May 2, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

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May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 1

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2 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

The Dynasty Room: A new look for an old haunt

By Alexa Strabuk IE Contributor

If people didn’t come out, I’d have gone out of business a long time ago.”

Of all the possible elements that could make a restaurant noteworthy, a urinal trough is unlikely to be at the top of anybody’s list. Common considerations may include the quality of food, the atmosphere or the service. And while those items certainly apply here, too, an adolescent I-Miun Liu found sharing a giant urinal with a handful of Asian elders in the old Four Seas restaurant bathroom to be particularly memorable.

Some social media naysayers have accused Liu and his team of gentrifying the old Four Seas building, but Liu says that’s inaccurate. He has never opened a business that forced someone else out. All locations were either previously abandoned or used as private administrative offices, which he then opened to the public. Plus, he adds, it wouldn’t be possible for him to re-create exactly what made the original Four Seas so special.

“This wasn’t a thoughtless project to mess around with an iconic business. There were hours of conversations around race, pricing and gentrification.

We wanted to create a space that was multiuse, that could really involve the rest of the community,” says Liu.

“I had good times there as a kid with my family. The bar was always full. I could never go in because it was 21-and-over, but I was still fascinated by the space itself. I was very serious back then,” jokes Liu. Years later, an adult Liu is breathing new life into the now-defunct Four Seas with his new restaurant: Dynasty Room.

Named after the dimly lit bar in the back of the original, Dynasty Room opened earlier this month in the Chinatown-International District (CID), serving a rotating menu of Korean and Chinese street food and tea-infused craft cocktails.

A look inside the Dynasty Room after its makeover • Photo by Jill Wasberg

scheduled for leveling next year. He answers that it’s an opportunity for creativity, the challenge of putting a twist on tradition like he’s done with his other businesses.

Liu owns several other beloved local For many years, Four Seas was a popubusinesses including Oasis Tea Zone, a lar dim sum restaurant and institution in bubble tea shop with locations all over the the CID neighborhood. Judge Dean Lum, city, and the Eastern Café in the CID. a former Four Seas employee whose faThe Chan family, the former Four Seas ther owned the restaurant from 1962 until proprietors, announced last year they 1989, told Northwest Asian Weekly that were closing to make way for an afford- the place was a central hub for politicians, able housing mixed-use project, a part- professional athletes, and on several occanership with the InterIm Community sions, A-list celebrities like Danny Kaye, Development Association. When Liu was John Wayne and Mickey Rooney. approached to activate the space for a last To respect this impressive legacy, bringhurrah before the site’s demolition in 2019, ing the Dynasty Room to life required a he wasn’t sure how it would all pencil out. team of highly ambitious creatives.

“Most owners open businesses for the Architecture firm Board & Vellum, artnumbers, right? I never really planned to ist-powered design studio Electric Coffin, make any profit, but I had to make at least and former Ba Bar manager Michael Chu, some of my money back,” says Liu. “I did who now manages Dynasty Room, were all the build out myself to save money. It all brought on to help create a restaurant, ended up being a really interesting project yes, but also an unforgettable dining exin that way.” perience. They figured if it was going to People often ask Liu why he’d put in be torn down in a year, why not go all out? so much effort to open a restaurant that’s

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Though they’ve added newer elements to the space – a fog machine and projectors – maintaining the building’s integrity and enhancing its traditional Asian fixtures remained central to the project.

“There’s an original, really intricate wood carving on the back wall of the bar,” describes Liu. “People come in and ask whether it was there before. It was. But by cleaning it up, adding new lighting, and using what was already there, we were able to highlight it.”

In the front entryway, an impressive cardboard structure, the “Wolf Temple”, sets the tone for the entire backroom. It also features a small gift shop, an homage to the traditional variety stores in the CID like Sun May Co. This is an important inclusion. Dynasty Room owes a lot to its locale, explains Liu. Opening a business like this in a different location, say, in the rapidly developing South Lake Union area would be a completely different story.

Dynasty Room will host events, movie nights and feature local artists. In Liu’s mind, a restaurant is representative of its neighborhood, and therefore, is responsible for keeping its storefront clean, supporting local organizations and creating a positive environment for its patrons. It is not about turning a profit only to run off.

One person recently said they’d never pay for a $6 cocktail in that part of town.

Liu found this insulting. He’s hoping to challenge false perceptions that Asian food is always cheap, that the service is always bad, and that the shops are always dirty.

“For the short time its here, I hope people come and see the neighborhood, recall their fond memories of Four Seas in a different light, and at the end of the day, I hope it showcases a different side of the CID. That’s the important part,” he says.

So come for the chicken gizzards, the jajangmyeon noodles and the lychee craft cocktails. Or, at the very least, come through to see the infamous urinal trough in all of its glory just as you re“The amount of neighborhood support member it.

I get as a small business owner is overwhelming,” he says. “People don’t realize how special the support is here in the CID.

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INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 3

Community commentary: Where it ended, where it began

By Janet Brown IE Contributor “In ten more years, when we look back at Seattle as it used to be, where will we decide we went wrong,” a friend wondered yesterday when we talked over coffee in my tiny Chinatown apartment. It was a question that refused to leave me alone, teasing at the back of my thoughts and elbowing its way into the forefront this morning.

My vote for causing the city’s tipping point goes to the Columbia Center, the “Darth Vader” building, which upon completion in 1985 was out of place, absurdly defying Seattle’s scale of small architecture. It looms over downtown like a behemoth of darkness, and has set the standard for all the other towers that have joined it over the years. None of them can be taller than real estate magnate Martin’s Selig’s scar on the city.

Traditionally, Seattle’s downtown was a center for a multitude of neighborhoods, each of them its own cozy community. After six at night, there was scant activity in the city center and the little that flourished was mainly provided by travelers staying at the hotels. The Olympic was the kingis going through an urban revolution and pin, giving a touch of grande luxe magwhen it’s over, who knows what will still nificence to an unpretentious city, with the be standing? nearby Fifth Avenue Theater and shops in I live in what was the most overlooked Rainier Square buttressing that luster. neighborhood in the city – until now. AlFor years, the most coveted experience though Pioneer Square is where tourists in Seattle was dinner at the Georgian flock to see the original Seattle of the 19th Room, a night at the theater, and a cocktail century, the Chinatown-International Disat Shuckers before going up to one of the trict is the place where residents still live, Olympic’s Belle Epoque suites. A stay at shop, and go out to eat in the buildings the Olympic guaranteed its guests a night from that era. or two of life in the reincarnated form of Too poor to have excited commercial inDiamond Jim Brady. terest for over a hundred years, now this But as a rule, Seattle residents went home section of town has become a Mecca for after work, to small bungalows in Ballard, developers and soon hotels and condos Wallingford, Green Lake and a score of will dwarf whatever is allowed to remain. other small towns that combined to form Many of the old buildings here still sport a city. These were self-contained commu“ghost signs,” a precursor to billboards nities where many of the inhabitants went downtown only when they had to – and where advertisements were painted diexcept for work, they rarely needed to. rectly on the brick walls. “Dancing, Chow In the neighborhoods were supermarkets, Mein, Chop Suey” one of them continues bookshops, movie theaters, bakeries, din- to invite, while the building I live in proers and taverns. Each area was distinctive: claims, “U.S. Hotel, Rooms 50 Cents.”

Fremont was the bohemian turf of hippies They’ve stood solidly in place since the and bikers, Ballard was a Nordic fishing 1900s and some perhaps even before that, village, Wallingford resembled the sort of through fire, earthquakes, economic detown Ozzie and Harriet should have lived pressions, boom times, but they haven’t in. None of them were destinations, except been “retrofitted.” If they aren’t soon for Green Lake with its Olmsted-designed threaded with steel girders or other reinforcements, they will come down and with park and the zoo. them goes a significant part of Seattle’s They were pleasant, unassuming (if history. you ignored the ornate mansions built by One hundred years before the Columbia Gold Rush wealth on Capital and Queen Anne hills), and just a bit smug. Why, each Center building opened, in November of resident seemed to wonder silently, would 1885, a mob of 500 Tacoma citizens forced the (approximately) 700 Chinese residents anyone want to live anywhere else? of that city to leave and then burned their And suddenly, it seems as though nohomes and businesses to the ground. A few body does want to live anywhere else. months later in February of 1886, martial Seattle’s downtown has become the law was declared in Seattle to stop mobs most desirable address in an exploding from forcing the Chinese residents, who city, and beyond its borders, the sweet were at that time 10 percent of the populittle neighborhood bungalows are being lation, onto steamships that would remove torn down and replaced by micro-apart- them from the city. Although officially ments and condominiums. A place that Seattle repudiated the expulsion, the numdelighted in being quiet and unobtrusive

Photo courtesy of International Examiner

ber of Chinese soon dwindled from over of culture and history. It’s an example of 900 people to a handful, “a few dozen, at what an urban village can be. And it’s posmost,” says historylink.org. sibly doomed, definitely threatened.

But those remaining residents kept Seattle’s Chinatown alive, to become a place for people from all over the world, as well as a refuge for artists, writers and musicians. It has led to the creation of Little Saigon with its bounty of Vietnamese businesses and it encompasses a corner that’s still Nihonmachi, Japantown.

Elderly Chinese ladies and colorfully dressed women from African countries fill the streets every morning, taking their children to the school bus, buying groceries, meeting to chat with friends and play cards in Hing Hay Park.

We all claim milestones based upon our own personal experience, where we were when Kennedy was shot, what we were doing when the Towers fell on September 11.

We measure change with alterations in our own private worlds, so for each one of us, Seattle’s turning point will be an individual opinion. For me, it came in 1985 when Martin Selig’s black skyscraper overtook the Smith Tower as the primary landmark of Chinatown’s city view, its long shadow falling on what is now seen as under-utilized real estate, ripe for development.

Someday perhaps, it will all have been worth it. I doubt it. But then I have skin in It’s a community of pedestrians who this game.

I’m losing my home of 12 years walk to the library, the post office, the to the gentrification of a community that neighborhood health center, to one of the has survived against all odds until now. many restaurants.

Goodbye Chinatown. Hello Metropolis.

Lion dancers bring their drums and Janet Brown has lived in the CID since gongs to announce the Lunar New Year 2005.

She has written four books while livand the sidewalks are carpeted with the ing in the International Apartments. She is scarlet petals of exploded firecrackers for a Mak Fai Lion Dance Troupe groupie and days afterward. a passionate devotee of King Noodle.

Tai Tung has fed the community and visitors Chinese-American food since 1935.

A more recent arrival, the Eastern Cafe, serves espresso and crepes in the Eastern Hotel building, a place dating from 1911 that once housed the Atlas movie theater (which closed as the Kokusai Theater in the 1980s).

Floating through it all is the smell of roast pork from whole pigs cooked in gigantic, ferociously hot ovens at Asia Barbeque, the light sweetness of fortune cookies baked at Tsue Chong’s factory on Eighth Avenue, and the fragrance of layer cakes that drifts down the street from Yummy House Bakery.

Chinatown-International District is more than a neighborhood. It’s a triumph

4 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Seattle drag icon Aleksa Manila reflects on Filipino heritage, living in the Chinatown-ID

By Chetanya Robinson IE Managing Editor

alongside my peers. And so I made it a personal goal and mission, like: ‘I appreciate the laughter, but I want you to laugh “Drug counselor by day, drag queen with me, not at me.’” by night.” That’s the tagline of Aleksa Since then, Manila has used her drag Manila, an iconic Seattle drag personalpersona to fundraise for meaningful ity who uses her arresting state presence causes and organizations and to educate and appearance to entertain, educate and people.

She founded the AAPI LGBTQ raise awareness. organization Pride ASIA, which holds In his professional career outside of community gatherings in Hing Hay Park. drag, Manila goes by a different name She’s been a speaker, announcer, enterand works as program coordinator for the tainer, performer, and appeared on billharm reduction Project NEON and as an boards promoting HIV awareness. She addiction counselor at Seattle Counseling has a long list of awards and achieveService, an organization serving the LG- ments to her name dating back to 2001, BTQ community. the most recent being the The Greater Aleksa Manila the drag personality is Seattle Business Association Humanideeply rooted in her Filipino heritage. tarian Award for Community Leader of “It’s one of the foundations of my drag the Year, and the Community Champion expression as an art form, but also as a award from the Seattle Women’s Pride and Seattle Lesbian Organization. She form of activism,” she said. was recently one of 100 people living and Her name comes from where she was deceased to be recognized by the Filipino born: Manila in the Philippines. She’s American Student Association at the Unilived in the Northwest for over 20 years, versity of Washington (FASA sa UW) in about ten of these in downtown Seattle, honor of its 100th year anniversary mostly the Chinatown International DisIn an interview that’s been edited for trict (CID). length and clarity, Manila spoke to the Sitting down for an interview with the International Examiner about her FilipiInternational Examiner at the Eastern no heritage, how she developed her drag Cafe, Manila brought out a book about persona, why she’s drawn to live in the Seattle Filipino labor activists Silme CID, and the troubling erasure of FilipiDomingo and Gene Viernes (murdered nos from CID history by the Seattle City in 1981 in Pioneer Square on the orders Council. of the Marcos dictatorship), a visual history of the Filipino Community of Seattle, and Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America In my adult life I felt grounded here

by Chong-suk Han, sociology professor as a Filipino immigrant, as an Asian at Middlebury College and former editor American, as a U.S. citizen, but also beof the International Examiner. This last ing a queer person, being in downtown book’s cover features a stylized collage Seattle, even in Chinatown, I feel safe of Manila’s face, her eyes hidden by big being queer.

I walk out of my apartment shades, posing with a cigarette (when the building in full drag in daylight and I feel book came out, she worried people would safe. think she smokes in real life; she doesn’t).

I remember walking into these restauManila’s drag persona was born from rants [in the CID] before I even came out, a study she was involved with, of young with friends and relatives. This is a cengay, bisexual and questioning Asian men tral meeting place for all families, for all in Seattle and San Francisco. The study explored how ethnic pride has a positive communities, regardless if you’re queer influence on how people make safe sexu- or straight, or even if you’re Asian or not al choices. At a cultural event the men put Asian. on, she gave one of her first drag appearances. “It was this very meaningful thing for me,” she said.

Years later, in 2001, Manila was crowned Miss Gay Filipino at the Filipino Community of Seattle (FCS), where, she likes to say, she won in every category except congeniality.

After being crowned Miss Gay Filipino, Manila decided to be more intentional with her drag.

“In the Filipino community there’s acceptance of queer culture and queer people, but it’s a stereotype,” she said.

“The gay Filipino man is the screaming beautician at the public market. And so when they would watch the pageant that I was in, there was a lot of laughter, but I kind of felt like I was being laughed at

Aleksa Manila on top of The Publix Hotel in Seattle’s Chinatown International District • Photo by Malcolm Smith

books, in newspapers, whether there’s vantage point of the skyline. And Beacon organizations or just the natural progres- Hill, really thriving, I think there’s a lot sion of culture morphing and changing, it of Filipinos there. It’s just crazy-making. needs to be kept.

If you could so easily forget and/or not This whole idea of Manilatown miss- know, and not bother to ask, I can only ing in the language and the literature imagine what that would mean for genand the [2017 City Council resolution]. erations to come. My fear is that slowly, It’s like you erased me from the family you’re erasing history of Filipino Ameritree. It feels like you just cut off a branch cans living in Seattle or around Seattle. and it was fine -- it didn’t need to be And to me, it wasn’t an omission -- it And I think that’s the essence of Chi- pruned, it just needed to grow. How can was crossed off! But why? Especially not natowns around the world. I’ve been in the Filipino community grow if you cut now in the political climate that we’re in. a lot of Chinatowns nationally and also it off?

The more divided we are, the more dioverseas. There’s an essence there that I get it if you don’t live here, but could visive we are towards each other, that’s you feel like you’re at home. you just open your eyes? Like we’re sit- horizontal hostility. All that does is make One of my friends Alexis Landry actu- ting at Eastern Cafe, next door to the the community weaker. And I see that too ally drew an illustration of the Chinatown Eastern Hotel, and you just peek through within the LGBTQ community. It’s like, International District from about 15, the glass windows, there’s photographs the lesbians against the gays against the maybe almost 20 years ago. You open it of Filipino American workers that work bisexuals against the trans people. All up and it was the map of Chinatown. And in the canneries. And there’s quotes from that does is divide up the LGBTQ comI have one -- they don’t exist anymore, Carlos Bulosan, who was an author who munity. And I think I’m seeing that also because the map has changed. Even Wing worked in the canneries. He’s Filipino. with instances like this in the Asian PaLuke Museum has changed, all of those You walk over that way and there’s a cific Islander community, where it’s the places are shifting and changing. I was monument that features Uncle Bob San- different national origin communities gocrowned Miss Gay Seattle at the Nippon tos, who’s also an activist, he’s part of the ing after each other. But why? What does that do for you?

Kan theater, which is gone -- I believe it’s Gang of Four. a call center now. I’m kind of sad.

At the edge of Chinatown is José Rizal And what’s critical too is oral history. Bridge -- the national hero of the PhilipWhere are these stories? Unless they’re pines, which is attached to Dr. José Rizal ALEKSA MANILA: Continued on page 20 . . . written down or talked about and in Park, that probably has the most beautiful

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 5

Life After Manzanar: Rebuilding and healing after WWII Japanese American incarceration

By Chizu Omori IE Contributor

a major scholar of camp history, who contributed the foreword to this book, says, “I would argue that resistance to oppression Manzanar was one of the 10 camps is nonetheless the leitmotif” of this book. where Japanese American U.S. citizens What these auliving on the West Coast were incarcerthors wisely did ated during WWII. The book is a group was to comb the areffort, with input and contributions from a range of people, and tells the story of chives, the existing those who were finally released from cus- testimonies, the rich tody and had to start new lives. Personal material that exists stories form the main content, reliving in many places, thus the actual departure from the camps at allowing voices from the end of the war up to today. Some of as far back as 1973 the contributors are well known, such as – Sue Kunitomi EmJohn Tateishi and Aiko Herzig, but most bry, Togo Tanaka, are ordinary folk, examples of the varied Karl Yoneda, to 2017 – David Goto. This population that comprised this group. range gives a rich“One of the initiators of this book proj- ness to the stories in ect wanted something to reach visitors this absorbing book, to Manzanar National Historic Site, the along with the phomuseum and study center…. who might tos that allow us to wonder what happened to people who left see these individuals, the barracks for the great unknown,” say their families, and authors Naomi Hirahara and Heather C. their humanity.

Lindquist in the afterword of Life After It is a very readable, accessible work, Manzanar. and overall, builds up to the bursts of acAnd as the years pass and more research tivity that came forth as the community has happened, a great deal of resistance came to grips with its history, formed orwithin the camps surfaced. Art Hansen, ganizations, created pilgrimages and

study centers, culminating with a demand for redress and an acknowledgement from the government that, indeed, a terrible injustice was perpetrated.

ers across southern California. The job situation was bad, forcing many to do whatever it took to put food on the table.

Gardening was one job that many took up When the camps out of necessity. It was a struggle to reesclosed in 1945 and tablish themselves, and the elderly never 1946, most had lost regained what they had lost. almost everything In time, the community got on its feet and faced hostile en- and began to fight against anti-Asian legvironments.

They islation and discrimination, in politics were given only $25 and in the media. As younger generations to start over. Housing come to learn about their family’s hisand jobs were in short tories, their desire to know more results supply, and so surviv- in more research, books, films, visits to al became the gov- former camp sites, more commemorating erning fact. It is star- of the camp sites, leading to more undertling to see a picture standing of their past. of temporary housing The inhumanity and pain incarceration (page 47). One of two caused has taken a long time to heal from. sites built by the War This comes through loud and clear in this Relocation Authority compelling book. for those out of inCo-authors Heather C. Lindquist and carceration camps, it looks exactly like the Naomi Hirahara will speak on Sunday, the barracks that they May 6, at 2:00 PM at the Microsoft Auhad just left. After incarceration, life for ditorium in the Seattle Public Central Limany resembled the very camps they had brary. The authors will appear in conversation with Tom Ikeda, executive director been forced into. of Densho. The event is free. No tickets 4,000 Japanese American people lived are needed. in converted army barracks and trail-

6 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Governor Jay Inslee appoints community activist Sina Sam to CAPAA

By Bunthay Cheam IE Fellow Governor Jay Inslee recently appointed longtime community activist Sina Sam to a position on the Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs (CAPAA), making her the first Khmer American woman to serve on its board. CAPAA is a state agency made up of 12 commissioners and is led by executive director Michael Itti. The commission focuses on issues pertinent to and affecting Washington state’s Asian American Pacific Islander community including economic development, access to healthcare and social justice. Sam’s appointment follows the departure of another Khmer American, Darren Pen, whose tenure ended in June of 2017.

Sina Sam is a 1.5-generation Cambodian American. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand following her family’s escape from the Cambodian Genocide. Her family settled in Seattle, where she was raised. She is an alum of the University of Washington but her professional career is currently at Washington State University where she is a program exam specialist within the Global Campus program.

Sam’s current affiliations include Formerly Incarcerated Groups Healing Together (F.I.G.H.T.), a community group that advocates on behalf of incarcerated community members through community support and cultural engagement and the Southeast Asian Resource Action Network (SEARAC), where she has served in the facilitator and advisory capacity.

Community work for 20 years Sam’s career as a community activist has been marked by what she often

describes as “shifts” on her journey to where she is today, with access to opportunities she says that other members of her community have not had, things as simple as higher education. Because of some of the resources she’s been able to connect with, she admits her capacity as an advocate for the community is beyond that of many of her peers and is the reason she checks this “privilege” by placing herself at the forefront of the community’s needs. “It’s not something I planned to do 15 years ago, but because it’s something that is advantageous for my community, I’ll step into that role to do it. Or I’ll step to the front lines.”

Sina has been doing community work for over 20 years with her journey beginning with her struggle to find herself. “In terms of our identity and the U.S., I think I’ve always done that [self-research] as a child, trying to learn where my parents come from…they don’t talk about it.”

Her pursuit of finding herself accelerated when she entered higher education and found herself having access to historical information about Cambodia, which she never experienced in a public school setting. “Because of the trauma, some of it [her parents’ stories] may be accurate depending on their personal story. Because I’m a little more a fact-based minded in terms of what happened, I really wanted those answers.”

Access to these resources gave Sam a deeper understanding of her culture and the variables around the plight of the Cambodian diaspora, one of many moments that she describes, “shifted my thoughts about what I wanted to do in the community because it became, instead of a cultural, social exploration of my identity…I felt like I needed to take action.”

Connecting at a national and international level Sam’s transformation into an activist continued to evolve when she began connecting with other like-minded Cambodian American from across the United States through an online platform called Khmer Connection.

This revelation of a community beyond the borders of Washington state expanded her yearning to continue her journey on a national level. In her mid-20s, Sam began to transition from event organizer to more direct activism, and she began work in the arenas of gender equity, healthcare and reproductive rights.

It was her work here that Sam honed her skills in community work, hard skills that she would later bring back to the Cambodian American community in Washington state. Here, she learned how to lobby legislators, phone banking and canvassing. “I think that was really helpful to go into other movements where they had a history and the resources that I learned that exist…it didn’t exist within the [Cambodian American] community in this capacity.”

In 2011, Sam’s continued journey on a national level took her to the doorsteps

Sina Sam greets the audience during the ART of Survival at Seattle City Hall • Photo by Mark Embry

of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Network (SEARAC), a national advocacy group that focuses on leadership development and building capacity within the Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese communities of the United States. Sam participated in SEARAC’s inaugural Leadership and Advocacy Training (LAT) program. In 2013, she became a facilitator for LAT. It was through SEARAC that another “shift” in her journey would occur.

Through the LAT program, Sam made one of the most impactful connections in her journey. She connected with 1LoveMovement, a Philadelphia-based group advocating on behalf of the exiled and deported members of the Cambodian community.

At the time of meeting, Sam was still focused on health care advocacy. “I was there to do health work, but I spent my evenings working with them, learning about where they’re at or where the movement was.”

Sam would go on to work even closer with 1LoveMovement, and in 2016, with collaboration from the Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN), she joined an ambitious anti-deportation campaign called Right2Return. This coalition radically changed the traditional anti-deportation strategy by directly engaging with government officials in Cambodia.

In the fall of 2016, this coalition travelled to Cambodia and was accompanied by an NBC Asian America crew led by film maker Sahra V. Nguyen, which created a documentary series from the coverage called Deported.

The Right2Return delegation met with a collective of representatives from the Interior Ministry, Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Justice Ministry. At its conclusion, a task force was formed to revisit the repatriation agreement between the United States and Cambodia with regards to deportation between the two countries.

This experience would once again “shift” Sam’s direction in terms of her community work, “It kind of planted a seed for me…this is where the direct need is for my community.”

Bringing it home This experience with SEARAC also gave Sam the platform to see how her skill sets acquired over the years could be adapted to work back home, “connecting with SEARAC is what brought me back and to see that there was a way that this can be connected [to advocacy in Washington state].”

Sam’s appointment into CAPAA marks her first foray into a position directly affecting policy. She acknowledges that this territory of work is very foreign to her, let alone the people she’s used to working alongside in the community. “I think social justice activists often times do not think about going into these types of positions because they’re often working in a capacity where they are protesting, working on the front lines, working with families, going into meetings to be on the other side... it’s [policy makers] often seen as the opposition.”

This latest “switch” occurred when she had an encounter with then Commissioner Darren Pen, and was able to see policy work and being a change maker. “I think when he said he was commissioner, I think that flipped a switch to say there’s Khmer people involved in that.”

As a CAPAA Commissioner, Sam hopes to begin work towards ending deportation, building capacity for marginalized communities and cultivating “deeper thinking, reflection, learning history and making connections” – something she was able to do because of her access into higher education. Lastly, she hopes to continue to “help the younger generation and anyone afterwards [have it] easier for them…to not grapple with identity.”

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 7

Diane Narasaki reflects on 23 years of leadership at Asian Counseling and Referral Service

By Chetanya Robinson IE Managing Editor In October 2018, Diane Narasaki will retire after 23 years as executive director of Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS). Headquartered next to Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Beacon Hill, ACRS serves mostly low-income Asian Pacific Islanders, offering mental health care, aging services, addiction treatment, help with issues like citizenship, legal matters, domestic violence, gambling, education and referrals, and more. The organization also advocates for social justice and civic engagement.

Narasaki was born and raised in Seattle.

Her parents were among some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII, something that Narasaki says strengthened her commitment to social justice. During her career, Narasaki has worked as executive director of the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office, co-founded the King County Asian Pacific Islander Coalition (a group of AAPI community organizations in Washington State), served on the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and more.

“No one has worked so strategically and tenaciously for justice,” Sharon Maeda, a friend of Narasaki and station manager at Rainier Valley Radio, told Northwest Asian Weekly. “Diane is such a dedicated, and relentless advocate for the community.”

ACRS has grown over the past 23 years under Narasaki’s leadership, branching out from Seattle to add offices in Bellevue and Kent. The organization doubled the number of people it serves, from 14,415 in 1995 to 31,737 at the end of 2016. From a staff of 76 who spoke 25 languages and dialects, ACRS now employs 270 who can speak 40.

ACRS has also grown in its social justice advocacy, Narasaki said. “We always were active in social justice – we grew out of the social justice movement.” But over the years, she said, ACRS has expanded its national and statewide partnerships and become more active in social justice activism and civic engagement.

It was Narasaki’s interest in social justice work that first drew her to work at ACRS. “I never thought of building a career here,” she says. “I have simply, throughout my life, wanted to work in service to what I believe and to make a difference for the better.”

Narasaki spoke with the International Examiner about her career, API issues in Washington state, and the threats to API communities from the Trump administration. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. See the full interview online at www.iexaminer.org.

International Examiner: What’s something significant that you’ve learned during your career?

Diane Narasaki: One of the things that was always clear, but is even clearer now,

Diane Narasaki in her office at Asian Counseling and Referral Service. • Photo by Chetanya Robinson

is that the more power that you share with others, the more power there is for everybody to do what they need to do, to get to where we want to go, when it comes to social justice. Most of what I’ve been engaged in over the past 23 years has been collaborative leadership, so that’s leadership with people at all levels. It’s not a matter of my leadership – it’s a matter of all of us pooling our leadership in order to get something done. And that’s been very clear over the years, and I believe that together we’ve been able to make some really significant changes because of that shared collaborative leadership.

IE: Your parents were among thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. How has this shaped your views on social justice and equality?

DN: I grew up during a time of great change. Lots of social unrest and many movements that were coming to the fore or resurging, and so I always thought that social change was necessary. Having been born not too long after WWII, racism as it affects Asian Americans in general, Japanese Americans in particular, was still very virulent. And so I always believed in the need for change, but it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to learn about the concentration camps and the incarceration of my community and my family for no reason other than race and ancestry. Learning about that simply deepened by commitment to what I had already believed, which was in the need for civil rights, for human rights, for social justice for everyone in the country and in the world.

IE: How will ACRS and those it serves will it be impacted by the Trump administration?

DN: If the Affordable Care Act continues to be assaulted in the way that it was earlier, and if there is any successful legislation to seriously change the Affordable Care Act in some of the ways that were attempted last year, that would definitely not only have an impact on the people we

serve, but an impact on us as well. Because if they don’t have access to Medicaid, for instance, it will make it harder for us to serve them, because much of the funding that we receive to provide mental health services, or recovery services for substance use disorder, or other sorts of services, will be reduced very substantially. Many of the services that we provide are subsidized through government contracts, and some of those are a combination of federal and state funds. There’s a ripple effect from the federal level when some of these major funding sources are cut. So they could affect us depending upon what type of funds for what type of programs are cut.

IE: What do you see as the most important issues facing APIs in Washington state, King County and Seattle?

DN: They’re similar to on the national level. So for instance, the administration has increased its efforts to deport people who are here undocumented. Usually whenever immigration is discussed in general or undocumented immigration in particular is discussed, people often assume that that discussion is solely around the Latino community. But since our community is the one that has the highest proportion of immigrants and refugees, we are in fact the most affected. We don’t have the most undocumented immigrants, but we have a large number – so, out of the roughly 11 million people that are thought to be undocumented in the country, over a million are thought to be Asian American or Pacific Islander, and the Asian Pacific Islander undocumented population is the fastest-growing, though not the largest, in the state.

So that effort on the national level to increase deportations also includes increased focus on deporting Southeast Asians. So that’s a very important issue for us on the state level. And then the many attacks on the rights of immigrants or people who are not yet citizens, has increased the demand for naturalization services. A lot of people who are eligible

to become citizens are now taking the step to become citizens. So we are asking the state, through the API Coalition and our legislative agenda, to increase funding for naturalization services, because there’s a huge surge in demand.

What’s happening with environmental protections and climate change also affects us here. We’re glad that we have a governor who understands the importance of addressing climate change. We are supportive of legislation to address climate change if it also looks at those communities that are most affected and looks to reinvest not only the funds in clean energy projects, but also in those communities that are most affected so that they can improve their health and conditions.

The same could be said for education.

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the model minority, and that is a racist depiction which simply isn’t accurate. If you disaggregate the data on our community, you can see that many different ethnic groups fare very differently from each other. And some of our communities have some of the worst educational attainment and drop-out rates for instance. We would like to see education funding sufficient to help all of the communities who need it, but we’d like to see funding targeted toward those communities who are in most need.

In our local API legislative agenda, there are a variety of different things that we’re trying to address. One is naturalization. Another is increased funding for our limited English proficient immigrants and refugees who are trying to find work in our economy. Another has to do with, as I mentioned, education, and yet another has to do with climate change.

We’re also concerned, like all other communities are, about making sure that there is strong police accountability. We support the legislation which would try and strengthen accountability for police involved in shootings, because right now, it’s almost impossible to hold the police accountable for shootings which may not be justified. So there are a lot of different issues that we’re looking at. We’re also looking at the need for making sure that we have adequate infrastructure in our communities, to provide for housing and services for the people who them. There’s a long list – those are a few of them.

IE: What’s next for you after you retire?

DN: I’m looking forward to spending more time with my family and my friends. I really have a passion for the work that we do here. I will still have that passion for social justice and I’ll still be active in working with others to achieve that, but I hope to live a more balanced life, have more time to spend with family and friends, and travelling and pursuing other interests that I simply haven’t had the time over many decades, including the last two at ACRS, to pursue.

8 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

The Sympathizer author Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks at Benaroya Hall on May 7

By Vince Schleitwiler IE Contributor

he’s not afraid of challenging their views.

“I’m not approving their perspectives,” he said, “but validating them, and that’s what they see.”

You can see why people might celebrate Viet Thanh Nguyen as a model refugee.

Since I’m not an expert on Vietnamese American literature, I asked Michelle Dinh, a PhD student at UW, if she had questions for Nguyen. How are secondgeneration writers changing the field, she wanted to know, and how have postwar generations imagined ways of remembering events they didn’t experience?

For these inhospitable times, he seems ideally cast. Brought over as a child in 1975, he grew up to be a telegenic author and scholar, whose first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize. He followed that with a short-story collection, The Refugees, a nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies, and more accolades, including a MacArthur and a Guggenheim. His new book, The Displaced, collects essays by seventeen refugee writers; part of the proceeds will go to the International Rescue Committee.

The differences between the first generation and “1.5” folks like himself, brought as kids, are significant, Nguyen said. “I was directly shaped by the history of the war, but I had no memory until I came to the U.S.,” he explained. “Memory had to be active. The first generation was shaped so indelibly, they can’t forget.”

And the case for welcoming refugees needs to be made! Two years ago, it felt shocking to hear politicians suddenly denigrate Syrian refugees. Now, the deportation of long-resident Cambodian American refugees in record numbers, expanding a program begun after 9/11, barely registers.

As for the younger, U.S.-born writers, he laughed. “I don’t know what they are dealing with!” (Write that dissertation, Michelle.) Still, he had more recommendations, all poetry: Duy Doan’s We Play a Game, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

Why not a refugee success story?

Nguyen’s parents arrived with nothing, opened a small business, and worked hard for their kids. (Wait, that’s an immigrant story – the American Dream.) Nguyen, a Berkeley graduate and English professor, was actually the family’s black sheep – his older brother Tung went to Harvard, became a doctor, and chaired President Obama’s Advisory Commission on AAPIs! (Wait, that’s an Asian American story – the model minority myth.)

Viet Nguyen is all these things – an Asian American, an immigrant, a refugee – but they aren’t identical. “Immigrants and refugees overlap,” he told me, “but a refugee is a particular kind of classification.” Refugee status should provide certain rights, which is why formal recognition isn’t easy. Legally privileged, the category is nonetheless stigmatized. “Refugees are unwanted where they come from and unwanted where they go to,” he said.

Truth is, idealizing refugees as model minorities isn’t much better than seeing them as a foreign threat. Refugees are no better or worse than anyone, and welcoming them should be an act of solidarity, not charity. Still, Nguyen insists on the term. “So many refugees disavow it,” he said, instead identifying as immigrants, but he claims it as a “kinship”: “We who made it need to help others.” As his brother Tung wrote, the “burden of being a refugee” is lighter when it’s shared.

Terminology has consequences. “When the category ‘immigrant’ is applied to me and my work,” he said, “I know it’s an attempt to classify my work under a national mythology.” People who use him to celebrate the American Dream want to forget how he became a refugee.

Representing that history, as much as any identity he claims, can be daunting.

As a Vietnamese American, his homeland is erased into the name of a war, and his experience of that war is made to disappear behind the cultural psychodramas of a nation eager to exclude him.

“I think that’s the inescapable bind,” he said, for “all of us who are here in the U.S. because of a certain kind of history.” You can’t escape it, so you make it your own.

When he was still an aspiring novelist, he worried that the time for a Vietnamese American war story would pass. History knew better. “We’re still getting involved in perpetual war overseas,” he said. “The moment is still ripe – it will be five or ten years from now, for someone else.”

Not that he left much to chance. After finishing The Sympathizer in 2013, he asked his publisher to hold it until April 2015, the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. When it came out, he did thirty interviews in thirty days. “We who are shaped by history can’t be naïve about it,” he said. If a naïve refugee exists, Nguyen isn’t him.

If you haven’t read Nguyen’s books, where should you start? There’s The Sympathizer – many writers spend a career working up to such a book, but he went all-in from the beginning, each sentence carefully worked and polished to a hard shine. The narrator, an undercover agent spying on an army general all the way from Saigon to refugee California, has a remarkable voice, brilliantly Photo courtesy of Seattle Arts and Lecture witty and uncomfortably self-aware, as complex and contradictory as the history As a critic who entered the field he it expresses. studies, he also represents a tradition Maintaining this voice over an entire – or several. Nguyen took a class with novel is an accomplishment, but reading it Maxine Hong Kingston, and named his can feel like eating all your meals at a fancy son “Ellison,” after the author of Invisible restaurant for a week. If you prefer the Man. Given a platform in the New York tasting menu, the stories in The Refugees Times, he’s promoted Asian American are a nice introduction, with more direct classics by John Okada and Carlos prose but no less of a punch. Nothing Ever Bulosan. Nguyen is a frequent contributor Dies might be a more specialized interest to the “newspaper of record,” but they – it’s a critic’s book, reading about reading still add a hyphen when he writes “Asian– but it’s accessible and arguably more American.” assured, an interdisciplinary inquiry into Seattleites are hipper, I told memory, forgetting, and war. him – especially IE readers! Any “I think that memory and forgetting recommendations for us? He suggests work hand in hand,” he told me. “We need Elaine Castillo’s debut, America Is Not both. There has to come a time when we the Heart, and two playwrights, Lauren should be freed from the memory that Yee and Qui Nguyen. (We’re on it: Yee’s oppresses us.” Justice is important – he The Great Leap just closed at Seattle Rep, pointed to the Japanese American redress where Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone played in struggle – but it isn’t all. “What justice 2016.) can’t heal, mortality will lay to rest. That’s He also actively promotes Vietnamese not tragic – that’s just how it is.” and Vietnamese American writers – his Catch Viet Thanh Nguyen in Times essay “The Great Vietnam War conversation with Jamie Ford at 7:30 Novel Was Not Written by an American” pm, Monday, May 7th at Benaroya Hall. is a whole syllabus. In turn, many Tickets are available from Seattle Arts & Vietnamese Americans take pride in his Lectures. success, which he finds heartening, though

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 9

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s book of poetry, Oceanic, feels clear and blue and wide

By Besty Aoki IE Contributor Upon first read, these poems seem easy, lulling, with their constant visual references to the sea and its denizens: starfish, whales, dolphins, turtles and the many-eyed scallop that opens the book.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fourth book of poetry, Oceanic, feels clear and blue and wide and everything written within it feels as accessible as a day on the beach with no reason to be anywhere else.

But there’s a hint of Lucille Clifton here in these long, lyrical lines, and brilliant power in these seemingly simple and easy turns of phrase that are in fact harder won, much more studied and thoughtful than they appear.

Just as it takes practice and poised conversation in making guests feel welcome to a hotel or luxe spa where they easily settle in, so has Nezhukumatathil worked gently, unerringly and cleverly to woo the reader into the different waters of her seas. There are indeed sharks in these waters.

In the opening poem “Self-Portrait as Scallop”, structured in the fragmented/ scattered form that C.D. Wright honed to a dark art, we seem to be wafting along.

The poem begins with the speaker in the shadow of the addressee, and it is only as we read, “Carry me/ in the gobble of your beak”, we realize that it’s a poem of prey addressing predator, and the poem is describing a seductive annihilation.

It ends with the reader having to look up the word “umbo” – yes, it is in fact a word, but one that has a touch of both mollusk AND a knight’s protective shield.

That word was not casually inserted. That word was honed like a blade.

Traditional poetic forms sneak into this manuscript – aubade, ghazal, haibun – and a few of the more modern ones: one-star travel reviews describing the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall. Her selfportraits (selfies?) continue throughout, with the author as painting, C-section scar, as Niagara Falls.

Her inspiration leaps from Greek legends about Andromache, Psyche and Cupid to poems inspired by a Prince or Lucille Bogan song, to the stories of four people who tossed themselves over Niagara Falls for fame and glory. The book is all one section, and it works because of the continual braid and play of the poems’ poetic stances with each other.

Destruction and yearning run in equal parts through the book, and perhaps nowhere better in the poem called “The Body,” where Nezhukumatathil begins with a starfish sickness that has them literally wrenching themselves apart by their arms: the pull, the pull – what a stroll – until the arms detach entirely and spill their creamy innards onto the ocean floor. I want to do that with my arms – maybe just my left one – the one that keeps reaching back to your yellow house and those slow summers where we grilled out almost every night...

Nezhukumatathil’s gaze is global, shifting, pulling at the reader and combining the natural world and its fragile ecosystems with the strong tides and tidepool reflections of the human heart.

A great collection, and one that should translate very well to the stage where she is reading here in Seattle this month.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be reading at Seattle Arts and Lectures, McCaw Hall, Monday, May 21, at 7:30pm.

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Make sure you have a pre-pregnancy blood test to see if you are immune to the disease.

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Did you know that your baby gets disease immunity (protection) from you during pregnancy? This immunity will protect your baby from some diseases during the first few months of life, but immunity decreases over time.

Your vaccination history It’s important for you to keep a good record of your vaccinations. Sharing this information with your pre-conception and prenatal health care professional will help determine which vaccines you’ll need during pregnancy. If you and your doctor don’t have a current record of your vaccinations, you can: •Ask your parents or other caregivers if they still have your school immunization records. Ask them which childhood illnesses you’ve already had, because illnesses in childhood can sometimes provide immunity in adulthood.

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10 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

White Center celebrates Cambodian New Year

By Carolyn Bick IE Contributor

The Seattle community of White Center celebrated Cambodian New Year on April 28 with a day-long street fair.

Hosted by the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington, the event featured dance and entertainment, food, activities for children and parents, a banana eating contest, Cambodian hacky sack, Robam dances (classical Khmer dance), guest speakers, poetry, live Cambodian bands and more.

Cheng Hong, back center, holds baby Alisa Lee. (Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018). • Photo: Carolyn Bick

Sir Henry the dog rolls around on the ground, near a balloon animal fashioned into the shape of a dog.

(Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018). • Photo: Carolyn Bick

People watch performers. (Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018.) • Photo: Carolyn Bick

STREET FAIR: Continued on pages 12-13 . . .

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 11

12 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Dancers bow to the audience, after finishing their performance. (Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018). • Photo: Carolyn Bick

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INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 13

Jannakah Hach, center, wipes some food from sister Kahliyana Hach’s face. (Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018). • Photo: Carolyn Bick

People react to an announcer’s question, during the Cambodian New Year festival. • Photo: Carolyn Bick

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Deon Taylor’s cheeks bulge with banana, as he tries to out-eat his opponent, during a tie-breaker in a banana-eating contest. (Cambodian New Year festival at White Center in Seattle, Washington, on April 28, 2018). • Photo: Carolyn Bick

14 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

50 Objects, 50 Stories helps Japanese American families across the country unlock the past

By Chizu Omori IE Contributror “There was a story in my family,” says Nancy Ukai, about her grandfather taking a box of eucalyptus leaves with him when he and the family were sent into an incarceration camp during WWII. The family asked him why he packed such seemingly useless stuff on this journey. He replied that he didn’t know if they would ever be allowed to return home, and that the leaves were a reminder of the life that they were forced to leave.

This story is something Ukai never forgot though there is nothing left of those leaves. If they had survived, they would surely have been one of the 50 objects that she is gathering onto a website called “50 Objects, 50 Stories”, objects that remain from that wartime experience. Inspired by other projects that have been put together by the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and prompted by a recent attempt to auction off a batch of a folk art specialist’s collection of objects from the camps by Rago Auction House in New Jersey, Ukai has been locating and assembling pieces and the stories behind these objects onto a website.

The website has been launched, and every week or so, a new object and the story behind it will be put up. The search and the research involved has taken Ukai all over the U.S., tracking down families, combing archives, talking to dozens of people and doing some filming. Ukai was astounded to find that one thing would lead to another and before long, whole family histories would become part of the project.

The first object is a series of paintings done by Gene Sogioka who had been a Disney artist before the war. He was given the job of illustrating day-to-day life in the camps for a study being conducted by an anthropologist, and this painting of fellows playing with dice shows one of the pastimes that the inmates played to pass the time.

Ukai’s father said that he had made money by gambling while at Topaz, one of the camps. And so any object can lead to many stories, and the personal story becomes a community story. In these ways, history

is remembered, connections are made and become almost magical in opening up the past. They become prompts that jolt memories, make links, sometimes leading to insights and “aha” moments. So much was lost during that wartime period, but people did save some things, and these were probably saved for special reasons.

The truth is that many Japanese American families have not talked much about that painful traumatic period, and in their struggle to survive and reestablish their lives, didn’t have the time or inclination to reflect on it. It was something that was

bigger than their individual stories and how to process what had happened to them was difficult. So, the stories often died when the people died, and the next generations grew up not knowing what had happened to grandparents and parents. But some things remain, stuck in garages and closets, or maybe displayed in a home but no one knowing the stories behind the objects.

Ukai’s project attempts to preserve some of the stories through these objects and encourages others to look for remaining memorabilia in their family’s belongings. It doesn’t take much, maybe old photographs,

bits of diaries and letters, and a whole old world can come to life.

Ukai is married to a genealogist who helps her track families, and as she says, she never knows where it might lead. And she’s helped some people discover family history that had been practically lost. So, it is a gratifying project, one that has led to meeting amazing people and finding surprising material. She encourages everyone to look through family belongings and papers, and some may be the key that leads to a greater understanding of the past, the past that so many American Japanese families had locked away.

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INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 15

API writers “complicate and expand” the notion of home in Go Home!

By Ari Laurel IE Contributor Go Home! is a compilation of a thousand different experiences in response to two very familiar words. The anthology is a partnership between the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Feminist Press – organizations that each have strong legacies in New York. The intersection of the two in this collaboration, along with the selections of first-time anthology editor Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, makes for a heartening collection that takes the abstraction of “home” and builds a foundation from it.

Go Home! is comprised of works from emerging and established Asian, South Asian, and Pacific Islander writers who, for Buchanan, “complicate and expand” the notion of home. As most of us know from our own lives, there are many ways to tell a story of home – geographically, emotionally, generationally, through the other familiar phrase: “Have you eaten yet?”

In Chang-rae Lee’s “The Faintest Echo of our Language,” he describes the contradictions of his mother encouraging him to learn English, only to witness

her become anxious later in life over the possibility that he might have forgotten how to speak Korean. Now that she has passed away, we see him pushed in many different directions by inherited shame.

In Karissa Chen’s “Blue Tears,” another contradiction emerges. A man stationed on an island, looks across the water at Xiamen, his home from a time before the war, and tries to make out the details of his city. “They tell us it’s treasonous to miss home,” the man says, because the mainland is where the communists are, where the enemy is, what his lieutenant only calls “unfriendly people.” But the mainland is where the soldier is from, too, so what does that make him?

In the poem “Pygmy Right Whale,” Rajiv Mohabir calls on the broad and inexact taxonomies used by an oppressive majority (“a category used to classify what brown they see and do not understand”) and letting those sit beside the precise language used to describe the right whale, the careful study lent to understanding its bone structure and molecular makeup.

The foreword, written by Viet Thanh

Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, looks at the concept of home and diaspora with a critically present lens. First, drawing on a memory of his family’s struggle with being outsiders, he recalls seeing a sign posted in a shop window near his parents’ store that read “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.” Next, he makes the necessary connection to experiences of incoming refugees, and our responsibility to tie our histories with the present struggle of others. Nguyen warns us against the temptation to “close the door behind us and lock it shut.”

The writing in Go Home! is bold and devastating, and the anthology becomes the very definition of reclamation. Buchanan takes a familiar slur and ultimately turns it into a writing prompt.

The notion of going home is different versions of the same fantasy, whereby even under the shared definition of those who see us as the perpetual other, we are still being commanded the impossible.

Going home as a prompt of the imagination allows us to consider where we can go from here, what Buchanan calls the “multiplicity

of homes.” What happens if we try to go home? What do we find when we reach it?

What languages do we speak, and who will be there to welcome our voice?

Half Life in Fukushima documents life in the “red zone”

By Misa Shikuma IE Contributor Playing this weekend at the Northwest Film Forum, Mark Olexa and Francesca Scalisi’s haunting 2016 documentary Half Life in Fukushima follows Naoto Matsumura, a middle-aged former rice farmer who tends to the animals left behind in the exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Shot five years after the devastating earthquake that rocked Japan, the film is devoid of any particular political message or agenda, instead focusing on the profound sense of loss that the abandoned town of Tomioka represents.

Presented in grainy, vibrant color and edited with fluid continuity, Half Life in Fukushima takes on an ethereal and intimate ambiance, interspersing scenes of Matsumura tending his cattle, dealing with decontamination crews and golfing alone in an overgrown driving range with imagery of parking lots overgrown with weeds (an anomaly in orderly, pristine Japan) and stoplights that still change color even though there is no traffic. Such is life in the “red zone,” where most of the nuclear waste is stored and the protagonist is the sole resident; his lonely existence like the reallife version of a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

The directors provide no setup nor context, and thus most of Matsumura’s backstory must be inferred from small snippets of dialogue. His elderly father, whom he cares for, lives in the exclusion

zone, too. (The younger Matsumura also has a wife and a son, who remain on the outside). The two men lament the loss of their neighbors and the destruction of their community; in the aftermath of the disaster, they were the only ones to come back. In halting conversations they speak of a loss of agency and sense of purpose, continuing to live in a state of flux after the international community has long shifted its gaze to other crises.

In a rare aside to the camera, Matsumura confesses that he initially hoped for recovery. But by the time of filming he compares his beloved town to Chernobyl, saying, “My city won’t come back anymore.” As decontamination crews continue to try to hack away at the problem, the slow acceptance that things will never go back to the way they were sets in.

Olexa and Scalisi play fast and loose with conventional documentary form, and the resulting film, at just over an hour in runtime, is a gnawing meditation on human tragedy and how little we understand the consequences of the technologies we create.

Half Life in Fukushima plays Friday May 4 through Thursday May 10 at Northwest Film Forum.

16 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Remembering Lonny Kaneko, the heart of Highline College Lonny Kaneko, the poet, playwright, writer and long-time teacher at Highline College, passed away on March 30, 2017. He spent his early childhood at Minidoka internment camp where many Japanese Americans from the Northwest were incarcerated during WWII. This experience would shape his writing for years to come. He was Poet Laureate of Vashon Island where he lived for many years. Lonny was a friend to many and he influenced and touched people from all walks of life. His collected poems Coming Home From Camp and Other Poems (Endicott and High Books) was published in 2015. On the one-year anniversary of his death, we offer a mosaic of memories, an offering that points to the kind of man he was by friends, family and colleagues.

Alan Chong Lau - IE Arts Editor

Love to the man who caught fire and created light

by Tarisa A.M. Matsumoto IE Contributor Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote about spying on him at Highline College. I wrote about how I knew his office routine, how I knew his smile in the mailroom, that twinkle. Since then, I knew he was sick, but there was his office, still lined with his posters, books still shelved to the ceiling. It was like he was still there. I could look down the hill of our campus, and on a good day, I could see Vashon reclining in the still water.

His island, his home, like he was there walking on the beach, spying on campus, watching us beneath the cloud-ridden Seattle sky.

Lonny Kaneko.

A few months ago, I saw a light on in his office. I ran to our division secretary with amazement and nearly yelled, “Is Lonny here?” She looked at me with pity and told me that adjunct faculty were using his office for their office hours. I was angry. That was Lonny’s place. That office should only carry his footsteps. How dare someone else sit at his desk with all of his stuff still in there. Then I was sad again, knowing from my confidential conversations with some of his Highline friends that Lonny wouldn’t be back in that office again because of his health. So it’s fitting that today, as I sit across from his office writing up this difficult love letter to him, I look across and see that his office is dark. His posters of past art exhibitions stare back, a collage Lonny pieced together to block out most of the glass sliding doors and whatever is left inside.

say something that would just make more sense than anything that had been said before.

Since I got the news that he passed away, there have been many phone calls, texts, Facebook messages and emails among his colleagues at Highline College, both current ones and those who were mentored by Lonny and have taken their careers elsewhere. All of the messages are filled with sadness and good memories. No one has been at Highline as long as Lonny. No one has sat in those meetings listening as long as Lonny. No one has touched the lives of more students than Lonny has. He’s even mentored writers like our own state’s first poet laureate, Sam Green. Lonny is the holder of 50 years of our school’s history.

If you wanted to know the background of some department or policy, Lonny knew it. In fact, Lonny changed the very face of Highline. Back in the day, when Lonny was the only Asian American tenured faculty at Highline, he pushed for hiring more faculty of color. He pushed so hard that today 30 percent of our fulltime faculty are people of color. Even in our own English Department, part of the Arts and Humanities Division of which Lonny was chair for many years, half of us are people of color. It goes without saying that Highline wouldn’t even look the way it does were it not for Lonny.

But he also kept everything close to his vest. People keep telling me that I knew him well or that I was his friend. I like to think that I was his friend, but I don’t really know. When I told one of our extended Highline family about how Lonny didn’t want people knowing he was sick, And make no mistake – this is a love she, another Japanese American, basiletter. Everyone who knew Lonny loved cally sighed in her text: JAs. him. No need to say more. He’s sansei; him. Everyone. For as stressful and disYes, those Japanese Americans who I’m yonsei. He’s from Seattle; I’m from heartening the job of teaching can be, I sit and listen and don’t say much. I don’t Gardena. He was in the camps; I grew up never saw him angry or upset, dismayed know how much of a friend Lonny con- with the camps as a mythic touchstone. or disillusioned. Never. Or maybe I sidered me, but I know when he became But it didn’t matter. We understood each met him at a time when he had turned my source of comfort here at Highline. other, or at least he understood me. And the anger he had about his incarcera- A couple of years after I started working that’s all I needed to feel at home at tion in Minidoka during World War II at Highline, he asked where I was from. Highline, to think of him as a friend, as into something else. A power. Once, a When I told him that I’m from a small an extension of my Japanese American teacher at Highline laughed at how Lon- Japanese American enclave in Southern family. ny would sit in meetings quietly, with a California via a father from Hawai’i, his He knew me, and it was like that for smile on his face. How everyone would response was, “Oh, you’re one of those talk and talk and talk and Lonny would Japanese.” I was almost insulted, and everyone at Highline. And honestly, just sit and listen. How after everyone then, in his mischievous smile, I under- there is no Highline without Lonny. So had talked themselves silly, Lonny would stood. Yes, I was one of those Japanese. from now on, that will be his office and finally speak up in a soothing way and And that was it – he knew me and I knew that will be his view down to the water and his island. He will be right here at the

Photo courtesy of International Examiner

top of the hill, where the public art sculpture Celebration looms. It greets every student as they near the heart of campus, and as part of this sculpture, there is an open book with Lonny’s invitation: Some struggle through the dark.

Others reflect the world around them.

A few catch fire and create new light.

This is my love letter to you, Lonny, and to all the light you created here.

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Dancing With Different Partners by Samuel Green The following is an excerpt of an essay written by Samuel Green, Washington state’s first Poet Laureate. It was originally published in Washington State Kappan A Journal for Research, Leadership And Practice in their Fall 2008 issue and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Some of us are lucky with teachers. And some of us are fortunate enough to figure out just how we’ve been lucky. I fall into that group.

For the sake of this little memoir, I want to mention just three who have had a tremendous effect on my life as a poet – and as a person – because each of them was very different in their approach. Each of them had that mystical skill of the best teacher who enters into a dance with a student, making them believe that they are, in fact, leading, when all the time, the teacher – who appears relaxed and happily following -- is looking ahead, sending subtle signals, and pushing the dance where it needs to go. It takes far more energy than anyone can guess.

The first was Lonny Kaneko. In 1970, when I was a returning veteran, Lonny was teaching the creative writing courses at Highline Community College. I had been writing poems secretly, but thought it was time to find out what someone else thought about what I was doing, so I tried signing up

for his course. It was full. I had to talk him into signing an overload slip, something I still tease him about. Lonny was the first person in the world to introduce me to the world of contemporary poetry.

One of the first poems I remember him reading aloud to us was Theodore Roethke’s great villanelle, “The Waking.” I was hooked. Once Lonny recognized the hunger in me, he made it his job to feed me. You could call it “the bread crumb method,” I suppose.

He knew where I needed to go, but he also recognized my need to discover things for myself, so he scattered clues to learning like crumbs along a trail, neatly disguising what he was up to. I followed along while he kept a close watch on me from the dark shadows of the path, or the overhanging trees, when the going was dense. He gave me everything he had, and more. He had a disarming way of keeping us off guard. One quarter, on the first day of class, he announced that he wanted to teach the course without grades getting in the way, so he told us we were going to begin with the final exam. He sent us off to find some place comfortable, instructed us to invent a form, and write a poem. We did. I began the course with an A. The rest of the quarter was sheer joy.

Only Lonny could have gotten away with that.

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 17

Lonny Kaneko Lonny was the first person to purchase a major painting of mine in the 70’s.

For the next few decades he generously allowed the painting to be part of several exhibitions that travelled across the country months at a time. Of course, he humorously complained about the homely blank space on his wall. Lonny knew that loaning the work was helping me out and would have it no other way.

Amidst the turmoil of growing up Asian American in the 50’s and 60’s, Lonny was a “go to” friend that was always there for me. He was a caring and sensitive individual, devoid of ego and malice. He is someone that will be sorely missed and remembered with affection.

Roger Shimomura

The King County Immigrant & Refugee Commission is recruiting!

King County Councilmembers Rod Dembowksi, Larry Gossett, Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Claudia Balducci invite you to apply to join the King County Immigrant & Refugee Commission.

The Commission will be made up of 13 King County residents reflecting the diversity of ethnicities, professional backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and geographic areas that make up the fabric of our communities. The Commission will meet monthly beginning in the fall of 2018, and will work to achieve fair and equitable access to County services for immigrant and refugee communities, improve opportunities for civic engagement, set annual goals, and participate in important dialogue on County policies and practices that impact the community. Applications are due May 14, 2018.

For more information, or to learn how to apply, please visit www.kingcounty.gov/irc.

The King County Immigrant & Refugee Commission is a permanent body committed to integrating, strengthening, and valuing immigrant and refugee communities, and upholding the County’s commitment as a welcoming community.

18 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Japanese American artist Lauren Iida explores her identity through latest exhibit: 100 Aspects of the Moon

By Bunthay Cheam IE Fellow Lauren Iida is a hand cut artist with roots in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts.

She currently resides in Kampot, Cambodia, and has been living between Seattle and Cambodia for the last 10 years. She operates her own studio in Kampot, Lucky Number, and has been involved in various non-profit and social entrepreneurship projects in Cambodia.

Past exhibits include works at ArtXchange Gallery in Pioneer Square, King Street Station, the Mayor’s Gallery at Seattle City Hall, Shoreline City Hall, Tacoma Spaceworks and Sculpture Northwest. She is an Artist Trust GAP Grant recipient and was awarded an Art Matters fellowship in 2017. She is also the founder of non-profit The Antipodes Collective, which creates high-quality learning materials for children in Cambodia.

“I didn’t really decide on Cambodia. I just fell in love with Cambodia when I got there. I remember how it looks and how it smells… what was happening and everything about the first second that I exited the airport,” she said.

Iida only ended up in Cambodia because of political turmoil gripping Thailand in 2008 between the “red shirts” that supported then ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the “yellow shirts” who opposed him. “The protesters happened to shut down the airport at the exact moment that I was supposed to fly in [to Bangkok] from Australia.”

On Saturday, April 21, 2018, Iida’s second solo exhibition in Seattle, 100 Aspects of the Moon, opened with a reception at Virago Gallery in West Seattle. The exhibit features 100 paper cutaway pieces

inspired by Japanese woodblock artist Yoshitoshi, who created a series by the same name in the 1890’s.

Yoshitoshi is considered to be the last great master of woodblock art under the ukiyo-e genre. He lived during a time of great social change in Japan, amidst the transition from the Edo period to the Meiji Restoration, a period in which Western ideas and technology were entering the country. The exhibit is also influenced by her Japanese Americans heritage and family’s experience under internment during World War II, and her life in Cambodia.

Iida came across Yoshitoshi’s work when a friend gave her 100 Aspects of the Moon for her birthday twelve years prior, “I was always fascinated with it and I gave it to my grandmother... she really loved it and we would talk about it and she would just read it, and [it] was like something we shared.”

Eventually, the book would find its way back to Iida following her grandmothers passing. “I sort of forgot about it… then after she passed, I ended up with the book again. It clicked for me, I have to recreate this using my own imagery.”

She would go on to draw inspiration through family photos from her Japanese heritage as well as life in Cambodia which she’d been living in for the last 10 years.

“Sometimes I’ve studied one piece and then it reminds me of somebody in my own life. And then I ask them to pose in the same position. Other times I’ll make a piece and then when I’m studying that original series, I will realize there’s a really big correlation between either the persons…in the piece or something about the situation that I’m depicting and the situation in the original series.”

Not only does this latest body of work trace her journey through family history

and life in Cambodia, it’s also an exploration of sorts with her own knowledge of self. “It’s mixing my instances both from America and Cambodia, which is like east and west. But those are all parts of my identity. So I’m bringing my cultural identities together.”

While Iida is best known for her talents as a paper cutter, she also facilitates a culturally immersive art tour that takes westerners past the typical tourist experience and into the space of some of the most highly regarded artist in Cambodia including Arn-Chorn Pond and Sopheap Pich.

Her tour company, Two Roads Cambodia, marries her love of art and Cambodia, taking a cohort twice annually, and traverses big cities and small villages alike, all over the country.

“I’m really happy because I get to not only be the bridge through art between Americans and Cambodians, but also I get to support financially all these artists,” she said, pointing out that the artists are able to sell their art through this program. She also pays the artists for their time. “So for me it’s the perfect activity. I love doing it.”

In July, Iida will be starting a mini artist residency at Vestibule, an art space in Ballard. Here, she will recreate one of her pieces called the “Memory Net” which was the centerpiece to her original solo exhibition, How to Trap a Memory. She will spend three weeks hand cutting on one massive continuous piece of paper while engaging with the public. “It’s like a community art project, so people can come in, they can write down or tell me what they are interested in seeing in the net.”

In the future, Iida plans to use her platform to help the community that has inspired her in Cambodia. “I really want to have an art exhibition in the village where most of the people that I depict in my piec-

Photos courtesy of Lauren Iida

es come from to show them what I’m doing, because I’ve never shown them what I’m doing.”

She also envisions creating space through a mini art tour in Cambodia to connect and network, young emerging artists with each other so they can be inspired by each other and meet each other, “so they can all be stronger as a whole and share resources.”

“There’s still many things I like about it [Cambodia] and I’ve lived in a lot of countries and I have traveled to a lot of countries before that. But I feel like now after being there off and on for 10 years, that it’s my home, it’s where I want to be.”

100 Aspects of the Moon runs now through May 26, Thursday - Sunday, at Virago Gallery in West Seattle.

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 19

Reading with Patrick chronicles a studentteacher relationship in the Mississippi Delta

By Elizabeth Hanson IE Contributor In 2004, after graduating from Harvard, 22-year-old Michelle Kuo takes a position as a Teach for America volunteer in the Mississippi Delta town of Helena, Arkansas, described by Mark Twain in 1883 as “the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region”.

encouragement he begins to take school seriously and wins the award for “Most Improved Student.”

Kuo leaves the Delta at the end of the two years to attend law school, much to her students’ disappointment. “That I could leave, and they could not, was my trump card,” she guiltily notes.

When she learns three years later that Patrick has been arrested for murder (to protect his younger sister, Patrick stabs a predatory man) and is in the county jail awaiting trial, she decides to postpone taking a legal defense job and returns to the Delta instead.

By the time Kuo arrives, however, the town has become a sad shadow of its previous self, with two main employers gone, few decent jobs, no opportunities for young people, and a public school system more segregated than in 1954, with student test scores among the lowest There she visits Patrick in jail, and over in Arkansas. the course of seven months, in Pygmalion Kuo, who grew up in Kalamazoo, fashion, tutors him in reading and writing.

Michigan, the daughter of immigrants Soon she is visiting him daily, opening from Taiwan, struggles to help the each session by reciting poetry together angry, incorrigible black students in and introducing him to the work of C. S. the alternative high school where she is Lewis, W. S. Merwin, Frederick Douglass assigned to teach English. Their lives and James Baldwin. are complicated with troubled parents, drugs, teenaged pregnancies, violent deaths. Most have never traveled more than a few miles from home, much less met an Asian person; they taunt Kuo with the “ching-chong” imitation of the Chinese language, some even calling her a “Chinese bitch.”

Enforcing classroom rules becomes a major, and usually futile, focus of each day, the students settling down only when the school police officer steps into the room. “I was shocked by all of this,” Kuo writes, “but I was shocked, primarily, by myself. I yelled. I got mean.”

But by her second year at the school, she is able to engage the students in some simple free-writing exercises, supplies the classroom with books, and institutes a successful silent reading time.

One student, quiet and perceptive Patrick Browning, shows a keen gift for reading and writing. With Kuo’s

Kuo encourages Patrick to write letters to his daughter, born a few months before he was incarcerated, and in these he lets his imagination rise as he develops a loving, lyrical writer’s voice.

Surely, I thought, Patrick’s exceptional passion for learning and his fluency with expressing himself with words will lead to a happy ending, a college degree and a job as an English teacher perhaps? Or maybe literacy tests than white students from he too will go to law school, inspired by well-funded private schools.

Kuo? I wondered why Kuo did not include But no. He is sentenced to three years for more details of KIPP’s success, why the manslaughter, and though he is released public schools had not learned from its early for good behavior and passes his strategies, and why Patrick had not been GED with high marks, he is unable to encouraged to enroll. find work. “Until now, I had thought of Reading with Patrick is saved from Patrick’s crime and imprisonment as the being the memoir of a privileged doculmination of his pain,” Kuo writes, but gooder through Kuo’s frank and frequent his attempt to reenter the Delta and create questioning of her own motives. She a new life for himself “was a new battle, wonders from her first days in Helena excruciating, and, unlike incarceration, what, exactly, she thinks she has to offer with no end date.” her students, her own upbringing as the As Kuo shares details of her time with daughter of hard-working, educationPatrick, she also reveals the egregious oriented immigrants so different from inequities of the local justice system theirs. “You can’t do that much, you’re not – court sessions happen a mere four that important, there are so many forces in times a year and inmates meet their a person’s life, good and bad, who do you overworked defense attorneys only on think you are?” she asks. the trial date. Throughout the book she As we watch Patrick bloom under her weaves in a carefully researched history patient and exacting tutelage, it is clear of African Americans in the Delta; Kuo that she has changed his life, but she speculates that the Delta “did not exist is humble about her contribution. “It in the American consciousness because frightens me that so little was required it disturbed the mind. . . What had the for him to develop intellectually – a quiet Civil Rights Movement been for . . . if its room [he chooses a jail stairwell], a pile of birthplace was still poor, still segregated, books and some adult guidance.” still in need of dramatic social change?”

I left this moving memoir wishing that And yet we learn when she returns every student everywhere might come to the Delta after law school that in across a dedicated teacher like Michelle fact Helena is not as hopelessly bleak Kuo. I wanted the best for Patrick, too as she suggests earlier in the book. The – because of this book, perhaps others town has a shining new library and a will offer help so that he can continue to successful annual blues music festival. develop his considerable literary gifts and At a rigorous charter school, Knowledge use these to create a good life for himself Is Power Program (KIPP), the black and his daughter. students score higher on state math and

20 — May 2 – May 15, 2018 . . . ALEKSA MANILA: Continued from page 4

The trick with lip syncing is that you want your audience to relate. So if you do a song that’s relatable and familiar, they’ll know. This is probably the essence for me personally, is that I’m bringing forth something about my culture. And generally the performers that I pick are ones that I’m a fan of growing up in the Philippines. It’s very rare but sometimes I will do songs in Tagalog or some other language. There’s a Filipina singer Lani Misalucha, who sings in Spanish. So I’ve done that at gay Latino events, at organizations like Entre Hermanos. So that’s relatable, they can understand it.

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER my mom really loved Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly -- so I take to those actresses for influence.

When I was crowned that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I have an opportunity here to educate.’ I often share with people that if you’re going to look at me because I look a little different, I’m going to take this opportunity for you to listen to me.

Stories set in post-Cold War Mongolia and South Korea show humanity amidst shifting politics

With being Miss Gay Filipino, I was,

By Joe Un Eom ‘Yeah, I know this was fun, I won my first IE Contributor pageant, but I actually feel like I have a duty here.’ The culture of drag is truly “Black wolf, white wolf—no matter. rooted in activism. The Pride celebrations They all turn gray with age.” that we know of today, that’s because of In this collection of short stories, Jeon Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a Black trans woman and a Latina trans Sungtae highlights the rising tension and I’ve also lip-synced to Eartha Kitt do- woman. At the time they were dabbling prejudice amongst Koreans – both North and South – as well as Mongolians in ing Waray Waray, a song from the Phil- in drag and doing drag. ippines that she sings in Filipino. Things I quickly realized that, I knew I can’t the post-Cold War era. Wolves by Jeon like that, people appreciate because Ear- just be like angry towards the Filipino Sungtae is set in the time period after tha Kitt, for one, has a very distinguish- community. I needed to do this in a sort the fall of the Soviet Union when a marable voice. You know that’s Eartha Kitt. of sophisticated but intentional way. And ket economy replaced communism in But then you’re like, ‘But what are you I think I was successful at it. I remem- Mongolia, and when Korea became two singing?’ Regardless, I got your attention. bered showing up for events and I was separate countries. The stories portray the poverty experienced by many MonI think I was welcomed with open welcomed with open arms. And I thought golians, as well as changes in their noarms [by the Filipino community] be- that was beautiful. madic ways. Furthermore, it portrays the cause my idea of drag was glamorous.

And to this day, the folks that I met distrust yet curiosity of South Koreans That made it easy. I don’t necessarily do during that period -- we’re talking over about their North Korean neighbors who shock drag unless it’s called for by say ten years now -- I walk in and they still were once compatriots.

Halloween or a very specific event. My remember. It goes back to community The majority of the stories are written interpretation of drag is sort of high glam, again. That even though I’m gay and even Hollywood. I was raised by my mom and though I’m a drag queen, I’m respected from the perspective of South Koreans as a fellow Filipino American, as a fellow and are mainly set in Mongolia. Each community member. That’s beautiful to story in the collection is independent me. And if we can repeat that cycle for and has its own set of characters and is others, that would be great. That would placed in different settings. Despite the stories having its own unique narrative, be amazing.

Corrections from the April the author masterfully connects these in4, 2018 issue: I do have these really precious mo- dependent pieces to portray the lives of ments when, every now and then I will regular citizens who are affected by the In Robert Hirschfield’s story, “Saira have a young queer person, gay, lesbian, politics and policies of their individual Rao: A newborn Indian American radwhatever come up to me and say, ‘You governments. ical runs for Congress,” which was on were the first drag queen I ever saw, and page 6, Saira’s mother is from MangaWhile the stories portray the banality you inspired me to come out.’ Those molore, not Bangalore. Saira was a clerk of life and the struggles of individuals ments -- never mind the accolades, never on the 3rd Court of Appeals in Philawho are striving to make ends meet, it mind the spotlight, it’s that life-changing delphia, not the 5th Court of Appeals. also portrays the rising tension amongst opportunity, just because I was trying Photo credit for the story “Kevin the different nationalities and even withto be like Beyoncé onstage, and I hapLin: Challenges for actors playing in the same ethnicities.

Many of the charpened to influence someone to become a Hamlet” on page 8 should have been acters in the stories are similar to lone Beyoncé themselves. That’s huge to me.

Bruce Tom. wolves who have fallen away from the And people take that for granted I think pack.

Furthermore, the regular citizens In “The Venn diagram of Natasha sometimes -- the power of influence for Moni’s poetry” by Jan Wallace, on just being you. That to me is a legacy that are like wolves hunting after limited prey, forced to fight each other for surpage 17, the name of the Jack Straw cuI’d like to leave. vival and significance. rator is Daemond Arrindell.

However, what’s central to the novel is the passage, “Black wolf, white wolf – no matter. They all turn gray with age.”

Despite the efforts of governments and political elites who use politics, the economy and/or policies to separate people and make them into enemies, one cannot deny our shared humanity. Though different in degrees, we all experience sorrow and loneliness, find beauty in art, fall in love, and ultimately, turn gray with age.

Wolves is extremely descriptive and beautifully written. Jeon Sungtae takes extreme care in describing even the minute details of the landscape and even the most subtle of reactions of the characters. The narratives take the reader to the Mongolian steppes all the way to an island in South Korea. As readers take a glimpse into the characters’ lives, we see our own hopes and fear reflected in this collection of short stories.

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

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On April 23, InterIm Community Development Association brought in goats to chew up blackberry brambles at their newly acquired property in Little Saigon on S King St. • Photo by Chetanya Robinson

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 21

22 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

COMMUNITY RESOURCE DIRECTORY

COMMUNITY RESOURCE DIRECTORY

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

Safe access to school is a right: Take our survey to tell us how we can do better TAKE OUR 10 MINUTE SURVEY

By Seattle Department of Transportation The Seattle Department of Transportation’s Safe Routes to School program works to make it easier and safer for students to walk and bike to school.

Unfortunately, many kids encounter barriers between home and school that make walking and biking a difficult choice.

Evidence shows that Black and Latino children are disproportionately affected by these barriers and suffer from higher rates of obesity.

We are performing a racial equity analysis to maximize the benefits of walking and biking to school for all students. We know that active commuting to school is linked to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke later

in life. Good health should be a right for all students.

Our vision is for Seattle school children to start their day experiencing the benefits of walking and biking to school, including: Having fun; feeling safe; strengthening connections to their communities; arriving to school in time for breakfast and ready to learn; and improved physical and mental health.

We want to learn about walking and biking to school in your neighborhood.

The survey results will directly inform our future programming and services to ensure that Seattle’s Safe Routes to School program is serving students of color in the best ways possible.

We are committed to working alongside communities to promote more walking and biking among students because all children have the right to health, happiness, and academic success, regardless of race.

Participate in our survey and learn more at our website: www.seattle.gov/transportation/srts-rea.

May 2 – May 15, 2018 — 23

24 — May 2 – May 15, 2018

INTERNATIONAL EXAMINER

WE SUPPORT ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH Public Health - Seattle & King County recognizes the important and untold stories of innovation, service, and sacrifice by Asian/Pacific Islanders and supports efforts to improve equity and achieve social justice.

ALL ARE WELCOME HERE. We proudly serve immigrants, refugees, and all who live in King County with a range of services, including: Asian/Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is May 19 An HIV/STD test can give you peace of mind. It's the only way to know if you have HIV or an STD. www.kingcounty.gov/stdtesting

Help enrolling in low-cost or free health insurance and transit Apple Health (Medicaid) Qualified Health Plans ORCA LIFT – Qualified adults save up to 50% on transit fares www.kingcounty.gov/coverage or 1-800-756-5437

Low cost healthcare Birth control, pregnancy & new baby support, dental care, WIC nutrition, interpretation available. www.kingcounty.gov/clinics Learn about good food safety at home and in your restaurant www.kingcounty.gov/foodsafety or 206-263-9566