Their stories are about growing up in immigrant families, with parents working long hours six and seven days a week and very young siblings resolutely looking after each other. But their focus is on the future – a better future for people everywhere. Humankind.
A dozen young immigrants – Dream Riders – are sharing their stories, and their hopes for the future, as they bike from Seattle to San Diego on a Journey to Justice, part of the Citizenship for All campaign. The support van traveling with them carries the usual – First Aid supplies, water, energy bars – and one not so usual essential: a lawyer. That’s because eight of the riders do not currently have legal status and their route is filled with pitfalls like immigration checkpoints. If they’re stopped they follow this protocol: Keep calm and quiet. Don’t consent to being searched. Call the lawyer.
The group stopped by Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco recently for breakfast and a brief press conference. Hearing their stories, and the stories of some supporters, was a reminder of how lucky America is to be a nation of immigrants – especially with immigrants like these still wanting to become citizens despite the hurdles and hostility they face.
Mi Jin Park, currently protected by DACA, spoke eloquently of being at school with her brother when they were 5 and 7, in a crowd of children waiting for permission to leave with their parents. Park would tell the teacher in charge that she and her brother had to meet their mother on the corner – and then the two would run all the way home, to their tiny apartment in a sometimes scary neighborhood. They would lock the door and look after each other. Her brother would constantly call the nail salon where their mother worked long hours six days a week, just to hear her voice and ask when she would be home. “When I think of those immigrant children now being separated from their parents at the border . . .” Park began . . . but she couldn’t finish the sentence.
Some of the Dream Riders and their supporters entered the U.S. via harrowing journeys through deserts or wading across the Rio Grande river in the middle of the night. Some came long ago on tourist visas and simply stayed. It was very hard to meet these bright, funny, energetic young people and go home to PBS NewsHour’s report of the latest characterization of “illegal aliens” by some leaders of our country.
The Dream Riders are being sponsored by NAKASEC (the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium,) HANA Center, nd the Korean Resource Center. Any of them would welcome your support.
What do they want? Just a chance to live freely and to contribute to their community. (NAKASEC works for, among other things, Youth Empowerment, Education Access and Adoptee Rights.) What precepts do they follow? Live Right, Know Your Roots, Live Strong, Live Together.
The framers of the Constitution couldn’t have put it better,
I wrote about all this once long ago, on the late lamented news aggregate site True/Slant, and the vitriol that landed upon my page in response made me very glad that my T/S readers didn’t know where I lived. I mean, it was if the NRA had put out a worldwide hit on me. I’m now counting on the belief that most of my current readers are kinder and gentler – since you can sure find out where I live if you don’t already know. And I’m satisfied that most of my angry T/S readers long ago quit following this blog. We’ll see.
When I was a child of about 12 someone broke into our home – well, nobody locked their doors in Ashland, VA in 1945 so he probably just opened the door and walked in – and made his way to the second-floor bedroom of my oldest sister Jane, who let out a mighty scream. The intruder left multiple hand prints on the newly painted walls as he swiftly descended the stairs (and left by another door.) But by the time the Richmond police arrived they pronounced the fingerprints too dim to be of use, so our nocturnal visitor was never identified. My family (4 girls + parents) that night morphed from 6 people in five beds to 6 people in two beds – Jane in between my mother and father; the other three of us in one double bed. (It took us several weeks to expand back into our individual beds.) The next day, our father bought a gun. It went to reside on a shelf in the closet of our parents’ bedroom. We all knew where it was; once or twice my sister Mimi and I stood on a lower shelf and looked at it. But instead of making us feel safer and protected, the thing created more fear. Despite all his stories about working on somebody’s ranch in Texas as a boy, my sisters and I (and our mother, I regret to report) feared our father’s probable ineptitude with a gun more than we feared another intruder. We had belatedly also begun to lock the doors. All five of us – mother + 4 daughters – also feared the fearsome instrument on the closet shelf more than we feared anyone who might be confronted by it. Overruled by us all, my father soon (I think it took less than a couple of weeks) took the gun back to wherever it came from.
You need to swagger manfully around with a pistol on your hip? Fine. Swagger somewhere else – like, on a shooting range. Just stay out of my Starbucks. All I want is to drink my latte in gun-free peace.
I am (as you may know) Fran Johns, a fairly simple name that has worked for me since 1992. I live in Apt 704, 2400 Miller Street in San Francisco, CA 20020. I began to get mail addressed to Stephanie Yamamoto, who lives in Apt. 704, Two Cascade Hills Blvd, San Francisco 20020. OK, the ZIP codes are the same too – but still. Johns v Yamamoto? Miller St v Two Cascade Hills Blvd? You can’t mix these up unintentionally.
We met for tea. The very charming Ms. Yamamoto is not my new best friend, but close. The packet from Hawaii which the U.S. Postal Service would have sent floating around ZIP code 20020 forever contained essentials needed for a trip to meet her mother (the Hawaiian addressee) overseas, where she does remarkable nonprofit good work – but that’s another story.
