FLUX 2001

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Kristina Johnson MANAGING EDITOR Ben Nahorney ASSOCIATE EDITORS Stefani Blair Jessica Brittsan Jenny Moore Michele Taylor CONSULTING EDITOR Bobbie Willis RESEARCH EDITOR Stephanie Griesi RESEARCH ASSISTANT Oralea Howard COpy EDITOR Michael J. Kleckner ASSISTANT COPY EDITOR Katie Mayer EDITORIAL INTERNS Leland Baxter Jessica Cagle Deborah Diaz Devon Karr ART DIRECTOR Justin Kistner DESIGNER/ART ASSOCIATE Emily Cooke ART ASSOCIATES Sarah Cohen Megan McDaniel ART INTERN Tara Chala PHOTO EDITOR Kipp Wettstein PHOTOGRAPHER R. Ashley Smith PHOTOGRAPHER/ART ASSOCIATE Lauren Howry PHOTOGRAPHY INTERN Monica Valenzuela BUSINESS MANAGER Alissa Scott PRODUCTION MANAGER/ ART ASSOCIATE Laura Chamberlain PRODUCTION INTERN/ART INTERN Morgan Dethman

SPECIAL THANKS Jonas Allen Connie Snyder Ballmer Paul Brainerd Brett Campbell Andre Chinn Stephen Deck Daniel Ellsworth Jason Glaspey Dean Tim Gleason Art and Anita Johnson Assistant Dean Greg Kerber Assistant Dean Jennifer King IP Koke Printing David Koranda Kristin Light Daniel Miller PhotOregon John Russial Valerie Stilwell Jim Upshaw Jim Wallace Tom WheeIe k

Flux magazine is planned, written, edited, designed and produced by students in the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication.

All photography and art is the work of University of Oregon journalism students.

Staff members are selected by faculty through a competitive process similar to profess' hirin receiv their produ Schoo II d inting 'n, regon. online Flux, is a http://influx.uo

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FACULTY ADVISERS Carol Ann Bassett Bill Ryan

On the cover: Annie Cha wears her traditional Hmong New Year's dress (page 25). photo by Lauren Howry

spring 2001

unearthing a northwest treasure

under the veil

soldier of • consaence

by Jessica MacMurray

by Mariya Kuzmin

by Kristina Johnson

The hunt for an ancient Japanese delicacy turns u promise for a sustaina6 forest resource

A young woman raised by orthodox Russian Old Bel ieversJoQks

Carl Geiser followed his idealism to Spain sixty-four years ago and almost didn't make it bac

5

a e

ace

daughter of the

~thewheel the belle's

on the road • agcun

aossing the line

• turning

last toast

by Jenny Moore

photo essay by Kipp Wettstein

by Jessica Brittsan

by Persephone Shon

by Jennifer Savage

Born in the aftermath ofwar and displacement, a generation of you ng women red Ine what it means to be Hmong in America

Vintage bikes get a new spin on life

A nun travels to Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest u.s.

Army training of Latin Amen an officer

A member ofa persecuted Chinese spiritual group continues his praetic in exil

No more dyeto-match shoes, drunk fathers or wildflower bouquets - this bridesmaid i retiring

secret war

5

-1

Yume de nashi matsutake ouru yama no hara It is no dream!

Matsutake are growing On the belly of the ' mountain.

- Shigetaka

Y HEART POUNDS AS I POKE my fingers into the dark mat of the forest floor. There had been a mound, an unassuming little mound at the base of a Ponderosa pine, and suddenly I'm on my knees burying my fingers in earth. I brush the spindly brown needles aside, revealing a layer of damp, soft loam. Smaller bits of needles, feathery green reindeer lichen and petals from fallen pinecones nestle together with dark, rich soil in a thin layer of wet - the only moisture to be found in this dry forest.

These are familiar woods, but this time I am exploring them in search of a new quarry: American matsutake, a rare fungus with a storied past. They're said to be delicious, these mushrooms. People pay hundreds of dollars for them, and the adrenaline of value and a rare find is pumping through me now.

I Wiggle my fingers deeper and feel a change in the density of the soil; a new texture, something hidden - solid but spongy, different from the mesh of needles and earth. My excitement fades as I brush away dark soil only to reveal more dark soil - no milky white skin of matsutake. I find a chunk of wet wood, gone soft with decay and fused into the soil around it. Rocking back on my heels, I brush off my knees and start back up the hill.

Matsutake mushrooms are considered a delicacy in Japan. photo byjessica MacMurray

IN THE NIHONGI, A BOOK OF JAPANESE history completed in 720 A.D., there is an account of the japanese Emperor Ojin arriving at the Palace of Yoshino in 288 A.D. The local chieftains honored him with a song and a feast of forest mushrooms and boiled frogs. Consumption of the matsutake was not allowed outside imperial courts until the eighteenth century, and the matsutake has always been considered a noble offering. Today, in japan's intense corporate world, the matsutake is still a prestigious gift, given to visiting executives as a sign of the highest respect.

The voluptuous japanese goddess of mirth, Okame, is associated with mushrooms - matsutake in particular - because of their phallic sym6

Flux Spring 200 1

bolism. Okame, a naughty, gleeful figure, dances through japanese literature and art, scattering mushrooms behind her. She playfully brought her mushrooms to many a graphic story and poem, and th~ association stuck. The matsutake became such a common phallic symbol that women in the eleventh-century Imperial Court of Kyoto were forbidden to speak its name instead, they used the honorific "0" identifier, referring to the suggestive fungus as O-Matsu.

The matsutake has become a symbol for autumn in japanese culture. Much as American autumn-lovers look at maple leaves set afire with color and pick pumpkins with pinkcheeked children, japanese people go on matsutaki-gari, mushroom-hunting picnics, as a rite of the season. It is a contemplative activity, exploring pine forests after the weather has turned a little cold and a little wet, searching the earth for mounds that indicate a crowning fungus hidden under the needles.

There was a time when matsutake flourished in japan's mixed pine forests. But in the last century, changing forest usage and devastating blights have wiped out native mushroom habitats. In the 1970s, japanese retailers discovered the American matsutake, a close

son. Because the mushrooms reproduce more often and are cheaper to harvest, they may be more valuable than the timber that takes almost half a century to renew. Mushrooms won't replace timber, as some had hoped, but wild mushroom harvesting, especially the matsutake, is a commercially viable industry.

As a result, a lucrative and contentious economy springs up each year in small towns on the slopes of the Cascades. Camps full of migrating pickers move from the Siskiyous to the North Cascades, following the fruiting patterns of the mushrooms.

Heading east on my own matsutake search, I passed through Crescent Lake junction, a former logging town clinging to the meager tourism that keeps the gas station open and the general store stocked with fishing lures and beef jerky. Every fall, the campgrounds fill up and the town bustles with activity - not tourists, but mushroom pickers.

Afew miles east of town, a laminated paper sign points up a dirt road that leads into the Winema and Deschutes national forests: "Mushroom Camp." Farther down the road, a pickup is parked at an abandoned gas station.

A banner with a crudely spray-painted silhou-

relative of the japanese species - and one that shares the fragrance of pine. Now, in the fall, instead of searching the woods from Hokkaido to Kyushu, japanese chefs, soup companies and food retailers pay high prices to import the American matsutake from Oregon, California, Washington and British Columbia.

Mushrooms growing in the Pacific Northwest are proving to be a remarkably renewable resource when forests are allowed to exist in their most natural state, without logging or fire suppression practices. Although the fruiting season is short - in some areas, it's less than a month - the mushrooms often fruit in the same places more than once a sea-

ette of a mushroom hangs between the truck's roof and a post. A plywood sign leans against the driver-side door: "$$ Mushroom Buyer $$."

This buyer's presence and purpose are clear dollar signs and pictures of mushrooms are critical when most of the customers speak only Lao or Vietnamese.

Buyers follow the harvesters, paying hundreds of dollars for the matsutakes. They' make shipments nightly to japan, where the mushrooms are graded, weighed and sold again for up to $1,200 per pound. Thousands of dollars change hands in the buyers' tents, and everyone in the camps knows that everyone else has cash hidden in tents and pickup

WAS SIXTEEN, I STOOD HOLDING MY rn outside the hospital while my mother to cram the car seat in the truck. She was ng in Russian, "All these absurd ideas - just him in your lap." But the nurses would not I us go if the baby wasn't secured in the car - seat. I reached in with one hand and threw the car seat in the back of the truck, climbed in and laid memoir by the baby in my lap.

My mother started driving past the salt-eroded Mariya Kuzmin town of Voznesenka, Alaska, past the abandoned boats and onto End Road. My lower abdomen and photos by hips hurt, so I spread my legs and let my newborn R. Ashley Smith son slip onto the seat. As we drove through the dips and curves, I opened the window a little and leaned my head on the glass. Far off, I saw the beacon in the harbor flashing red rays on the churning ocean; the bad weather indicated an end to the summer, and soon my father would come back from summer fishing. I dreaded his return. I wanted to rest and plan a way out for my son and I. The harbor faded as we drove on, and I stared at the objects passing: an abandoned boat, its wooden panels broken, garbage bins and finally the gravel road. This isolated place made me feel hotter and sicker, so I reached for the handle, opened the window wider and tried to breathe in the salty air. "Close the window. You're weak right now," my mother said in Russian. Oh, just shut up, Mom, I thought, but I closed the window anyway. I squeezed my thighs close together and returned my baby to my lap. I looked at his soft hands closed tight and put one of my fingers beside his little fist. He clasped it. I stared at him for a long while, contemplating all the names I wanted to give him, but I knew only two were available from our Russian Old Believer's Bible: Adrian and Kalin.

I secretly named him Dan. But, of course, when we got to our home in the village and krestine - naming day - came, I ended up calling my son Adrian. The same day, my cousin Fenka also named her newborn Adrian. Since the Russian Old Believers loved celebrating marriages, births and deaths, everyone from the village gathered at my parents' house and drank until dark.

Some said this celebration was inappropriate because I didn't have a husband. My mother cried later, "How come Fenka knows how to live with her husband and you don't?" After her bouts of screaming, she went to a bedroom and banged her forehead against the floor, begging a saint to bring back my husband.

IN JANUARY OF 1991, I WAS ONLY THIRTEEN and part of a culture that pressured girls to marry young. Outside our village, women were flying combat jets in the Gulf War and the communist structure of the USSR was falling apart. There was so much hope outside my little world, but I 9

NDER THE VEIL

Mariya Kuzmin has taught Adrian (right) about his culture, though they live apart from it.

11

belonged in a culture called the Russian Old Believers, or the believers of an old religion.

There are about six thousand Russian Old Believers in the state of Oregon alone. They fled Krasnoyarsk, Russia, during the worst Stalinist years and came to America in the late 1960s after a long migration. When my grandparents left Krasnoyarsk, they went to Harbin, China, and then to Cuiba, Brazil. After Brazil, they migrated to Woodburn, Oregon. Many Russian Old Believers settled comfortably in Oregon, buying farms and bringing ripe, sweet loganberries and boysenberries to factories like Smucker's. Other families, like my own, did not fare too well and moved on to more remote areas, such as Nikolaevsk, Alaska, where land was inexpensive. Later, many men in Nikolaevsk bought land deeper in Kachemack Bay. My father was one of them. Our new village was named Voznesenka, which in Russian means "an elevated place."

Back then it was the most beautiful place in the world. I can still remember the fine smell of dust and ocean in the air on Sundays, when all the children came out wearing their colorful clothes. Late in the day, parents came out to sit on fences and watch. Those days were filled with salmon roasts, wildflowers and intimacy. It was just like my father had described it when we were moving and my mother stood unloading things, not wanting to go.

"The rivers there, they flow with honey and milk.

And in the mornings, the birds chirp outside your window. And berries, how many berries there are.

You just lean your mouth down on the ground and there they are, all ripe and ready to be eaten." But what my father failed to tell me, and what my moth-

er already knew, was that there would be no phones, electricity or help. In the isolation my father was able to abuse my mother and terrify me.

One day I came home from school to find a whole group of people drinking and eating.

My mother's face was swollen from crying. The svatya mother-in-law - had come.

My marriage was planned. I felt dead looking at my husband-to-be. His name was Timafey. From the rumors in our village, I knew he was planning on marrying a girl named Marka. She was three or four years older than me.

But I was the Marka he wanted. I didn't realize people saw me as mature enough for marriage. At thirteen, my chest was flat, and I was so skinny kids at school called me a toothpick. I hadn't started my period, like the older girls in the village.

Timafey was seventeen. I never had a chance to look directly into his face. I feared that his swollen pimples would pop and he would go crazy. On our wedding night, he was exceptionally quiet. By the edge

of the drawer, I unwrapped the sachmora, a kind of headpiece a woman wears once she is married, and dropped the pins and the scarf on the counter. My scalp hurt from the weight of it, and I stood scratching my hair.

I asked him if I could sleep on the floor because I hurt so much. He didn't answer. I braided my hair into one loose braid as I had always done as an unmarried girl and asked again.

This time, an even longer silence passed. He sighed heavily, turned away from the dark window and said, "You'd better sleep on the bed or someone will find out in the morning."

Slowly over the following months, he and I began to talk. He vowed he would never physically hurt me, and perhaps that was the first sign of the violent habits boiling inside him. I felt scared and breathed with caution.

Many nights after the marriage, I looked out the window and thought about suicide.

Once, he and I were fishing on a boat in that part of the ocean where the border between the Russian territory and the United States blurs.

Several of the fishermen tied boats together and began drinking. I was so scared of being out on the sea with drunk men that when bedtime came around I climbed onto a bunk bed and began to laugh uncontrollably. Gulps and gulps of the misery I had endured up to that point threw me into a fit of bursting, coughing laughter that wouldn't subside. Timafey sat in the captain's seat and listened to me. Finally, he got up and began shouting, "What is so funny? Do you know what it's like to grow up with an alcoholic father?" I said I did not, and my stomach began to convulse again. That was when he began to sob.

Over the next few days, silence reigned. I couldn't stand it, so I walked up close to Timafey and asked loudly if I should cook rice or fish. When

there was no response, I increased the volume of my voice and inquired again. He continued ignoring me.

Finally, I tossed the spoon in my hand on the counter and said, "You can cook your own dinner."

Late into that day, I cried. I knew I was in for something crazy and wrong. I began to plan an escape. During the night when my husband lay sleeping, I visualized myself bobbing on the cold water, muttering a prayer until a wave swallowed me whole, shutting my eyelids forever. I thought about the step, the drop and then the vacuum of the ocean. Mostly though, I thought about how it would hurt my parents and how they would regret abandoning me.

Timafey was no less suicidal. Once he turned the throttle to full blast and sent our boat roaring over

I didn't realize people saw me as mature enough for marriage. At thirteen, my chest was flat, and I was so skinny kids at school called me a toothpick.

The gold turrets of a Russian Old Believer church in Woodburn, Oregon. After fleeing Stalinist Russia, the Old Believers made new homes around the world.

My determination - stronger than they were - had already settled the disagreement. I .wanted out of that life, out of the traditional Russian Old Believer's life.

13

the tips of the waves. I crouched by the table, my knuckles white from gripping. Dishes flew out of the cupboards, and the bathroom doors banged as the engine growled and coughed. He sat in the captain's seat and laughed at me. The boat thudded and jumped as though it were crashing into blocks of cement, and just before it seemed ready to explode, Timafey eased the speed to a normal state. Another time, he slammed the boat into some rocks. The boat just hung there until the Coast Guard came and pulled us off. When the officers questioned the accident, an unusual direction of the wind served as the explanation.

The marriage itself was like a wild run on the sea.

For two and a half years, I dragged my feet into one harbor and then the next, washing laundry, cleaning fish and cooking.

Between fishing seasons, we would come home and live with Timafey's parents. He began disappearing for weeks at a time. One day, I climbed out the window and walked across the field of snow to Voznesenka's grammar school. My legs were frozen by the time I arrived there. The teachers were hesitant about giving me a seat because everyone knew married girls had no place in school, but I'd had enough. I was tired of waiting for my husband. The principal, a sympathetic guy, invited me to join the class.

As soon as my father found out I'd returned to school, he came over right away. He and my husband threatened that if I didn't withdraw, they would beat me. I shuffled around the kitchen, listening to the two of them fuming. My determination - stronger than they were - had already settled the disagreement. I wanted out of that life, out of the traditional Russian Old Believer's life.

There was no one to help me. I knew I needed to

get an education if I planned to survive on my own.

One night when I was fifteen and almost five months pregnant, Timafey disappeared. About three days later, he returned and gathered clothes and equipment for a fishing trip. I did not speak, but I obeyed when he called me to help with the food packing. After the essential items were loaded, Timafey hopped in the truck and left, saying he would be back in a few days. That was the last time I ever saw him. Years later, I learned that he drove nonstop to California.

In the village, though, no one knew where he was and everyone felt sorry for me.

Married ladies brought me handmade baby blankets and perozke, a pastry baked with raspberries. My father blamed me for everything. Few days passed in our house without his accusations that I had failed to hold my husband and keep him home. At times, my father would muster up some hope and reassure me that Timafey would come back and everything would be fine. But near the end of my pregnancy, the commercial fishing season had begun and Timafey still had not returned.

I gave birth to my son, and there was no sign of Timafey.

His mother visited, but said she did not know where he was either. My father's older aunts wanted to help me out.

One time in church, my Aunt Ustinea called me to the side and told me she had a special massage she wanted to tryon me. Later in the week, my mother drove me and my son to her house. Aunt Ustinea beamed with excitement. "I started such a hot sauna," she announced in Russian. The sauna was hot - hotter than hell. The fire in the stove let out an orange glow as we undressed in the entrance.

When we walked in, steam struck my son in the face and he began crying. Aunt Ustinea

took care of him. She laid him in a tub of cool water and sang a hymn that calmed him until he fell asleep. She told me I had too many loose cords in my stomach. She knew just the way to get everything back in place. So after slapping my whole body as if I were a loaf of rising bread, she dug four fingers into the center of my belly and began to twist my insides into one pattern. She whispered in Russian, "Gave away such a little one, what the devil was wrong with them?" But determined to help my father out, she continued tightening the loose parts in my belly.

When her whole hand seemed buried inside me, I began fading into the steam.

My son woke and started screaming. He did not stop until we left the sauna.

THAT WINTER, OUR FAMILY situation went from bad to worse. Finally, my mother and I could not take any more. I had learned to drive by then, and I knew my father had his life savings hidden in the attic between layers of ammunition in small army boxes. My mother and I planned an escape with the staff of a local shelter for abused women. A lawyer who was helping us said my mother had legal rights to the savings, and on the day we escaped, I climbed into the attic and gathered the money.

My mother, my little brother, my son and I left Voznesenka one day when my father was working on the boat. Years later, my mother returned to Alaska. My son and I visit Woodburn once or twice a year to attend church with my aunt.

ADRIAN FALLS ASLEEP AS I drive on an empty freeway.

The moon hangs low and I hum Russian music. At the Woodburn exit, I flip on the blinkers and ease off the freeway, driving past my aunt's home and onto a gravel road.

The church sits in an open field, its gold domes protruding into the pale yellow sky. I park and turn off the engine, then whisper to Adrian in Russian, "Honey, wake up. Let's go pray with Aunt Elena." ~ This memoir is by Mariya Kuzmin, a seniorjournalism major. This summer, she plans to travel to Russia with Adrian to participate in a creative writing workshop.

Soldier Conscience It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

-Albert Camus

story by

Kristina Johnson photos 0/

Kipp Wettstein

T WAS APRIL 1938. THE GREAT Depression had torn through the United States six years earlier, leaVing one-third of the labor force hungry and jobless. Hitler and Mussolini were beginning to spread terror across Europe. In Spain, peasants and workers fought to defend an infant democracy from General Francisco Franco and his Fascist allies. Rebel planes had flattened Guernica. Trenches scarred the wheat fields of Aragon, and the rivers ran with blood.

A young American, Carl Geiser, pressed his back to the stone wall of a Spanish farmer's courtyard near the Ebro River. He stared ahead at a dozen Italian soldiers leaning on their rifles. They gazed back steadily.

A priest in a black robe paced behind the soldiers as the morning sun blazed down. Next to Geiser, fifteen gaunt prisoners straightened themselves against the rough stone. Everyone waited quietly.

Finally, two Italian officers rounded the corner.

After speaking with the sergeant in charge, they strolled up to the prisoner nearest the road. Geiser strained to pick out Spanish words as the officers worked their way up the line. "Nationality!" they demanded of a prisoner a few feet down.

Geiser had heard stories of men who faced imminent death. Some saw their lives flash before them. Others trembled or lost control of their bowels. But the men flanking him stood in silence.

Some of the men were Canadians. Others, like Geiser, were American volunteers - part of an army of nearly 3,000 who saw the specter of fascism in Europe while the rest of the world slept. They feared that Franco, Hitler and Mussolini would launch a second world war, and they had come to Spain to try to stop it. They were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and by 1939 one-fourth of them would be buried in the Spanish earth.

Above: Carl Geiser studied at Fenn College in Ohio before volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Opposite: Now ninety years old, Geiser is haunted by his memories of the war.

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Flux Spring 2001

Geiser holds a list of International Brigade soldiers captured in Spain.

Carl Geiser did not pray as he stood before the firing squad in Spain. He'd concluded long before that the only God he worshipped was the wellbeing of humanity. He'd declared himself an atheist and a Communist and devoted his life to fighting the greatest evil he could find on earth: Fascism.

Today, Carl Geiser is ninety years old and one of only a handful of surviving Lincoln Brigade veterans. He shuffles around his Corvallis, Oregon, apartment in a button-down shirt and blue jeans.

He's always laughing about something, and when he does, tears gather in his liquid blue eyes and run down the sides of his nose. His sharp humor masks an inevitable frailty. He tires easily. He talks for a while, then his voice falters and he has to steady himself against a sturdy, black exercise bike in the center of the living room.

Behind him, a stiff bed sealed with blankets crowds the couch and coffee table. Geiser has converted the apartment's only bedroom into a cluttered office - no room for the bed. Instead of studio portraits of grandchildren, Che Guevara

glares out from a framed poster on the wall. A Ralph Nader campaign sign blocks the view from Geiser's fifthstory window, and bookshelves sag under the weight of the complete works of Henry David Thoreau, The Cornel West Reader, Howard Zinn and three dozen titles dealing with the Spanish Civil War.

By THE TIME GEISER WAS ten, his father had died of the flu and his mother of tuberculosis, so he moved to his grandparents' farm in Orrville, Ohio. They were Swiss immigrants who spoke only German and grew oats, wheat and corn on their sixteen-acre plot. None of the neighbors

had much, so they worked together to get the most out of the land. They shared one thrashing machine and took turns helping each other beat down the wheat and oats. "The people helped each other without any thought to repayment," Geiser remembers.

Like most other young men in the Depression years, Geiser worried about how he would find a job. He wasn't particularly politically active - he spent most of his time studying electrical engineering at Fenn College, waiting tables and attending the local Baptist church.

All that changed in 1932, when he signed up for a student exchange to Russia. The trip was sponsored by journalist Edward R. Murrow and the National Student Federation of America, and for Geiser it was just an adventure. He wanted to visit his great-uncle in Switzerland, and he thought the group might stop there on the way to Russia.

When he arrived in Moscow, he was shocked by what he saw. "I was very naive. What they printed in the papers was that Russia was a terrible place," he says. "But everyone was working."

Geiser had grown up poor in a capitalist country, and visiting Russia awakened him to the possibility of economic equality. Before the trip, he'd mocked the one Socialist at Fenn College. "He kept telling us that the capitalist system doesn't work," Geiser recalls, shaking his head. "We laughed at him, bUJ by 1932, we knew he was right because of the Depression."

When he returned to the poverty of the United States, Geiser began speaking to youth groups about the jobs and equality he'd seen in Russia.

"You're becoming a stooge of the Soviet Union," he remembers one of his friends saying.

"I tell you nothing more than what I've seen with my own eyes," he insisted. The more resistance and ignorance

he encountered when he spoke, the more radical he became.

He joined the Young Communist League shortly after his trip to Russia. He scraped together bus money to attend the Chicago convention of the Students Against War and Fascism in 1932. It was worth it - in Chicago he was elected secretary of the organization, and it was there that he met his future wife, Sylvia. He liked her politics. "She was quite bright," he says. "She was also quite radical."

When they decided to marry in 1933, they paid ten cents for a ring at Woolworth's, and a City Hall official conducted their brief ceremony.

Sylvia was a substitute teacher and made just enough money to support them both. With the Depression at its worst, Geiser couldn't find paying work. "The only thing I found I could do was pro bono," he explains. He and Sylvia moved to New York, where he dedicated himself to activism, volunteering for International Labor Defense and the American League Against War and Fascism.

It wasn't easy - he had to sleep in 路Union Square now and then when he didn't have a nickel for the train home to the Bronx. Because he spoke German and Spanish, International Labor Defense asked him to translate correspondence coming into the office from Europe. What he was reading about Hitler, Franco and Mussolini made him uneasy, though most Americans hadn't yet begun to pay attention to the storm brewing in Europe.

When Hitler and Mussolini sent planes to aid Franco in July of 1936, Spain's civil war exploded into an international cause. Geiser was hiking in the Adirondacks when it happened. As soon as he came down from the mountain and heard the

"~I

would have been sorry if/ hadn't gone. ... /n a sense, why wouldn't / go?

Was it because / was afraid? / couldn't admit that. "

18

Flux Spring 2001

news, he decided he had to go to Spain.

He opens his wrinkled hands and examines the palms. "I would have been sorry if I hadn't gone," he says.

"I was in a position to go. I didn't have any dependents; my wife could take care of herself." He pauses and looks up.

"In a sense, why wouldn't I go?

Was it because I was afraid? I couldn't admit that."

When he confessed his wish to Sylvia, she didn't ask him to stay, but she didn't urge him to go. "She wasn't happy about my leaving," he says, rubbing the thin white fuzz on his head.

Congress had already passed a law prohibiting assistance to either side in Spain's war, but Geiser prepared himself to go.

When he asked around, his anti-Fascist colleagues directed him to a secret attic in the city.

There a doctor examined him while an assistant questioned him about his reasons for volunteering. They handed him a third-class ticket to France, and days later he was playing shuffleboard on a rolling freighter in the middle of the Atlantic.

French labor unions met the volunteers when the ship arrived in Le Havre in April 1937. The Americans were supposed to act as though they were vacationing in Europe, but they didn't fool anyone. Geiser shakes his head. "No Frenchman who looked at us didn't know what we were doing there. They just smiled and waved."

He was put in charge of a group of ten Canadian lumberjacks for the hike over the Pyrenees. When they arrived in Figueras, he joined the George Washington Battalion as a 3rd ammunition carrier. "I had used a gun from the age of nine," he explains. "My grandmother had a shotgun and a .22 rifle to keep off chickenhawks, so I had experience in shooting, at least. But I had no real idea of what it was going to be like at the front." He learned soon enough.

During Geiser's first battle at Brunete, the George Washington Battalion fought next to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, but by the end of the battle half the men in each unit were dead. The surviving volunteers joined to form the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Geiser wCl? promoted to political commissar and put in charge of raising the morale of the men. "When half the people on a unit are killed, the morale goes down," he says. "Mine didn't." He shrugs. "I knew we had to pay these casualties. I didn't join in condemning the Republic and the officers. I knew the problem was that the Fascist side had the tanks and planes. So because of that, I became the battalion commissar."

He'd only been political commissar for a few months when he was captured. Before sunrise on April 1, 1938, a commander sent Geiser's unit to deliver a message to another brigade. As they walked along the Gandesa-Calceite road, chattering about what they would eat for breakfast, they heard a group of soldiers call out to them in English. Geiser assumed it was the brigade they'd been looking for, but as they drew closer, he made out the letters on one of the soldiers' uniforms: "23 de Marzo" - the name of Mussolini's Italian unit.

By then it was too late to retreat.

"Believe me, Imp, war means suffering, horrible and nerve wracking."

20 Flux Spring 2001

One of the few photos taken of Geiser during the war. In Sp.ain, he rose from 3rd ammunition carrier to political commissar.

21

The Italians disarmed the men and herded them back to a farmer's courtyard. There Geiser learned that Franco had ordered all international officers executed by firing squad. "The International Brigades have fought for an ideal," Franco had told the Italian ambassador, "even though the ideal is heresy. They have proven they know how to die; they remain disposed to die, just as though they were all Spaniards."

When an Italian soldier sprinted into the farmer's courtyard calling for el comisario, Geiser was sure his luck had run out. As political commissar, he held the highest rank among his men, and he knew that meant he would be shot first. He stalled as the runner tried to pull him away. He shook hands with each of his men, passing them his wristwatch, his pouch of Revelation tobacco and his wedding ring.

The runner led him into a dark corridor where an Italian lieutenant was eating breakfast. Knowing that Geiser would soon be shot, the lieutenant offered him chunks of fish and bread and began to speak openly about the battle.

Thirty thousand Fascist troops would be arriving in Gandesa before noon, he said. Geiser thought of the International Brigade soldiers they would find there - less than one thousand of them - waiting in the sun. He could already hear the enemy planes ripping the sky apart above him.

To Geiser's surprise, when the lieutenant finished his breakfast, he led him back to the courtyard. Geiser's men were overjoyed to see him.

But as they crowded around to hear what had happened, his heart sank. He had to tell them how badly outnumbered they were. The Fascists had as good as won.

The men listened to the sounds of battle as the sun climbed over the courtyard.

They sat, helpless and frustrated, imagining the Fascists slaughtering their comrades only a few miles away. Then came a cry from one of the guards: "Bring the Internationals!" The firing squad was waiting for them outside the compound.

As he stood against the wall waiting to die, Geiser saw two black sedans race toward the battlefront. The cars braked as they disappeared around a corner, then squealed into reverse and slowed to a stop in front of the prisoners. One of the drivers stuck his arm out the window and summoned the two Italian officers.

As Geiser watched them talk, he thought of the men on the front who would be dead before the end of the day. He desperately wished he could warn them.

The cars sped off again, and the officers approached

the firing squad. Geiser braced himself for the command to fire, but it never came.

The gunmen shouldered their rifles and walked away.

He stood frozen with disbelief. One of his buddies, Ed Hodge, broke the silence, blurting, "Well, I'll be doggoned!"

Geiser finds this memory hysterical. His eyes disappear behind his creased, spotted cheeks, and he can't finish the story. It's easy to laugh now, sixty-three years later. It's that much funnier, somehow knowing that if things had taken a slightly different turn that day, he wouldn't be sitting here, hunched and wrinkled, telling stories.

He later learned that the men in the cars were Italian officers on their way to the battlefront. As they bounced down the dirt road, they happened to see the firing squad lined up in front of the farm and stopped to hastily pass along the order they'd just heard: Between April 1 and April 9, International Brigade prisoners would be kept alive for exchange with Italian prisoners.

Once Geiser was captured, Sylvia stopped receiving his letters. It was impossible to find out what had happened to him. "She didn't know whether I'd been killed or captured," he says. "But she knew it was customary for the Fascists to kill captives." Six weeks later, the Red Cross helped Geiser send her a postcard that would get past the Spanish censors. "This is to inform you that I'm well," was all it read. She scrawled on the other side of the card and sent it back to the camp. Over the next year, Sylvia struggled to bring Geiser and the other prisoners home. She worked wi~h Lincoln Brigade veterans wh'o returned, lobbying Congress and appealing to Eleanor Roosevelt for help.

But most of the nation didn't care about a handful of anar-

chists and Communists imprisoned in Spain.

The Italians finally exchanged seventy-one of the prisoners in April, 1939. A few nights later, a telegram boy knocked on Sylvia's door in New York and handed her a message:

Geiser and the others had crossed the Bidassoa River into France, where a representative of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was waiting to ship them home. It was a bittersweet farewell. France and the United Kingdom had already recognized the Franco regime, and in September, the Nazis would invade Poland. Spain had bid goodbye to the rest of the International Brigade months ago; when the last volunteers paraded out of Barcelona, the city's residents leaned from their balconies, waving kerchiefs and littering the street with roses. Thousands gathered to listen as poet Dolores Ibarruri's voice trembled over loudspeakers:

"Sylvia didnJt know whether IJd been killed or capturedJ but she knew it was customary for the Fascists to kill captives. JJ

You came to us from all peoples, from all races.

You came like brothers ofours, like sons ofundying Spain...

You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend.

Geiser remembers standing on the deck of the returning ship as it pulled into the harbor in New York. "There were a lot of people on the dock, and we were wondering, 'Who's this important person who's coming back?' Then we realized they were waving at us." He picked Sylvia out of the crowd easily. They went back to her new apartment in Chelsea, where she'd planned a party with all his friends. "She'd been working to get the place ready and get all the people there. They were asking me all kinds of questions," he recalls. "When I looked over, she had fallen asleep in her chair. She could finally rest." He leans back on the sofa and looks out the window, where bare maple branches sift the low winter sun.

FOR THE NEXT FORTY YEARS, GEISER WORKED as an engineer at Liquid-O-Meter, making fuel gauges for the planes that fought the Nazis. He and Sylvia had two boys, Jim and Pete. He was busy working and raising a family and had little time to think about the war. He and Sylvia divorced in 1946 but remained friends until her death three years ago.

He returned to Spain in 1981 - six years after Franco died - to collect stories from other International Brigade prisoners. Eventually he 22 Flux Spring 2001

If the Republic had gotten the fuel and trucks instead, surely they would have won. If he hadn't been captured...

Ifhe could have escaped... If he could have warned the men... But Franco rose, and with him Mussolini and Hitler.

Center: Geiser found this shrapnel on a return trip to Spain in 1981.

turned his research into a book, Prisoners of the Good Fight.

On that trip to Spain, he visited Franco's tomb a looming $IS-million monument to fascism built on the back~ of prison laborers. The tomb's caretakers eventually had to move Franco's body from the public viewing area, Geiser says, because so many people urinated on it. This thought makes him hunch over, holding his side as dry gasps of laughter escape.

He hates Franco, but when the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of state Cordell Hull comes up, Geiser spits it out like a bitter seed. He believes Hull changed the course of the war the Spanish Republic should have won.

He blames Hull for delaying the release of the international prisoners and conspiring with Texaco and General Motors to supply fuel to the Fascists. If it weren't for Hull, he says, the Internationals would have been released sooner. If the Republic had gotten the fuel and trucks instead, surely they would have won. If he hadn't been captured ... If he could have escaped... If he could have warned the men...

But Franco rose, and with him Mussolini and Hitler. Millions died in the camps and on battlefronts.

Geiser slumps against the exercise bike. His raspy voice fades. Most of the people he meets now have never heard of the Abraham Lincoln

Brigade. They confuse the Spanish Civil War with the Spanish-American War. The handful who understood, who knew what it was to fight for the dream of the Republic they're gone now.

He stoops in front of his bookcase. From the bottom shelf, he heaves a grotesquely twisted piece of rust the size of a man's hand. It's shrapnel from a battleground near the Ebro River. He weighs it, the only souvenir left from a time he can't forget. Geiser had to dodge chunks of steel this big in Spain. As they hurtled past him, he must have clutched his ideals close. t:J. Kristina Johnson, from Seattle, Washington, is a student in the Professional Master's Program. She loves second-hand shops and the great outdoors. When she isn't writing and reporting, she does a little editing (in chief) on the side.

I am the green mountains

of Laos because my father and mother live in me.

-KaShia Tasli Moua

IXTY MILES WEST OF THE MEKONG RIVER AND HIS home country of Laos, Lieutenant Chue Blong Cha built his own prison. On a plot bordering the jungle, the young soldier assembled a small house with a roof of grass - one of the first for the four thousand Hmong refugees who would join him inside a guarded refugee camp. He then waited for his wife, Ko, to cross the border and find him. Months passed, and great rains fed the rice stalks that swept the knees of villagers coming out of the Mekong basin. White Hmong, Green Hmong and Striped Hmong, they streamed from Laos like slowmoving tributaries and converged inside the bamboo fence that held them in like the wall of a dam. Ko and her four children were among them.

Two months had passed since the end of the Vietnam War, and the Americans were pulling out of Indochina.

Deep in a remote mountain valley in northern Laos, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had been running a secret military air base called Long Cheng to help the Hmong fight communism. In May of 1975, the agency had evacuated, ending an eighteen-year partnership with the hill tribe Hmong. Communist forces crept through the jungle toward Long Cheng. There would be no more American weapons, no more rice raining from the sky. Families waited on the airstrip for the Americans to fulfill their promise, to save them from the Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese armies. Three thousand military leaders and their extended families pushed their way onto American planes. Those left on the ground buried their belongings before abandoning the mountains. When Lieutenant Cha heard the Americans were evacuating, he 27

walked out of Laos forever.

To some, the word Hmong means "human being" or "free people." But not knowing whether his family would return east to Laos or west to the American "land of giants," Lieutenant Cha considered himself neither. Months passed.

The rains receded. Two of his children died of disease. In the fall of 1976, Ko's belly swelled and she gave birth to a girl, naming her , Zeeg after "falling leaves."

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, ON A warm spring afternoon in Portland, Oregon, Lieutenant Cha's youngest daughter, Annie, sits on a couch across from her father and listens to the details of her parents' story for the very first time. Annie is a nineteen-year-old freshman majoring in business at the University of Oregon. She is a college student with a heavy load of books - a pretty girl who carries a purple cell phone - and a shy but proud daughter with a dozen thoughts she keeps hidden behind a wide, endearing smile. She is Hmong. She is American. She's part of the first

generation to carry a label that connects two very different world views: Hmong American.

Last year, Annie found out why her family lives in the United States.

Not through parental lectures, stories or tears in her grandparents' eyes, but through two books in the library that explained whom her father fought for and why. In her senior year of high school, Annie walked to the front of the room and showed the results of her research: a white piece of posterboard stapled with enlarged images of loss, including a photo of a man hiding in the bushes witnessing the execution of his own family. After the presentation, a girl, the only other Hmong student in the room, walked up to Annie and said, "I never knew any of that."

Annie says, "Until that project, I didn't know why we were here. I feel so ashamed that I know so little, but we didn't talk about the war growing up. My father would say, 'The dinner table is for eating, not talking.'"

In the last year, Annie has asked herself a lot of questions about who she is and what she wants.

She thinks about her boyfriend, homework and friends. But she also thinks about the loss of what she calls a "dying culture."

Increasingly, college-aged Hmong women are rejecting ideals of cultural purity and assembling dual lives. Girls work, but money comes back into the household to support extended families. On the weekends, they leave their dorm rooms to care for young children back home. They intentionally speak Hmong to their young nieces and nephews to prevent the imminent loss of their language.

Today, young Hmong women dance, wear makeup, are visited by shamans, attend Christian baptisms, cut their waist-length hair into ear-length bobs and lower their heads in the presence of their fathers.

Some are proud, strong and assertive. Others are shy, doubtful and insecure. Annie's life does not represent the experiences of all Hmong American women, but she is connected to them in an essential way. What Annie and other Hmong American women share is their ability to stitch a seam

between two cultures that remain spiritually, morally and politically in conflict with one another.

Twenty-five years ago, American social serviGe employees considered the Hmong the least prepared of all Southeast Asian refugees to assimilate into American society. In urban environments, Americans ridiculed the Hmong for rinsing rice in toilet water, hoeing dark earth onto their living room floors and believing welfare checks were their compensation for assisting the Americans in the war effort against communism. Across the country, thousands of Hmong tried to recover from their displacement.

When Annie was a little girl in Oregon, her mother, Ko, and a group of other wives would rent a car and ramble down the highway to Fresno or Seattle to take their daughters to celebrations of the New Year, the most important Hmong social event. The women drove while the daughters slept, talked and played games.

When the sun rose above their heads, they ate the chicken and rice their mothers had prepared the evening before. Lieutenant Cha stayed at home.

28 Flux Spring 2001

Early in the morning of the New Year when she was in elementary school, Annie sat on the floor and pulled out the long threads that kept her skirt crimped in hundreds of tight vertical folds like a closed paper fan.

"I haven't worn one of these in three years," Annie says now, standing in her parents' living room. "I tried wearing the pants, but you can't go pee the entire day."

"Go pee in the morning!" her mother tells her. Ko takes thirty minutes to dress Annie, wrapping her waist with thick cotton sashes. "The bigger you are, the better you look!" she says.

In high school, Annie lost patience for the "old ways."

She took two part-time jobs, one at a chemical company and the other at a retail store. Over the summer, men in suits dropped software packages on her desk and asked her to learn them so she could teach others. She stopped dancing at the Hmong New Year. She stopped sewing and no longer attended Hmong language classes. "I got tired of this after awhile because it was something that was forced," she says. Annie wasn't consciously rejecting her culture, but as a young girl trying to fit in, her parents' traditions didn't seem relevant to her own life.

Annie's parents tried to retain a semblance of their old lives. They worked harder. As the president of Hmong American Unity of Oregon, her father spent a great deal of time outside the home visiting other families who looked to him as a community leader. Families worried about jobs and children who didn't respect their parents. Annie's dad was gone much of the time. "My father was always visiting with other Hmong families.

He always was helping others. This made me jealous. I thought, 'Would they help us if we needed them?'"

The cultural tensions were a problem for all. Some fathers lost respect from American-born children. Seeing this, Annie's dad asked other members of the community, "What can be done about this generation gap between parents and children?" Change overwhelmed him. He felt alienated. He didn't choose to come here.

He wasn't like other immigrants. He was a political refugee who was forced to leave his home.

Before settling in Laos, the Hmong lived and farmed on the Yellow River in northern China, where they were ostracized and persecuted by the Chinese. Determined to survive, they migrated into路the mountains of Laos, where they have lived for approximately two hundred years in relative isolation from other people.

After the Vietnam War, they looked to Americans for sup- . port. But the Hmong were largely misunderstood. The media told them that their fathers were polygamous and abusive, their boys dealt drugs, their girls had too many babies and their mothers were submissive women with no goals of their own. Stereotypes like these had a huge impact on how girls perceived themselves and the Hmong community as a whole.

In 1999, KaShia Tasli Moua, a twenty-four-year-old Carleton College graduate, was awarded a $60,000 fellowship to create "Hmong Women's Circle," a forum for Hmong girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen.

Although they are a diverse group, what comes up over and over for these girls are the issues of depression, suicidal thoughts and polygamous relationships.

Although polygamy is illegal in the United States, Moua says, "Many girls express concern that their dad might marry another woman or that they are a product of such 29

a relationship. Because husbands rotate weekends, or nights, I hear the girls saying 'I never know when my:dad is going to be here.' Or, 'He loves my other brothers and sisters more than he loves us.'"

Moua tries to help girls feel proud of who they are. "A lot of girls I talk to say, 'Technically, I'm Chinese because o~r ancestors are from China.' I think that's pathetic," she says. While some Hmong girls are proud of who they are, others shelter themselves from their own history.

Today, the generation gap widens between the parents who fought for Laos and the children born in the United States who believe this world is an ever-changing, malleable place.

Annie, who was encouraged not to marry at the customary age of thirteen, earned her high school diploma. Her oldest sister, married with children and living in Minneapolis, says, "You come see me before you decide to marry, Annie." But around the country, other young women are expected to keep the family unit strong by marrying and bearing their first child by age sixteen.

Annie's parents think hard about their daughter's decision to attend a four-year college. They want her to be in a position to make choices. However, they do not want her to live alone. Even though she works full time, Ko takes the "loss" of her youngest daughter particularly hard.

Ko Yang has eight children whose birthplaces trace a path through war and displacement.

Maylee, Maysia and Sanit were born in the mountains of Laos; Zeeg and Nitkorn in a Thai refugee camp; and Annie, Franklin and Edward in a hospital bed in Portland, Oregon. Franklin was named after the physician who delivered him. Edward was named for Edward "Ted" Kennedy - after a quick search for a culturally meaningful name for "youngest son." Annie's namesake is the very nice lady who worked next to her mother at the paintbrush factory.

Annie's parents have held the same jobs for more than twenty years, possessing neither the 30 Flux Spring 2001

need nor the sensibility to climb corporate ladders. In September 1979, when they landed in River Falls, Wisconsin, Lieutenant Cha looked over a blanket of snow and said to Ko, "The ground looks like the sky.

The sky looks like the ground." Two months later, his brother sent for the family and arranged for Lieutenant Cha to work alongside him at Anodizing Company, where he applies high-performance liquid coating to Leupold sight scopes for hunting rifles. Ko works at the Purdy Corporation's paintbrush factory. She sits at a long, partitioned table in a large warehouse. The brushes she makes are marketed as the country's finest handcrafted brushes. During "Take Your Daughter to Work Day," Annie sits at the corner of her mother's station and watches her mom lift the smooth nylon bristles from the box, weigh them and insert them into the metal bracket.

Their families once farmed the lowland valleys of Laos, and Lieutenant Cha and Ko respect what they can accomplish with their hands. She works days. He works nights.

This way, one can always be home for the children. Now, only the two youngest sons live in the house.

On a Sunday afternoon, Lieutenant Cha wears a Hawaiian shirt and pushes his lawn mower across his green lawn.

Annie's eighty-three-year-old grandfather, a shaman who recently suffered a stroke, rests in an apartment next door.

Cousins play outside, tumbling and inadvertently turning on car alarms. An older cousin drops off two whole fish that glisten on a white plate. It is Easter, but for the Cha family it's a typical Sunday. Annie helps her mom cook and does some homework.

An hour south, another Hmong clan leads a distinctly different lifestyle. In Salem, Oregon, the extended Xiong family gathers in a YWCA swimming pool to perform a Christian baptism for several teenagers.

A seventeen-year-old girl with smooth, wide shoulders stands at the pool's edge and offers reasons why her life should go to God. Chest-deep in the water, the girl holds her nose and leans her head back. Her hair spreads into a fan, wrapping around the elbows of the two men that hold her. In the corner, a fat lifeguard with big white knees twirls her whistle.

Windie Xiong, a twenty-year-old nursing student, was baptized in this pool wh~n she was fourteen. Christianity is an enormous part of her life. "Christ is the reason I am here," she says. But other Hmong believe in the ways of spirits.

Religion, clan name, economics - these are the factors that both divide and unite young Hmong women and their families. Annie does not shun Christianity. She respects the lives and choices of everyone around her. She points out that Hmong women share a common history, but they don't lead identical lives. Young women today understand that cultural pride does not rest on their likeness to one another, but on the way they support each other.

Cultural change is not a set of prescribed steps. It is more like water, constantly in motion. For the younger Hmong, change is like currency. It can be traded for opportunity. But for many parents, continued change represents the disintegration of the Hmong culture.

"Our culture is being transformed daily," KaShia Tasli Moua says. It's not only children who have to learn what it means to be Hmong, she says. "It's everyone in the community."

Even Annie is surprised by change. "Our nephews 31

want so much more than we wanted. They always want a new Nintendo," she says. "When I was younger, I don't remember wanting so much."

As she has grown up, however, there are things she hasn't been sure she should ask for. At the beginning of her senior year, she didn't think she'd go to college. She considered enrolling for classes at a community college while continuing to live at home.

But the day before applications were due at the University of Oregon, Annie plowed through her essays and dropped the package in the mail without telling her parents. Upon acceptance, she sank into deep worry. "Who will cook for my Mom?" During the summer, Annie's father was quiet. One day he said, "You should get ready."

In September 2000, Annie moved into a tiny room on the third floor of the multicultural residence hall where girls from Guam, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and Indonesia primp in the bathroom and pop in and out of each other's rooms like ping-pong balls.

Annie continues a long-distance relationship with a boy in California who is half Lao, half Hmong. They talk on the phone.

They take their relationship day by day. When school is in full swing, Annie takes a part-time job on campus. She considers a minor in Computer Information Technology. She goes home "not very often." When she does, she says, "It's like we never left. Mom gets us up early and we cook. I want to go and see my friends, but I'm expected to stay home." Weekends are comforting but trying. Sitting in her room, she admits, "I value my independence, which makes me feel really guilty."

At the age when they traditionally would have married, Lieutenant Cha's daughters leave home, gO.to college and befriend boys who are Hmong, Lao and Caucasian. An older sister perms and cuts her hair, graduates with a business degree and lands a job as the general manager of a prominent Internet company.

At home, Annie's dad continues to help Oregon's Hmong community. New families are moving up from California. At last year's New Year celebration, Annie didn't even recognize some of the clan names. "I've never heard of that Hmong name," she says.

Her dad struggles with new families who want their own community leaders, their own New Year celebrations. "Too much change," he says.

IN THE AFTERNOON, BENEATH THE TALL OREGON PINES, Annie walks to her part-time job as Lieutenant Cha prepares for his evening work shift. He makes a pot of chicken vegetable soup prepared with a hot broth. He ladles the soup into a bowl and sits down to eat.

At the paintbrush factory, Ko stretches her back. She weighs her last handful of paintbrush bristles and pushes her chair away from her desk. She will be home soon. The lieutenant has made a little extra dinner for when she arrives. ~ Jenny Moore is agraduate student in magazinejournalism. She thanks Annie and her family: Ua tsaug rau Annie siab zoo tau pab kuv.

32

Flux Spring 2001

Bill Dunham's 1961 Schwinn Corvette

c~assic

w

rode then he o the Army. from Vietnam in sold most of his thing to survive the was his old Schwinn. it stashed in his Aunt arage and has been riding it ince. few years ago he was hunting for new seat for the Corvette when he stumbled across a 1941 Schwinn that he had to have. Since then, his hall closet, garage, shed and spare bedroom have slowly filled with rusty frames, sweetheart sprockets, Torrington pedals, orphaned saddles and vintage balloon tires still sealed in brown paper. Dunham tends to a stable of almost twenty bikes in various states of decay, disassembly and disrepair. Seven of them are fixed up enough to ride. A few have been restored to their original condition.

Their fat chrome fenders shine like martini shakers, and the handlebar streamers evoke memories of childhood Fourth of July parades.

Dunham says riding vintage bikes is like being in a parade every day.

"You're riding down the road, and people are waving at you," he says. "If that bike wasn't there nobody would say anything, and there wouldn't be any conversation between me and other folks. It's a way to open up and get to know people. I like that."

-

photography by

Kipp Wettstein

Kristina Johnson

34 Flux Spring 2001

.:2)

unham was driving outside of Portland when he saw this 1953 Firestone Monark barreling

down the freeway in the back of a truck. He chased the truck off the road and offered its owner $ 50 for the bike. He later sold the Monark to his friend Ed, who bead-blasted the metal frame, repainted it and spent $800 on new chrome. When Ed finished restoring it, Dunham bought it back from him. He guesses it would sell for around $3,000 today.

The 1938 Colson, which Dunham borrowed from his friend Ed, comes complete with a phony gas tank and headlights.

Though the Colson has been restored, it still has its original saddle and tool pouch, which are rare, according to Dunham. "They're just not around anymore," he says. "Pre-war bike parts are getting harder and harder to find."

37

girl's bike is Dunham's favorite. Collectors , bikes and use them for parts because e boy's models. But Dunham likes the curves," he says. The J.C. Higgins als and a rare "batwing" headrideable art. "I don't like e says. "There's no re for utility

story by

Jessica Brittsan

When she realized she was being arrested, she was thrilled.

Right: The (( Ban and Bar" letter . Sister John received was issued for criminal trespass on military property. photo by R. Ashley Smith

41

hree months before her seventyninth birthday, Sister John crossed the line. On a cold drizzly Georgia Sunday, she linked arms with eight others and stepped across the row of neat white bricks that spanned the two-lane boulevard. That day, 3,600 people stepped from public land onto the Fort Benning military base, home of the School of the Americas (SOA). The year before, the military police hadn't been prepared for the size of the mob and transported Sister John off the base without arrest. This year, they were ready. They loaded protesters onto waiting army buses, handcuffing and carrying those who resisted. But Sister John boarded the bus willingly.

When she realized she was being arrested, she was thrilled.

The SOA is a U.S. Army facility that brings Latin American officers to the United States for training. Critics of the school say it has turned out some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin American history - including Panama's Manuel Noriega, Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson and ten officers indicted by the United Nations for crimes connected to General Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile.

But the Department of Defense and SOA officials deny any connection between techniques taught at the school and crimes that some graduates have gone on to commit. "There's not been one shred of any evidence or proof that would stand up in a civilian or criminal court," says Ken LaPlante, a former SOA instructor and an adviser to the Army and the Department of Defense. He says the "black legend of the School of the Americas" is nothing more than emotionally laden hype and misdirected criticism of U.S. foreign policy. He believes the school is responsible for promoting democracy in Latin America and has improved its military. "The military personnel are [now] more professional in the U.S. definition of the term professional," says LaPlante.

However, human rights activists such as Father Roy Bourgeois, who started the protest at Fort Benning, say the school teaches torture and psychological warfare tactics that directly lead to violence in the region. "The school is the West Point for Latin America. It has become a producer of dictators and death squad leaders," says Father Roy. It is this argument that brought Sister John to the protests.

While many people associate religion with conservatism, Sister John equates it with justice and social change. She became a Catholic sister fifty-seven years ago because she wanted to live as Jesus had taught - to be a servant among the people, a teacher, a seeker of truth and a giver of love without condition. She taught high school literature for eleven years and now spends her days working with children and feeding the hungry and homeless. Sister John found a cause in the SOA that she was willing to travel and get arrested for. The experience of physically putting herself at risk for this cause brought a feeling of joy she had never expected. "I'll tell you, when you walk across that line with those other protesters, and you know you're doing something and putting yourself on the line, it's a great feeling."

Sister John joined the protest two years ago,when she made her first trip to the gates 9f the Fort Benning military base from her humble home in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. She knew about the school and the injustices associated with some of its graduates, but it wasn't until she read a newsletter from her religious community that she thought to act. A line at the bottom of an article said if anyone would like to attend the annual protest in Fort Benning, funds would be available.

She was the first to make the call to the financial officer. "I said, 'Mary, you know I've never been to jail, so that might be interesting. If you want to send me to the School of the Americas, I'd be glad to go.'"

The next year she attended the march on a scholarship from the Catholic Worker, a

"To me, if the government acts justly they are acting religiously.

You can't ~eparate them."

Below:

Sister John's spiritual beliefs led her to nonviolent action against the govemment. photo by Monica Valenzuela

religious foundation dedicated to nonviolence and voluntary poverty.

According to reports by SOA Watch, a group that monitors violence linked to the school, the UN has recently cited SOA graduates in connection with human rights abuses in Colombia, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. A 1993 UN Truth Commission report found that the majority of officers and government officials linked to crimes and human rights abuses during El Salvador's brutal civil war had attended the SOA at some point.

During the war, religious leaders became the target of violence because they voiced the concerns of the poor and spoke out against exploitative labor practices supported by the government. In 1989, six jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper's young daughter were murdered by graduates of the SOA. Stories like this plague Sister john. When she heard that ten of the twelve soldiers responsible for the El Mozote Massacre the 1980 killing of 900 unarmed Salvadoran civilians - were SOA trained, she was moved to action.

Father Roy and a few friends started the annual November protest at Fort Benning in 1990 on the one-year

anniversary of the jesuit Massacre. The 2000 action brought 10,000 protesters from across the country. Each year, the protest draws a diverse crowd of university students and clergy, the young and the old. This month, twenty-six people arrested at the protest will go to trial and face fines and prison sentences for their actions at the November protest.

Among them are college students, a mother, a daughter and three nuns, one of whom is eighty-eight years old. When Sister john became involved with the protests, some friends told her she was "spitting into the wind." But she thinks her actions are making a difference.

"Protesting makes people listen. "It's getting through to somebody," she says.

For Sister john, government and religion are inseparable. "To me, if the government acts justly, they are acting religiously. You can't separate them." It was her inability to find a sense of justice or humanity in the actions of her government or the graduates of the SOA that brought her to Georgia that November morning.

At the pre-march rally, Sister john was a Peace Keeper. She wore a yellow armband and made sure the crowd stayed orderly and organized. She stood near a fence separating the crowd from a stage where there were speakers and musical performances. Nearby, a reporter interviewed two young women who had just finished speaking. Sister john inched closer to listen in. As young children, they had watched soldiers enter their home and kill their parents. While Sister john stood with her hands clasped over the top of the fence, she imagined the two toddlers and the horror they had witnessed. She began to cry. The eldest girl extended her arm and patted Sister john on the hands. "Oh, the irony of it, after all she's been through and what she's doing - and she's comforting me," says Sister john, shaking her head.

At noon, officers removed the barricades and the march spilled onto the street. Protesters wearing black shrouds and white death masks led the march.

They carried coffins representing the many men, women and children who had allegedly been killed by soldiers the school had trained. Next came a large group of people carrying small white wooden crosses, each bearing the name and age of one of the dead. Sister john's cross read: juan Carlos, 40. A man read the names over a loudspeaker. After each

name, the marchers raised their crosses and answered by chanting presente (present). When they moved out of range of the loudspeaker, members of the crowd began reading the names from the fronts of the crosses they carried, and the crowd continued to echo presentee The march stopped about a mile into the base, where military police asked the protesters to put down the crosses and step onto the military police buses awaiting them. People started laying the crosses on the soggy lawn at the side of the road, but Sister john stepped onto the grass and firmly stuck her cross into the damp mud. Others saw what she was doing and quickly followed, picking up those that were on the ground and sticking them upright into the mud. The end result looked like a graveyard.

When Sister john stepped onto the bus, she was told by the military police that she wouldn't be arrested, but as she sat there she had no idea what her fate would be. After sitting on the bus for nearly three hours, she ended up in one of the many tents the army had equipped with rows of computers for photographing, fingerprinting and processing the thousands who had crossed the line. The money spent by the school on the buses, tents, heating and overtime pay for the guards baffled her. "It's crazy that we have that kind of money to put into putting a stop to it. Why are they trying to put a stop to it? They're afraid that we will have an impact."

Protesters arrested for their first time that day received a "Ban and Bar" letter.

The letter is a warning to those arrested for criminal trespass on military property.

It states that anyone caught entering the property within five years of his or her first offense will be subject to a $ 5,000 fine and/or up to six months in jail.

At 11 p.m. an army bus dropped Sister john in a park at the center of town. She didn't know where to find the people she came with, and she didn't know how she would get back to the hotel where she was staying. As she stepped to the door of the bus, she saw a crowd and a few familiar faces waiting in the park. At the close of a long, emotional day, she extended her arm and waved her "Ban and Bar" letter in the air.

The crowd erupted in cheers. /).

Jessica Brittsan is a senior journalism major. After graduation) she plans to travel the world and become independently wealthy.

By 1996, forty million more Chinese citizens were pracitioners of Falun Gong than members of the Communist Party.

TURN

story by Persephone Shon

o HONGYU SAW HIS PARENTS IN _~.tJl •

.l.JlJer 2000 - their first meeting in six he barely recognized them. Their air d turned completely gray, and they looked weary. They had come all the way from Hebei province in China to see him but had been turned away at the U.S. border in Canada. In their Vancouver hotel room, they seemed to Zhao almost like strangers.

"Their physical condition had deteriorated so much since 1994," he says. "In those six years, my father had two

NG

strokes caused by stress and depression."

Zhao prides himself on his composure in most situations, but this reunion overwhelmed him. "There were tears in my eyes, and they cried, too, when we finally saw each other."

Zhao, a twenty-eight-year-old Chinese citizen living in Portland, Oregon, has been separated from his family because his government sternly disapproves of his spiritual beliefs. He practices Falun Gong, which combines the principles of Buddhism,

Above: Zhao Hongyu met his wife, Shu liu, in the United States. He left China in 1994. If he returns, he faces persecution for practicing Falun Gong. photo by Monica Valenzuela Opposite: Zhao Hongyu and Wei Tan sit in Jieyin position, which they say recharges their bodies. photo by Lauren Howry

46 Flux Spring 2001

Chinese police handcuffed Cheng to a tree in the middle of winter.

As she stood in her bare feet, they beat her with a broomstick until it broke in half.

Charles Chin and other practitioners protest in support of Falun Gong by performing exercises at an arboretum in Portland, Oregon. photo by Lauren Howry

tion. "It's happened too many times for it to be accidental," he says.

In January 2000, Meng took a stand. She deliberately practiced Falun Gong in a small open square next to a movie theater in China. The police arrested her and sent her to a labor camp in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province.

When Zhao talked to his mother, she pleaded with him on the phone. "Don't come back," she said. "I can't bear to see you arrested also." She said to him that because of Meng's crime and a rumor that Zhao was a prominent figure in the spiritual movement, the Chinese government was keeping a close watch on her and Zhao's father.

"It's ridiculous," Zhao says. "I am only a practitioner - I have no great influence.

And I haven't talked to any practitioners in China but my sister since I left."

Meng spent almost a year in prison before she signed a pledge denouncing her faith. Zhao has talked to her several times since her release and is pained by her transformation. He says the government has "reverted" Meng - she doesn't believe in Falun Gong seriously anymore.

Zhao believes the government has brainwashed his sister.

Meng now sees nothing wrong with signing the pledge. Zhao says her interpretation of Li's teachings has changed to fit her new ideas. He tries to talk about Li's true principles when they speak on the phone. "But I always know you can't persuade someone if he or she is determined to go one way," he says. "I try my best to read the scriptures to her, but I think this is a hopeless situation."

IN HIS PORTLAND APARTMENT, ZHAO feels safe from the Chinese government. He lives a normal life, working as a medical assistant for Oregon Health Sciences University. At home, he sits with his wife, Shu Liu, looking at pictures of his family.

She's never met them - the two are newlyweds, just married in January.

They sit side-by-side, holding each picture together. Her eyes wide with excitement, Shu Liu asks, "Who is this?" and "Who is that?"

Zhao hasn't looked at these photographs in a long time. He points to his sister and her son. He shows Shu Liu his mother and father.

He looks at a picture of himself from six years ago - he was so much skinnier then.

"I think the persecution will end very soon," he says. "I've heard there is splintering among the high-ranking Communist officials." Zhao feels he's making a sacrifice, being away from his family in China. But he also knows he's safe from punishment by

his government. He believes he serves a greater purpose by staying in the safe zone of the United States and maintaining the principles of Falun Gong. He studies and practices, strengthening the wheel of the falun. And he looks forward to the day when he and his wife can return home to China, safe and free. !1 Persephone Shon) from Tuscon) Arizona) is a senior with a double major in journalism and Chinese. She has studied in China and hopes to return after graduation. Her ultimate goal is to be a foreign correspondent in Asia.

48 Flux Spring 2001

e Belles Last Toast I

No more dye-to- match shoes, drunk fathers or wildflower bouquets this bridesmaid is retiring story by

Jennifer Savage

photo by Kipp Wettstein

'VE HEARD THAT TO UNDERSTAND THE SOUTH, YOU MUST BE BORN THERE. BUT THAT

logic doesn't help me much. I grew up there, just as my mother and her mother did. I perfected my inflection for "y'all" and "ain't" on sticky evenings thick with the smells of summer. I learned that Jesus is King and that this place east of the Mississippi and south of the MasonDixon Line is, in fact, the promised land. I learned to marry young and marry well. I was born _ in the South, but I don't understand her and maybe I never will.

I come from a place of catfish and grits and bourbon-soft nights. A place where mama-and-them live down the road, dinner is at grandma's at two o'clock every Sunday and most summer Saturdays are filled with event-of-the-year weddings. And it's coming around that time of year again. Magnolias are blooming, sap is rising and wedding invitations are surely in the mail. But 49

this summer, for the first time in years, I won't be a member of any wedding party. I have offered my last toast, hung up my dye-tomatch shoes and officially retired from the bridesmaid circuit. After all, a bridesmaid has a shelf life and I, frankly, have expired.

Though I haven't taken that final stroll out of singledom, I have taken the aisle walk five times in two years to watch my friends join in holy matrimony.

There have been times I thought these unions were good and right, and times I prayed for God to give me the strength to forever hold my peace.

From my perch as a bridesmaid, I have watched strong Southern women leave their beliefs at the church door in the name of tradition. I stood beside my college roommate as she promised to love, honor and obey in the shortest ceremony I have ever witnessed. A welcome, a song, a promise, and it was over in ten minutes flat. Before the -ceremony, in the church parking lot, the rest of the wedding party and I swilled moonshine out of a Mason jar because it promised to be a long day, dry reception and all. Everybody knows to have a dry wedding in the South you better have a good excuse, like an alcoholic father or a devout grandmother. My former roommate had neither, and no one has stopped talking about it since.

That day, another friend ate wedding cake off a napkin and promised me that at her wedding, I would get a plate. Six months later, I did - and all the wine I could drink. It was the hottest day on record that summer, and the periwinkle floor-length gowns she had chosen for us did little to offer relief from the heat. Makeup melted, hair wilted and the duct tape another bridesmaid used to position her double-D breasts into her dress lost its stick. In the vestibule of the church, Pachelbel's Canon in D began to play, and this dear friend began to fret about her uneven bosom. I tossed my $75 "wildflower" bouquet to a groomsman and reached inside her dress to bring

her br-easts level. She walked down the aisle two minutes later poised, adjusted and balanced. I followed, smiling, knowing some of the ladies sitting in the crowd would be horrified if they knew I had just felt up another woman in the house of the Lord.

I couldn't summon any tears when the bride walked down the aisle that day. I just kept thinking that she was going to pick her new husband's XXXL boxers off the floor for the rest of her life.

A few months later, this bride and I stood at the altar again,- this time with another friend who dressed us and eight of her other closest friends - in "sage" chiffon.

We all agreed we rooked like high-waisted lima beans.

When the bride tossed the bouquet, chiffon flew, single women scrambled, and in the end, someone came out with a tattered wad of flowers and a hollow wish that she, too, could find a man.

I have been paired with escorts with names like Bubba and Moo. I have danced with brides' fathers to You don't have to call me darlin' after they've had too much to drink. I even had one tell me he liked my hair short because "with hair like that, I could take you from the bath to the bed and never even get the pillow wet." Comments like his forced me into retirement. No more drunk fathers, wretched dresses or friends transforming themselves into different people because our culture demanded it.

Sometimes I think I have unfairly accused these women of giving in., being dependent. But then again, I've seen brides bend themselves in keeping with tradition.

Their actions border on the ridiculous.

I know a strong, smart woman who became a bornagain virgin when she got engaged. I know another who blushed while receiving lingerie and thong underwear in front of her mother-in-law, pretending she had never danced on a bar with a bottle of Southern Comfort in her hand and a frat boy on her lips. I know some women who started to whisper the word "fuck" after having used it for years in regular conversation. I know others who extended their short, short skirts past their knees and started saying things like, "It's a man's world," as if there was nothing they could do about it.

Over the years I've softened a little; maybe I should have been happier for them. Maybe in a place where appearance is everything, they were showing respect to our roots in the only way they knew how.

I have done the same thing in smaller ways all my life.

So has every other woman, Southern or not. We have all found exile in the spaces that are ours, like a grandmother's kitchen or the bridesmaids' dressing room.

There aren't many places like this left. With all that we as women have gained in our quest to be equal, maybe we've lost some things too, like weddings with pomp -and flair. Maybe these weddings were not so much about obeying and a new last name but more about girls playing dress-up together one last time.

Maybe they were a tribute to our home and our place.

Maybe. But I never stopped to ask. ~ Jennifer Savage is a student in the Literary Nonfiction Masters Program. Born and raised in the Carolinas, this belle still considers the South her home.

50 Rux Spring 2001