Photo by yark64/Flickr (Creative Commons)
What we think of when we think of Iowa? Farm fields near the Mississippi, May 2007
University of Iowa professor Stephen Bloom’s recent essay in The Atlantic on Iowa, the state that could determine the next president, didn’t go over well with everyone who read it.
Among these was KPCC’s OnCentral blog editor Kim Bui, a Vietnamese Iowan (yes, there are those), who objected especially to the state’s remaining residents being portrayed in the essay as “often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid…to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow.’ “
Kim’s response below to Bloom’s essay, first posted on her Linkage+ blog, takes in her unique Iowa experience as the child of immigrants, reflecting on “why it made so much sense for my parents to raise a family there – it’s akin to the Vietnamese sensibility.”
“Iowa is a good place to be from.”
That’s what I usually say when a Californian asks me how it was to grow up in Iowa.
“What do you mean?”
And here’s where it gets tricky. I just finished reading Stephen Bloom’s Atlantic article on Iowa and I understand parts of what he is saying. And I understand the backlash. So here’s my picture of Iowa, one of the state’s “exports,” as Bloom kindly called us.
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I’ve been to a lot of beautiful places — Switzerland, the Czech Republic, my homeland of Vietnam — but it is hard to beat the beauty of Iowa in that glorious two weeks between spring and summer, when the fields are starting to grow, the flowers are blooming and it’s too humid. The summer storms are starting to roll in and the hills look endless.
I grew up in Des Moines, far from a farm, far from rural Iowa. I’ve never been to a farm. I grew up in a suburb of a small, but teeming city. We had sushi (though not until late in my high school days) delicious Chinese, Vietnamese and country cooking. I would play in the woods behind my house daily. The green belt, which stretches through a large portion of Des Moines, was a large part of my childhood. We swung on vines, caught tadpoles and my father and I went on miles-long bike rides (memories of which I still cherish).
It is not a state without issues. Racism was part of my youth, and there is plenty of “nothing to do.” Meth and drugs is and was a huge problem. I was far removed from the farms, but the Des Moines Register brought me stories of farm subsidies and stories of poverty throughout the state.
In the second grade, I was called a “chink.” A boy, who lived down the street and well-known as a bully, turned around on the bus, and said it. Nothing else. Then he stared at me for about a minute, then turned around. When I worked at JCPenney’s in high school, I was asked to follow my mother’s friends around, because security was afraid they would try to steal – regardless of how I protested.
But I had friends who were Indian, white, black and other. I had gay friends. I had straight friends.
Many of my family’s Vietnamese friends were meatpackers. They lived on the East side of town and over time, I figured out my family and others who lived on the more wealthy west side were regarded with dislike. We had made it.
