, Vietnamese, or Indonesian nationalist. Ask him or her at any noodle, tea, or coffee shop on either side of our deep blue Pacific. Downtown or east end.

If Asian history seems too remote for relevance to Portland life, substitute that with our Pacific Northwest’s native nations experience.

Family life along rivers Willamette and Columbia was pretty upscale when Lewis & Clark stopped by in the spring of 1805. Business was bigger, politics were more complex, and social life was much more diverse than all that in St. Louis, the kickoff city for President Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery.

It’s hard to say why Lt. Clark complains so incessantly to his diary about his soaked socks, or why he didn’t simply knock on a Camas family’s door and after properly introducing himself, look longingly at their family room fire. Hospitality is universal.

We read a lot about Capt. Lewis’ upset tummy, but never about him politely asking any of the many Klickitat aunties he must’ve noticed at market, and inquiring what she does for her kids’ belly aches. Women everywhere know about this stuff.

And it’s not only about personal matters. Near River Columbia’s confluence with the sea, there’s a big rusty iron tub where the Corps of Discovery boiled salt out of seawater. It’s an American heritage site, as if locals hadn’t thought of that yet. As if the guys couldn’t have borrowed a Clatsop neighbor’s salt shaker. Up high in Salem’s capitol rotunda, there’s a mural memorializing the first white women shipped here. As if.

Across the street, Willamette University still insists theirs is the first institute of higher learning west of the Mississippi. Watching vacationing families and field-tripping students visit these kinds of local history lessons has to make you worry whether our kids are concluding that 140 boring centuries passed without seasoning, without dating, without Indian boys and girls doing homework.

You and your money are welcome, but

Last month, downtown’s Dill Pickle Club packed a yellow school bus for a rainy day trip to River City’s eastern edge. "East Portland Peripheries Tour," their promo video said. "Welcome East Portland Tourists," David Douglas High School ESL teacher Ann Downing’s earnest students’ big banner read.

"Welcome to Fubonn," Michael Liu, manager of Oregon’s largest Asian mall and host of immigrant Portland’s busiest weekend draw, every week of every year, said as his guests shook Oregon rain out of their pant cuffs and umbrella folds.

"Welcome to IRCO (the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization)," Djimet Dogo smiled in that open-hearted, wide-armed way only Africans can. "For 35 years, a nationally-recognized model of newcomer resettlement."

And they meant it. All of it. All of them. East-enders are serious about their kids’ educations. As serious as west-siders are, as serious as Native-American dads and moms have always been. Jennifer Liu led her guests up and down aisle after aisle of greens and meats, sauces and snacks. Explaining the unfamiliar. Assuring a kinder generation that spices for what’s bland and fixes for what hurts are readily available in amazing variety. Djimet explained wave after wave, as natural as Seaside breakers, of refugees resettling their families in Oregon’s fertile soil. Some of them from the Far East, some from Eastern Europe, some from East Africa, some from the Middle East.

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Some families black, some brown, some white, and all of them welcome to his big house.

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So you have to hope, and so we have to expect, that our city’s political and business leaders will have learned from last era’s awful lessons. The east need not be so far east. And faraway folks need not be deemed so alien.

We’re getting better. Inside my reeling generation, a week of pitching in an iron Hong Kong steamer’s been replaced by a day strapped six-abreast into a jumbo Boeing. Inside these same decades, inventive and industrial awe has shifted, west to east.

And while east Portlanders may have to be patient, as patient as those long days and endless nights between sending and receiving Pacific seaports, for our city’s infrastructural investments to move east, investments making possible our westside’s generous parks and lively business blocks and quiet evening walks — we have to hope that when these changes arrive, they come with sincere respect for all those folks already living and loving here.

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Indeed, east- and west-siders, Portlanders all alike, have to expect none of the carelessness and the cruelty that so defined earlier expansions east.