Immigrant Stories

You Cannot See All The Way To The End 1

Tashi grew up on the high lonely plains of Tibet, tending a herd of yaks and longhaired goats. He lived in a yurt with his mother and father, his bothers and sisters. On frigid Tibetan nights under skies so deep and clear, so full of stars that it seemed you could see all the way to the center of things or during blizzards so hard and screaming that a man unprotected would be skinned alive by the wind driven ice, they would sit around the yak dung fire sip buttered tea, sing songs, and tell stories of gods and spirits and magical things as they had done for centuries. 2

When he came of age he was sent to town to go to school. There he came into grinding contact with the Chinese who have been running Tibet since the nineteen fifties. During their tenure in the country the Chinese have done there level best to turn the Tibetans into good Chinese or corpses which ever. Stories of bodhisattvas and demons were replaced with talk of class struggle, dialectical materialism, and Tibet's place in the creation of a new modern China. As always happens in these cases the coercion, brutality, and bureaucratic terror created few new socialist but many new malcontents, troublemakers, and half-baked revolutionaries. So before to long Tashi found himself out with friends late at night painting anti-Chinese slogans on the brick walls of the town. 3

As so often happens many a budding young revolutionary is actually a budding young bureaucrat perfectly willing to sell out his schoolmates for... Well just about anything. It wasn't long before Tashi was betrayed by one of his comrades. In the U.S. they fine you for writing on walls. In Tibet they shoot you. Luckily family relationships still count for something even in the new communist era. A relative who worked in a government office saw Tashi's name on a list of people the police had a special interest in and advised Tashi to leave the city at once and the country if he could. This proved to be possible due to the close friendship of Tashi's family to an old smuggler who had made his living for many years moving back and forth across the high passes into India. 4

Within a week Tashi found himself hungry and cold but alive in Dar Aslam home of the Tibetan government in exile. He arrived just in time to participate in a lottery that was held compliments of the State Department of the United States of America. The winners of this lottery received a boni fide refugee visas and a plane ticket to paradise. 5

Six weeks later our hero found himself working as a janitor at a restaurant in downtown Seattle. Tashi was intelligent and adaptable and it wasn't long before he was waiting tables, showing up for work in dark glasses, spiked hair, and baggy shorts and dating a Swedish medical student from the University. He kept to his religion didn't eat meat or drink alcohol but otherwise lived a life no one, least of all he, could have possibly imagined so long ago, so far away, when the sky was so deep and clear and so full of stars that you felt you could see all the way to the center of things. 6

The Luxury of Misery 7

The wife of the village political officer found her in the tall grass on the side of the dirt track the farmers used to bring their buffalo down to the river, a girl child in a country with little to spare and nothing at all to spare for a girt child. "A terrible misfortune better to leave it for the animals and try again for a boy." her relatives said. 8

The village council placed her in an orphanage. She was adopted from there by an older American couple with no children of their own and the most impeccable "New Age, PC, Post Modern, Liberal", credentials. Her new parents whisked her away to a prosperous suburb in the Pacific Northwest of America. There she was given dancing lessons, riding lessons, music lessons, swimming lessons, and learned how to play soccer. She learned to express her feelings in a healthy non-confrontational way and how to share her toys with others. She was computer literate and blessed with a good fashion sense. 9

By the time she had reached sixteen she had had enough of it all. She hated her parents for being so "informed" so "understanding" and didn't believe for a minute that they understood or cared a thing about the real person she was inside but only cared about the perfect daughter she appeared to be. She felt more like an exotic pet then a daughter. ~. 10

She spent endless nights fantasizing about the mother that had left her to die. She imagined the pressures her real mother had been under and she forgave her. She longed to get closer to her, to be reconciled with her. 11

She embraced her Chinese heritage, changed her name to something more ethnically appropriate, had a yin and yang sign tattooed on the nape of her neck, learned how to say nasty things in Chinese from the immigrant boys she hung out with and learned to smoke with those same boys. The immigrant boys had never seen anything like it before a Chinese girl that didn't give two shits about what her parents thought. She told them she was an orphan whose parents were dead. The boys thought she was a cheap whore. 12

Had her mother, her real mother, been stronger, had she been willing to take the heat from her husband and his family and her family and kept the little girl, the girl would have grown up in a rural village received a rudimentary education and spent most of her life in back breaking labor and grinding poverty. As it was angels had plucked her up, taken up to heaven to languish. In America she could afford the luxury of bring very, very unhappy. 13

The Bad Immigrant 14

The apartment is too small and there are too many people in it. Better to stay out on the corner until everyone has gone to sleep. Out on the corner with the other young men in the warm golden haze of a Los Angeles evening joking and smoking, wrestling around, hanging out. Older people, people you don't know, girls, walk across the street so they don't have to go past you. 15

You feel good out there with the other guys. It feels good that people are afraid of you. Like you’re somebody. Not like in school where you were nobody or worse so much garbage waiting to go out to the curb. They didn't want you there and you didn't want to be there, a happy meeting of the minds. 16

Out on the corner with guys like you. Guys from Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the children of peasants who came to America to avoid ending up dead. Shot in the head and left by the side of a dirt road. Shot by men trained by Americans who come in the of the night to drag people out of there beds with their women screaming and their kids crying. The children of people who hold down two jobs to pay the rent and buy the beans and are happy for that. The children of people who don't read and can't write and don't speak English. People who dream of warm moist winds blowing through banana leaves and talk and talk about somewhere else you don't even remember. "What a bunch of chumps, what a bunch of farmers." 17

Out on the corner you know what time it is. You know the score. Boost some beers from the Korean grocer two blocks down. Smoke some pot. Huff some gas. Roll a drunk. Score a ride and go cruising. Where's the party tonight? Get some paint and let the world know who's the boss in this part of town. Cross out all those other "lame-os". Find some girls and get busy. Get fucked up. Get real fucked up and if shit happens along the way you'll be ready. You've got a piece and your carnales; your brothers have your back. Shit! You can't live forever now can you? 18

Then one day, one day sooner or latter, if you live that long, your up against a wall or on the hood of some cop's cruiser. You get popped for something. Maybe you did it. Maybe it was some other guy that looks like you. Nobody cares anyway, but this time the INS gets involved and they tell you that you’re an, "undesirable alien". What ever! They tell you they're going to deport you back to Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. "Hell that ain't fair, that ain't right. Send me to county. I'll eat baloney sandwiches and sleep on the floor for a year. Send me up state I've got friends up there. But Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, “What the hell do I know about that?" 19