Coming to America

In a rundown refugee apartment complex a new world city is taking shape, and one teenage girl is at the center of it.

By Eric Scigliano

Photo: Gregg Snodgrass

THE APARTMENT COMPLEX stands just off a stretch of Highway 99 that used to be the not-so-happy hunting ground of prostitutes, crack peddlers, and the Green River Killer. Back then this road was Pacific Highway South. Now it’s called Tukwila International Boulevard, a name as apt as it is grandiose.

From the outside, the complex doesn’t look much different from any other 1978-vintage motel-style apartments on any airport strip outside any American city: A stark L of ridged three-story boxes. Dented beige aluminum siding. A wide parking lot. A chain-link fence, topped with razor wire.

Around the lot, suspended concrete steps lead to stripped-down one- and two-bedroom units, plain rooms with white walls, popcorn ceilings, beige and brown carpets, and stick-thin mahogany trim. In one of those units lives a teenager named Helber Moo.

Helber (pronounced helba ) is almost 17, but she could pass for 13. She is a little over five feet tall, sturdily built in the way of her people. Her hair is dark and wavy; she ties it in a loose ponytail. She dresses in standard teenage casual: jeans, jerseys, sweatpants, sweatshirts. She wears small crystal studs in her ears. She could disappear in a crowd, save for one feature: her smile, which breaks wide as a sunrise across her broad face.

Until two years ago, the only world Helber knew was the Mae La refugee camp where she was born, just across the Thai border from her family’s homeland in Burma. Now she lives in a two-bedroom flat in the apartments off International Boulevard with her father, Peh Bu, her mother, P’lae Say (pronounced pla say), and her two younger brothers. The living room where they spend most of their time at home is only half-filled with furniture: a worn couch, two chairs, and two coffee tables, one bearing a framed family photo and a small ceramic nativity figurine, the other medicine bottles and a sewing machine P’lae Say is learning to use. A picture-tube television is left on with the volume low, tuned sometimes to wrestling or cartoons, often to a channel that shows news, cooking, and other programs from various Asian countries. People sit as often on the floor as on the couch, and a brightly patterned grass mat is rolled out for children or the infants of visiting friends to sleep on.

On the wall, amid children’s drawings and family photos printed on office paper, hangs a hand-drawn flag with red, white, and blue bands and a red sun rising over a blue sea. The same flag appears in a photomontage with the inscription Kawthoolei —“land without evil,” the homeland of the Karens, Helber’s people. Framed certificates honor Helber Moo for unspecified contributions to Tukwila’s Foster High School and for first place in scriptural recitation at the Seattle Karen Community Church. The last is inscribed to “Halibut Moo.”

Growing up in the camp, Helber had heard tales of other worlds—of the land to the north, Mongolia they say, where her people dwelt in ancient times. Of the great river the Karens followed south until they reached vast, fertile plains, where they dwelt until “the Burmese”—ethnic Burmans, in the anthropological argot—came and drove them into the hills and forests. Of the peaceful village of Kwae Bu, where the soil was rich and the fish plentiful and her parents lived until the soldiers came. And of a land called America, across the sea, where the Baptist missionaries, who brought her people their schools and hymns and Bible, came from.

Next: What life was like in the refugee camp.

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Published: July 2009