Skip to main content

Color Added

Photo by Jim Gertz, Star-Tribune


Years ago, when we lived in a small town in Iowa, a relatively large number of Hmong people tried our small town on for size and fit.  Almost all of them moved to the Twin Cities, 150 miles north, because they needed more than a town:  they needed each other.  It has been Minnesota's gain.  


Every once in a while, I think that our part of the Americas was a plain place, when I grew up.  I was part of a Scandinavian immigration, but we Norwegians were too anxious to become Americans to add color to the culture.  We wanted to belong.  I recall that, in our family, where our father was a first generation immigrant, we tried to get him to speak Norwegian to us, one day a week.  It lasted about ten minutes.  "No!  No!", we said to him.  "That isn't a Norwegian word!  That's just an English word pronounced wrong!"  Dad gave up.  Blending in had begun to happen to him, too.


The Hmong, like all immigrants, learn English very quickly.  They want to blend in, too, or at least to communicate freely.  But they are better at keeping their celebrations, and their glorious costume.  Maybe it is because the differences between their parent culture and that of the Americas is greater than the difference between Scandinavians and the Europeans who came here earlier.  


Whatever it is, we are a far finer place because of the finery, and food, the look and the lilt of a nation full of immigrants.  The ignorance and mean-spiritedness of the people who have forgotten that all of us came here from somewhere is shameful.  Even the American Indians, long ago, came here from Asia.  


What delight!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more