This week's theme: Immigrants

All the talk in the news lately about immigrants got me thinking about my 
friend Peter Jen. I worked my way through college in a restaurant downtown 
at the Radisson Hotel and there was a Chinese immigrant named Peter Jen who 
worked there as a dish washer. He added -sen to his name to Americanize it 
and make it Jensen and joked that he was from the Swedish part of China.

Anyway, I don't think most people ever noticed Peter. He was just a Chinese 
immigrant working at a flunky job - so what? Well, being a goofy college kid 
at the time wanting to learn more about the world out there, I spent some 
time talking with Peter and got to know him pretty well.

He told me how when he was a kid, I think he said about 12, the Japanese 
invaded China during WWII. They evacuated all the rich kids from his town. 
He was from a very poor family and shouldn't have gotten to go along but 
some how he did. He said they managed to stay just one step ahead of the 
invading Japanese and were chased all the way across China. He said they 
were usually starving and would eat the leaves off of trees just to fill 
their stomachs with something just to feel as if they had eaten. One 
morning, when he awoke, he found the boy next to him was dead having passed 
away in the night from starvation.

Anyway, in the chaos after the war, he never got back home again but ended 
up in Peking/Beijing with the other kids and eventually even got to go to 
college and earned a Phd. in Biology. He had a wife with a child on the way 
when the communist revolution broke out. He ended up being thrown into a 
concentration camp. After several years he managed to escape and made it to 
Hong Kong and hid out and then moved on to Taiwan. He said the C.I.A. was 
looking for him and wanted him for propaganda purposes. He wasn't famous but 
he was a distinguished person being a college professor. He wrote a booklet 
for them entitled "My Escape From Hell" by Professor Peter Jen. He gave me a 
copy of it so I can assure you he wasn't making all this up.

Anyway, as a result he was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. Once here he 
found that none of his credentials as a professor were recognized here so he 
got the dishwasher job and went back to college and earned a masters degree 
in neuropathology and worked at the University of Minnesota Medical School 
as a neuropathologist during the day. A friend of mine met him there for 
lunch once so again I know he wasn't making that up either. He kept the 
night job as dishwasher I think just as his way to stay busy and deal with 
things. He asked us not to tell anybody where he worked at night.

Interestingly, he knew I collected old records and gave me my first Enrico 
Caruso 78 rpm record. A friend of mine wondered how somebody who had only 
been in this country for 15 years could come up with something like that.

He used to joke that he liked to speed when he drove and whenever he got 
pulled over he would look really scared and start yelling and screaming in 
Chinese and act like he didn't understand what the officer wanted - he joked 
they always let him go without a ticket. I'll have to remember to try that 
the next time I get pulled over :-)

Anyway, a few years later I talked to Peter again, it was after relations 
with China had been normalized under Jimmy Carter. He said it was safe for 
him to go home again and visit his wife and the daughter he had never met.

Now I realize not every immigrant is a biology professor or a 
neuropathologist but the dozen or so immigrants I've actually known over the 
years were all fine people who just wanted to get along in life like anyone 
else and weren't criminals or trouble makers or bad people.

My Dad once told me he thought immigrants actually made the best citizens 
because they were so happy to be here and out of the rat holes they escaped 
from that they were often more pro-America than the rest of us slobs who 
were born here and take it all for granted and my Dad would never have been 
accused of being a liberal, I can assure you of that.

I realize there are some bad apples that come in, the Mafia came in with the 
Italian immigrants a hundred years ago - but most Italian immigrants weren't 
Mafia. And I realize the dozen or so immigrants I've known doesn't 
constitute a very large sample. But no group is all good or all bad.

I realize we can't have the doors wide open or we'll be overrun, but it's 
not right to hate these people. They're just ordinary people like you and 
me. I don't think they're any different than our ancestors were when they 
came here.

Just sayin'  :-)