study to be wise

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Susan Storm Richards

There is a Planned Parenthood my bus passes by on 16th Street. I don't usually notice it when I'm on the bus, but I walk down there often enough, and occasionally there are escorts standing outside with fluorescent orange vests on ready to help someone in, as well as one or two dour-looking folk who hold up pro-life signs or pray with their rosaries. One older white woman I've seen more than once. She's creepy.

A few semesters ago, I was in my school's asylum clinic and represented a Central American woman who was a victim of domestic violence. DV is a controversial ground for asylum--we lost at our first hearing and our appeal has been pending for six months now--so we had to gather as much evidence as we could to show there was some kind of political angle to it. So I tracked down an anthropologist whose research was on gender violence, and she gave us a great affidavit describing the invisibility of women in Central America after the civil wars of the last generation.

She wrote about how in Central America, in its hierarchy of violence, domestic violence is at the very bottom, incongruous as it is with the more public narratives of wartime massacres and gang violence. And so women have no communal space to find shelter, no space to find solace except the space in her bedroom between her husband and herself, which is of course no space at all.

On my bus this morning, going down 16th Street, for some reason I looked out the window as we passed Planned Parenthood. The traffic happened to keep us stopped there for a moment. There were three pro-lifers there this time, and two escorts, and a young couple trying to get in, being hassled by one of the pro-lifers. My first instinct was to roll my eyes at the pro-lifers and think, jesus, just let the girl live her own life. As the pro-life man kept bugging the couple, the two other pro-lifers got down on their knees and started praying.

But then I looked at the couple as they tried to fend off the man politely, avoiding confrontation. The man was talking directly at the girl, as her boyfriend nodded his head and looked the same way I probably do when I try to get off the phone with a telemarketer without hanging up on them. And what I could not help but notice was the boyfriend's hand on the girl's back, maybe not pushing, but certainly nudging her forward, trying to get her past the pro-life man.

And I thought, that sucks. A lot. Being literally caught between a crazy old man who was probably telling her she was about to commit murder and her clueless child of a boyfriend who was probably scared out of his mind of being a daddy. It was like watching both sides yell at each other, over and above the most important player in this tough, tough game that no one can win.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

At the liquor store on the corner of Corcoran and 17th, Northwest

Guy at the counter when I bring up a bottle of champagne is a middle-aged Ghanaian man. Asks if I need a bag.

"Yes please."

He tells the guy next to him that I must be English, saying yes please and all, or maybe Canadian. This guy next to him seems like a DC local, sounds like a DC local, especially when he looks at me and hmphs back, "He's probably from Southeast."

Ghanaian Man, like he had it in a holster: "Southeast Asia."

I'm just standing there, getting out my wallet and getting my money out of my wallet, sort of stunned (1) that DC Local awesomely just doesn't do stereotypes, going more with common sense, no reason why the Asian kid isn't also DC Local. And sort of stunned (2) that Ghanaian Man, without me saying anything more than yes please has pegged me in close to exactly the right hole: from the Commonwealth and Southeast Asia.

I finally speak up when Ghanaian Man decides to settle it and asks me straight up where I'm from, my favorite question of all time. So in return for him being completely on point for me, I abandon my usual stereotype-dispelling lie (pick 'em NY or CA) and instead dispense with the truth.

"Hong Kong."

And Ghanaian Man smirks and says to DC Local I told you so without telling him so. Then he eyes the Chinese Taipei flag on my cap with the Olympic rings and says, "Yeah you were out there for the Olympics, weren't you?" DC Local rolls his eyes, apologizing to me without words, minority telepathy that says, sorry for my fob friend who thinks all one billion Chinese people went to the Olympics just because they were in China. Again I want to reward DC Local for his awesomeness, but the truth is out there.

"Yeah, I actually was at the Olympics."

Ghanaian Man is beaming. DC Local is quiet. Except, "'Bout time he got something right."

Ghanaian Man asks me where I was born, and when I say Australia he just laps it up like he had me at yes please. But DC Local gets the last word, at least in my book, because when I explain that I lived in Hong Kong most my life, he asks if I was there for the handover.

And I'm like, yeah, I was.

And he's like, yeah 'coz that was pretty cool.

And I'm like, yeah, it was.

And that's like, the most informed conversation about where I'm from that I've ever had through three years in the District of Columbia, capital city of the United States of America.

There was another liquor store across the street. Glad I picked this one.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

My dear Mr. President:


When John Paul Stevens took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on December 17, 1975, my mother was two months older than I am today. Three weeks earlier, some kid at Harvard had written the word "Micro-soft" for the first time.

William Douglas, whom Justice Stevens replaced, took the oath on April 17, 1939, three days after John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. My grandmother was nine. When she turned ten, the Japanese invaded her hometown.

Justice Douglas had replaced Louis Brandeis, who took office on June 5, 1916, less than three weeks after a couple guys named Sykes and Picot divvied up the Middle East, hopelessly unaware of what they were getting the world into. Later that year, my great-grandfather (from the other side) commanded the Third National Protection Army in Guangdong's fight for independence from Yuan Shikai. It may have been the only good fight he fought.

Justice Brandeis was the sixty-seventh justice of the Supreme Court. The woman who replaces Justice Stevens will be the one hundred and twelfth. Three guys; forty-five justices and ninety-four years on the bench between them. As a third-year in law school, that is a whole lot more opinions than I ever want to have to think about again, and those three wrote some pretty good ones.

But as a history major, as a student of the court and its country's cases and controversies, that is a whole lot more of the world than I can ever hope to live. I don't agree with life terms, but they sure make things interesting.