Little and big, some kept, some not

Terima kasih (I offer our love in thanks) dear Asian Reporter readers for opening to this page, for giving this column twelve quiet morning minutes for the past 20 years. That’s 1,000 of your spare moments. Thank you with all my heart.

We’ve now done 1,000 Talking Stories.

That’s a lot of wordy moments between us. I am grateful, indeed all writers are gratified by reader response to our work, whether you’re happy or sad or mad. I keep kind words sent me neatly folded inside a fragrant cigar box. I tell and retell the story of a voicemail so loud that our recorder couldn’t pick up most of it; a rant so long that it exceeded our machine’s 30-second max; but a complainant so committed that she called in again, determined to finish her message, and me, off.

Then there was the guy claiming to be an Afghanistan War vet and an Army sharpshooter, whose reaction to my writing was likewise hard for our editor or me to foresee. We had to call the cops on that one.

I mean it, though — the thing about being thankful. Our learning is never-ending. And our teachers — those who want you to feel or think in new ways — are humbling.

What writers promise

"A writer makes his or her reader a promise," patient Portland teachers Douglas Marx and Martha Gies told and told me when, already in mid-life, I began learning how to write.

You promise to deliver something, every time you start a story. Maybe something small, maybe something big. But in trade for a reader’s time and trust, you make a deal. And if you intend to keep dealing in the weeks or months or years between you and your audience, you better be true to your word.

I have tried. I try and try to be true. Really. But this is different from telling The Truth — in the style of oaths made in Hollywood dramas or in Multnomah County courtrooms. It’s not like telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." What that means is way beyond me.

The thing is, our family is cultivated in Java’s Kebatinan tradition — an ethno-cultural accumulation of a lot of really old stuff, sorted and re-sorted, but never tossed on account of an island ethos to not waste a thing. When resources are finite, more care for what you have, is called for.

I write what I know

Long-long before Mother India’s Hindu Religious Tradition arrived on our ancestral shores, long before Buddha Dharma built Stupa Borobudur, before Prophet Muhammad’s (May Peace be Upon Him) Teachings, even ahead of Lord Jesus coming to our 3,000-mile archipelago, our folk were devoutly wed to our whispering treetops and laughing streams, to our grumbling volcanoes and moody seas, to their big spirits and to the smaller spirits of our ancestors living among them.

So, our story goes, we saved it all. From Vedic gurus and Compassionate Buddha we learned how all things are illusion. Our desires and dreads are all we really know. From our Grand Ibrahamic faiths we learned that the only Truth is God, but that God is unimaginably grander than our 1.8 million years of carefully accumulated knowledge. So we are a hushed folk. Humbled, on our blessed island chain.

The closest I can get to the truth — with all respect due our urban American demand that all our propositions be supported by empirical data — is awe. Just plain awe at the grand mystery of it all. Of Creation.

These elements are central to my style of reporting. I won’t insist on my opinions, argue against your positions, or support anyone’s politics. I cannot.

Smaller truths

To stay true to my writing teachers’ rule on keeping your promises, I’ve done my best to stay true emotionally. To be sincere.

This kind of truth — sincerity — is hard to fake. All living creatures, among them our Pop’s exuberant dahlias, every Starbucks English sparrow, any golden retriever, all buddha-belly baby boys, know whether you’re really there for them, or not. Each knows it immediately.

I have now made 1,000 of this kind of promise. I sincerely have. Some of those promised truths were big and some were small. Some were serious and some were silly. Many promises I’ve kept, but many I have not.

It’s all been like the rest of my daily life, I mean when I’m not leaning into my achy old Compaq. And maybe your life’s long or short story’s been like that too. Every single promise, at the morning of its making, we make with every ounce of sincerity we own. But we’ve betrayed them anyway. Way too many. Sure, we have.

And this is what I want to address, here inside my thousandth essay for The Asian Reporter. What about promises made and promises kept by small-paper writers or by big-city lawyers, by priests or by presidents? Do any of us know more than the next guy about the world we promise to move, to improve a little or a lot? And what counts for staying true to a promise?

20 years ago

Twenty years ago I began writing from steamy East Portland noodle shops; out of fashionably decrepit Old Saigon cafés; from buzzing Thai border-province markets; from Lao frontier towns as colorful as that Star Wars wild-west saloon scene.

The 1990s were like daylight streaming through the shuttered windows of the Eighties, that awful decade of hungry drug lords running provincial northeast Thailand, and of ethnocidal Communist Lao armies hunting Hmong families up and down swollen River Mekong. Just ten years before that, those Old Saigon side streets belonged to terribly out-of-place U.S. soldiers, same age as our sons, stoned out of their minds.

Many journalists, academics, and travel writers reported from those places during that decade. Amazing writing. Rigorously researched. My promises were smaller. I wanted only to report what one Eurasian boy raised during the disintegration of western and Japanese imperialism, what one refugee kid schooled in the craziness of America’s affirmative action generation, saw, heard, smelled, and tasted in the middle of the transformative 1990s. Those thrilling Nineties.

That decade closed with many of us Oregon Asian activists laughing like children at the grand U.S.-Viet Nam reconciliation bash down at the Port of Saigon, Pier 2. A party thrown by that president with Elvis-charm, with encyclopedic knowledge, and of course with his generation’s undiscerning appetites: Mr. Bill Clinton.

Making promises and keeping each, was easier. It was an era like that, big with possibilities. Then darkness returned.

10 years ago

The new millennium was driven by Osama’s murderous crew. The U.S. and the cynical recipients of our foreign aid reacted year after grinding year to al-Qaeda’s brutality with excesses just as terrifying.

From 9/11 forward we talked-story about American wrath in miserable old Afghanistan and on Baghdad’s crowded downtown sidewalks. I wrote about the stealth, speed, and fury of U.S. military might. And about the ugliness naturally set loose when you own so much power. And use it.

I admitted not knowing a lot about Afghanistan’s domestic politics or regional policies, but said that I knew Uzbeki and Pashtun families. I know well their households’ generosity, their guys’ humor, their mothers’ and daughters’ modesty. I told you that I knew even less about Saddam’s Iraq, but I suggested that Oregon’s immigrant communities know all about irresistible giants warring over our neighborhoods. We know all about foreigners crushing our grandmas at market and burying our kids under their schools. We know all about angry soldierboys screaming a strange language at fathers just trying to get to work. Just being men, for us.

I suggested that none of us will ever forget the wail of women sorting through the splinters of their neighborhoods, and moreover, that we would never want any Portlander to know the acrid scent of wives and mothers when each inevitably finds and each tenderly wraps the parts, the disembodied parts, of each broken beloved. Never.

A new cycle, some more promises

It has been a dark and dangerous decade. In 2004, an Indonesian tsunami travelling at jumbo-jet speed took 280,000 precious lives from 11 countries. Three out of four of the precious souls suddenly departed were of our homeland. In these times, my promises have been somber. And those kept have not brought a lot of joy.

Then in 2008, the boy whose ancestral Kenya soil was where I did Duck U research, the kid raised in our Indonesian hometown, the president-elect who invited his Hawai’i prep school marching band (with our nephew on clarinet) to Inauguration Day, moved his beautiful family into the White House.

The job description was out of this world. Disasters made of breathtaking neglect loomed all around. River Mekong was swallowing more homes and rice harvests than during any monsoon over the last century. An abyss of digital debt deeper than estimable by any disaster model available to our nation’s best economists yawned.

And so we’ve started another cycle, or maybe another recycle, as we’re used to here, here on the confluence of our two grand river systems, 80 salmon miles from that vast clockwise sweep of Pacific Sea that perennially recycles those rivers, their Chinook and Coho, and Oregon’s generous rain. This dark decade will end.

Morning always ends night. And we’ll always go to work, making promises. Insh’allaah. We’ll try and try to keep them. Some betrayals will be little, and some big. More of the small kind than the crushing kind — we’ll have to insist. More based on what humble knowledge we really do own, and less on earnest western insistence on The Truth. Facts (with a cap F) lined up in a row. Like ducks. Like kittens.

Thank you dear reader for opening to this page, for giving me twelve of your quiet morning minutes for these past 20 years. That’s 1,000 of your spare moments. Thank you with all my heart.

* * *

Explanatory notas:

Misogynist: What that angry reader called me. I didn’t know that word, so I looked it up. Woman-hater. I have to disagree — I love our elder aunties, our mother, my wife, our sisters, daughters and granddaughters. A lot.

Veterans of war: No disrespect intended. I have great affection for our soldiers, for their instinct to protect us. Our familia has generations of soldatu. What I hate is national leadership’s readiness to have our kids war thousands of miles away from where their families live, where others simply live and love just like we do.

Award-winning Iraq essay: For our work on America in Iraq, The Asian Reporter was the runner-up for New America Media’s 2006 OpEd Excellence Award. Washington, D.C. party, including Hillary Clinton.

Kenya: Barack Obama, Sr.’s family is from Kisumu District, where I studied for UO in 1976.

Djakarta: Where Barack Obama’s mom took him, for love. And where he attended elementary school. Same town our parents met and wed and made babies.

The Punahou School: Hawai’i prep school Mr. Obama attended from grade 5 to graduation. Where our nephews attend still.

About men: I write from a male perspective. It’s all I can honestly do. I recognize that our contemporary American ethos requires a kind of genderless attitude and approach — but I simply cannot. This doesn’t mean I hate women, please see misogynist nota above.

2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake: Revised death toll, BBC Asian Pacific News (January 25, 2005).

Insh’allaah: From Quranic Arabic: If Merciful God so Wills it. An existential surrender to knowing little, and to being little. What a relief.

Ducks and kittens in a row (for English-as-a-Second-Language readers): An American saying. Only baby ducks follow moms in a neat row, and kittens cannot be thus disciplined.

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