'Little Bee': Better late than never

"Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeting [sic] persecution and conflict."
-- from Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship (UK Home Office, 2005)

Finally caught up to the highly acclaimed 2009 novel, "Little Bee," by Chris Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London.

Little Bee is the name of a young Nigerian girl who escapes the terror of her homeland,. caught up in mad violence over vast oil deposits, and lands in a detention center for illegal immigrants and refugees.

The other main character in the novel, Sarah O'Rourke, is a British magazine editor who lives in the gentrified suburbs of London, has a Batman-costume-wearing 4-year-old son and a lover named Lawrence who's as plain vanilla as his name.

Sarah's husband, Andrew, a smart, opinionated newspaper columnist has just committed suicide and that forces Sarah to take a hard look at her selfish existence and make some choices -- about actually being "present" for son Charlie, about continuing the affair with Lawrence and, above all, whether she has any obligation to help Little Bee apply for asylum.

Little Bee, you see, had encountered the vacationing Andrew and Sarah on a beach in Nigeria several years earlier. The couple's attempt to patch their relationship instead resulted in a life-or-death standoff with armed men who had terrorized Little Bee's village and now were threatening to kill her and her older sister.

I won't reveal anything more about that, except to say that Little Bee survives that encounter and flees to Britain. The only people she knows of are Andrew and Sarah and, after escaping the detention center, she shows up on the O'Rourkes' doorstep.

The author, Cleave, takes on the challenge of writing in the voice of both Little Bee and Sarah and taking us inside their minds, one having grown up in a place where "Top Gun" was the only American movie available, the other having every conceivable privilege. He spent his early childhood in West Africa and did a great deal of research on Britain's immigration removal centers, so he is able (for me, anyway) to write convincingly about the inter-ethnic conflicts and harsh conditions in the centers.

In doing so, he gives the lie to the UK Home Office's claim of being "a safe haven" for asylum seekers. Of course, Britain is hardly alone in taking a hard line against illegal immigrants. It's a universal and ages-old story of people seeking freedom from repression -- or simply a better life for their families --  and running into official resistance and racist backlash from ordinary citizens.

I'm reminded of "Illegal," a movie that I saw earlier this year at the Portland International Film Festival, about a Russian immigrant living illegally in Belgium. And years before that, "El Norte," the story of a teenage brother and sister who flee Guatemala and head for Los Angeles, hoping to start a new life in The North.

As long as we have repressive governments, we'll have stories like these. The power of a personal narrative like "Little Bee" is that it can break through the dehumanization and demonization that too often characterizes the millions of faceless refugees around the globe. In this case, Cleave juxtaposes Sarah's comfortable life with that of Little Bee's desperation and resourcefulness to pose some important moral questions about selflessness and sacrifice.

Bottom line: an excellent book. See the New York Times review here. For other reader reviews, see www.goodreads.com

PIFF 2011: 'Illegal' invites compassion

Ivan and Tania

I left Tuesday night's journalism discussion with enough time to hustle down to Southeast Portland and catch one more Portland International Film Festival screening: the Belgian film "Illegal."

After seeing two five-star films within a week's time, it would have been asking too much for a third. Still, I'd give "Illegal" a solid 3 to 4 stars.

It's a serious subject, obviously, illustrating the plight of a single mother, Tania, a Russian national who's living illegally in Belgium with her teenage son Ivan when she is arrested on his birthday. Tania (played by Anne Coesens) is taken to a detention center, where her initial terror at being separated from Ivan eventually recedes enough for her to befriend fellow detainees in the midst of inhumane treatment.

Director Olivier Masset-Depasse could have made this a film about the politics of immigration but instead he keeps the story focused on Tania and her desperate efforts to avoid deportation. She  stonewalls authorities about her real identity only to later complicate her situation by giving the name of a friend -- a tactic that suddenly has her facing deportation to Poland.

Tania makes for a sympathetic character if you happen to believe in liberal immigration policies. If you don't, well, I can imagine you'd say she gets what she deserves.

One thing that stood out to me is that Tania is often presented to us in near-darkness, an effective metaphor for someone living in the shadows of society.

The film was Belgium's nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. It didn't make the final five and I imagine that's a fair assessment. It was good but not great, a film that strives to be passionate but is also predictable in some ways. 

Photograph: www.indiewire.com

'Community Writer' brings a global perspective

A little over three years ago, when I was just getting started as Sunday Opinion editor, I launched a Community Writers program that was designed to give voice to ordinary citizens and their concerns. I thought it would be a good complement to the professionally crafted editorials and columns cranked out members of The Oregonian's editorial board -- and I was right.

The program was well received by the public, and the writers -- 12 in the first group, 15 in the second -- took the opportunity and ran with it, weighing in each week for 12 weeks on a variety of issues that mattered to them as teachers, students, retirees, lawyers, ministers or whatever line of work they came from.

One of the unexpected benefits is that I formed solid friendships with a few of the writers, not the least of which was with a Beaverton woman named Lakshmi Jagannathan. Originally from India, she described herself to readers as a wearer of many hats -- "agricultural scientist, homemaker, school volunteer, PIFF (Portland International Film Festival) enthusiast, creative writer (and) Mom." She said she hoped that as "an immigrant and an avid traveler, I expect to bring a global perspective to my writing."

And true to her word, she provided exactly that in an op-ed essay that ran Tuesday on The Oregonian's Opinion blog: "Safety is in the eye of the beholder."

Pyramids of Giza

She and her family recently traveled to Egypt and were struck by the contrast in how safe they felt compared to the United States. While they were abroad, they learned of the shootings in Tucson.

"As I watched the news on TV sets at the airport, I wondered what the Egyptians must have thought," she writes. "'America is a dangerous place,'" some nervous mother might now say to her child. "'You could get killed in a grocery store.'"

Muslims, Islam and the Twin Towers

Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré, a 9/11 widow, with her sons, Siaka, left, 9, and Souleymane, 11.

I'm still at work, nearing the end of a long day before the calendar turns to 9/11. Volumes have been written about that day in 2001 when the world changed forever because of foreign terrorist attacks on our largest city and our national capital. No need to go over that ground, especially not the whack-job Florida minister who in recent days grabbed worldwide headlines for his threat to organize a Quran-burning day to protest the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero.

Instead, I'll just post two excellent stories from today's New York Times that remind us that Muslim blood was spilled, too, in those horrific attacks on the Twin Towers.

First, a piece on a 40-year-old immigrant from Africa's Ivory Coast, whose husband worked as a cook in the Windows on the World restaurant and whose death left her with three children to raise on a nurse's assistant.

According to the piece, "Visiting Ground Zero, Asking Allah for Comfort," Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré "is the widow of one of roughly 60 Muslim victims — cooks, businessmen, emergency responders and airline passengers — believed to have died on 9/11. It is a group that has been little examined, and no precisely reliable count of their ranks exists. But their stories, when told, have frequently been offered as counterweights in the latest public argument over terrorism and Islam."

Second, an article on the "financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers" and many others -- American natives and immigrants alike -- who made regular use of the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower. The piece, "Muslim and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers' Life," illuminates the reality that "that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center."

Nine years after the devastation that took so many lives, I think back to how we were once all united in our grief and our shock and how we responded to President Bush's urgings to not blame all Muslims for the misguided, murderous acts of fringe fanatics. I despair at what's happened since, when ignorant loudmouths try to whip up fear and resentment toward American Muslims who want only to enjoy the freedoms and the pursuit of happiness that everyone else has a right to claim. Articles like these help shine a light on the truth.

Photograph: Nicole Bengiveno, The New York Times

WWJD / Losing my religion

Carlos Hernandez (left) and Jack Louman sing in the front row of City Bible Church in Tigard.

It's Sunday morning, a good time to share two articles that I read this week.

The first -- "What would Jesus do about immigrants?" -- was published in the Portland Tribune, a twice-weekly newspaper. The second -- "Organized religion sees numbers fall" -- was published in today's Sunday Opinion in The Oregonian.

They're not directly related but each did give me pause for reflection, and maybe they will for you, too.

In the Tribune article by Steve Law, I was pleasantly surprised to read of Tim Nashif and Kevin Mannix, two Republican stalwarts long associated with conservative political causes in Oregon, speak with compassion about illegal immigrants, in stark contrast to most state and national GOP leaders.

At a time when no issue seems more polarizing and paralyzing for U.S. politicians, Nashif, Mannix and a surprising number of other conservative Christians are taking what some might call a liberal position on illegal immigrants in our midst.

“The real hard-line approach of identify them and kick them out, I think a lot of people feel that that’s a little bit harsh.” says Nashif, a pastor at City Bible Church and longtime fixture in the Multnomah County Republican Party leadership. ...

“If I see a human being in distress,” says Mannix, a devout Catholic and former state GOP chairman, “my instinct is to help him, not to question his status.

“Liberal Democrats seem to say ‘let’s hand ’em citizenship papers, and conservative Republicans say let’s hand ’em deportation papers.’ There should be a middle ground.”

Nashif has been a leading opponent of same-sex marriage and Mannix instrumental in passage of overly punitive mandatory sentencing laws that have filled our prisons to capacity, so I was stunned when I read of their views on immigration. I'm encouraged to see them putting their religious values into practice in positive ways. If more folks did so, maybe organized religion wouldn't be shedding as many members as it has in recent years.

In The Oregonian article, William Lobdell reports that the "unaffiliated" category of faith is the fastest-growing "religion" in America, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The Pew report found that one in six American adults was not affiliated with any particular faith. That number jumped to 25 percent for people ages 18 to 29. Moreover, most mainline Protestant denominations have for years experienced a net loss in members, and about 25 percent of cradle Catholics have left their childhood faith, the study showed. 

Why?

Evidently, church-goers aren't much different from other Americans when it comes to moral behavior, which suggests many people who call themselves Christian don't really believe in the tenets of their faith. As a result, Lobdell writes, "the sea of hypocrisy between Christian beliefs and actions is driving Americans away from the institutional church in record numbers."

Interesting reading. Thoughts, anyone?

Photo: Christopher Onstott, Portland Tribune

Making sense of immigration and identity

With all the national furor over Arizona's state law designed to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants, it was a welcome respite to lose myself recently in a thoughtful, meticulously reported book called "Just Like Us."

Somehow I missed it last year when it won praise from The Washington Post as one of best books of 2009. I'm glad I picked it up this spring at a used bookstore in Anacortes.

"Just Like Us" is the true story of four high school girls in Denver whose families have emigrated from Mexico and the complications that ensue because of their differing legal status. Best friends since middle school, each has at least one parent who crossed into the U.S. without a legal visa.

Marisela, the leader of the group and the one most tied to the Mexican culture, was smuggled into the United States at age 7 in the back of a pickup truck. Her best friend, Yadira, also crossed the border illegally. Neither girl has a green card or Social Security number. Elissa was born in the U.S. and Clara is a naturalized citizen so both, unlike their friends, are able to get a driver's license, travel on a plane and, most important, apply for college scholarships without reservation. Illegal immigrants in Colorado, like most states, must pay non-resident tuition and are ineligible for state or federal financial aid of any kind.

As the girls pursue their education, they confront multiple challenges involving their family's finances, the tug-of-war between American and Mexican cultures, and the fraying of their own friendships, tattered by the difference in their legal status. If this weren't enough, two subplots complicate things further: 1) Congressman Tom Tancredo, who represents a suburban Denver district, becomes a leader in the national movement to crack down on illegal immigration, drawing the girls into political activism on campus and in the community. 2) An illegal immigrant fatally shoots a Denver cop at a Latino night club and flees the state, triggering a scary backlash and putting the city's mayor on the hot seat.

The book, at 382 pages, falls into the genre of narrative non-fiction journalism and recalls similar books, like Adrian LeBlanc's "Random Family" (about multigenerational welfare) and Alex Kotlowitz's "There Are No Children Here" (about life in the Chicago projects).

The narrative follows the girls from high school to college with author Helen Thorpe tagging along to family gatherings, Denver nightclubs, their classes and dorm rooms -- and even to Mexico to visit the mother of one of the girls. Thorpe uses pseudonyms to protect the girls' identities and brings two unusual perspectives to the book: She was born in London, the daughter of Irish parents, but grew up in the U.S. carrying a green card and became a naturalized citizen at 21. And, though she's an established journalist, writing for The New Yorker and other magazines, she's also the wife of John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver.

Thorpe acknowledges the conflict of interest wherever it pops up and is admirably transparent in sharing the evolution of her thinking as she considers all sides of the immigration debate, with obvious empathy for the girls and their parents but also with respect for Tancredo's views and the thorny questions raised by one's status. With considerable skill, but sometimes a sense of too much information, she makes this a coming-of-age story as well as a powerful account of contemporary politics over a complicated social issue. The first-person narrative is a bit awkward, but unavoidable, because she's the mayor's wife.

Most of all, it's a gripping story about identity. As the book liner says:

"The girls, their families, those who welcome them, and those who object to their presence all must grapple with the same deep dilemma: Who is an American? Who gets to live in America? And what happens when we don't agree?"

I'd like to think this is the kind of book that might, just might, cause those who demonize illegal immigrants to pause and consider the complications and the consequences that result from blended families like these -- blended in the sense of having differing citizenships and limited/unlimited opportunities to live freely in America.

I think I'd be dreaming, though.

For an excellent review of the book, read Jenny Shank's take for New West.net.

For more on Helen Thorpe, read Natasha Gardner's profile in 5280 Magazine.

The immigrant work ethic

I had planned to start my day today with a visit to a new credit union at 9 a.m. A few minutes after the hour, I approached the front door and tugged, only to discover it was locked. Who knew that on Tuesdays they opened at 10?

With a few minutes to kill, and having skipped breakfast, I walked across the street to the James Bean Cafe and ordered a sandwich. The woman who waited on me was very friendly, and her accented English gave her away as an immigrant (I should have noticed, but I think she was Korean or Vietnamese.) As I sat waiting for my order, I could hear her chatting up a couple of suits who'd wandered in, repeating herself as needed so they could understand her. All around her were the trappings of a typical American cafe -- an espresso maker, yogurt cups, fresh fruit, syrups for Italian sodas, etc.

I thought of the contrast between the diet she must have grown up on and the items she was serving to her customers here in Portland: scrambled eggs with cheese and bacon or sausage on a choice of bagel. The thought had occurred to me before in other places around town. Plenty of Asian immigrants have developed menus to accommodate American tastes.

In some cases, they've learned to speak a little Spanish, too, if they've hired Latino immigrants to work in their kitchen. At Du's Grill on Northeast Sandy Boulevard, not far from our home, the Korean woman who works the register routinely turns to her books and puts in the teriyaki orders in Spanglish: "Dos chicken" (two chicken) or "Dos beef" (two beef) or "Uno mas chicken" (one more chicken). It's so cool.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Mohammed, the Jordanian immigrant who owns The Energy Bar, where he serves up fresh-baked muffins and scones, and prepares blended fruit-and-veggie drinks (the kind with lemongrass, ginger, carrots, etc.). He epitomizes great customer service, greeting so many of us by first name and even memorizing our favorite drinks.

On Sunday, The Oregonian's Gosia Wozniacka, herself a Polish immigrant who speaks five languages including Spanish, wrote of the challenges facing U.S. producers of labor-intensive crops who must compete with foreign growers who benefit from cheap labor and lower production costs. The disadvantage would be even greater if U.S. growers did not already rely on an ever-growing percentage of foreign-born (and mostly illegal) immigrants who fill nursery and agricultural jobs that Anglos refuse to even consider.

As Gosia reported ("Stable farm labor seems elusive in global economy"):

When Bob Terry, owner of Fisher Farms near Gaston, advertised for entry-level field work positions a few months ago, he expected at least a few white, Anglo job seekers.

"With unemployment being as high as it is, we thought we'd have at least some Caucasians," Terry said. "But we had none."

Several hundred job seekers showed up, all Latino, Terry said, and most spoke broken English. The company, which produces more than 3.5 million nursery plants on 300 acres at three sites, hired 80.

This is how it's always been, said Terry, who has worked with the company for 16 years.

"We always hear, 'You don't hire Americans; you hire the others, immigrants, because they're cheaper,'" Terry said. "And it's just not true. We don't discriminate; we just take them as they come in."

I know I've rambled here but ... whether it's serving bagels or energy drinks; working amongst hops or Christmas trees; reporting and writing in your third language (Gosia grew up speaking Polish and French before learning English); or working janitorial jobs at indoor malls and office buildings (something I haven't even touched on here), the immigrant work ethic is alive and well and beautiful to behold.

Growing old and alone in Fremont

What a shock to open up the Times Digest, a condensed digital version of The New York Times that arrives in my "in" box each day just before midnight, and see a Fremont, Calif., dateline on a truncated story headlined "Quietly, Elderly Immigrant Population Surges."

A shock because while I'm used to the Times spilling lots of ink on the place where I was born (Berkeley) and the place where I live now (Portland), I don't recall more than a mention or two of the place where I moved as a 5th grader and lived until age 19 and the start of my junior year of college.

That place, of course, would be Fremont, a suburban bedroom community 40 miles south of San Francisco. Previously, we'd lived in Union City, a smaller, adjacent town, in a working-class neighborhood populated by fellow Mexican American families. It was a jolt when we moved to Fremont, where I was greatly outnumbered and initially intimidated by my white, middle-class peers.

One of the fixtures back then was the Fremont Hub, an outdoor mall at the corner of Fremont Boulevard and Mowry Avenue, roughly half a mile east from where I attended high school. I remember the mall as a strictly functional place where we shopped at a discount drugstore and department stores like Mervyn's and Montgomery Ward, both now defunct. It was not a place where I hung out, at least not in the way teenagers do at today's cookie cutter indoor malls.

So, imagine the incongruity I felt upon reading about The 100 Years Living Club, an all-male group of elderly immigrants from India who meet five days a week at The Hub to sip their chai tea and commiserate over the loneliness and isolation they often feel as new arrivals in a new country. Many are widowers and live alone.

In the full version of the article, "Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left With No One to Talk To," Patricia Leigh Brown reports that these Indian men make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group -- the ethnic elderly.

"Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say that America’s ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. Seventy percent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children...

"Immigrant elders leave a familiar home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home in communities like Fremont that demographers call ethnoburbs," Brown writes.

"A generation ago, Fremont was 76 percent Caucasian. Today, nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 percent are Latino and it is home to one of the country’s largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a setting for the best-selling book “The Kite Runner”). Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque; a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple."

My mother, in her early 80s, still lives in Fremont, so I've seen these demographic changes take place over the past two decades. On my visits home, I have become accustomed to the sights of turbaned Sikhs and hijab-wearing Afghan women and wasn't at all surprised to meet the Indian doctor who performed an angioplasty on my mom last year.

Here in Oregon, where Latinos constitute the largest minority group, it's easy to imagine a lot of elderly Mexican immigrants feeling just as lonely and out of place as the members of The 100 Years Living Club in Fremont.

Brown has done a splendid job illuminating an issue that goes beyond Fremont or even California. Since 1990, she reports, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 percent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050.

That's a long time from now, so who knows how accurate such a projection may prove to be? In the meantime, it's good to see Fremont mentioned in the same breath as Chicago as cities that are responding to the needs of elderly immigrants.

"Fremont began a mobile mental health unit for homebound seniors and recruited volunteer “ambassadors” to help older immigrants navigate social service bureaucracies," Brown writes. "In Chicago, a network of nonprofit groups has started The Depression Project, a network of community groups helping aging immigrants and others cope."

My old hometown. A national leader in culturally-specific social services? Imagine that.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times