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

One day Sally Webb called me with a plea: Helber, thanks to her good grades, had been invited to apply to the National Honor Society. But she’d hit a wall with the application, which was due the next day. No one was available to help—would I?

Helber had to write essays detailing the “leadership experiences” and “qualities of character” that qualified her for membership, a task as foreign as writing a Greek ode. The Karens are famously reticent and self-effacing, even as Southeast Asians go. “I have often heard a veteran school-teacher remark that the Karen never puts his best foot foremost,” the missionary and ethnographer Harry Ignatius Marshall wrote 87 years ago. He credited this to a habit of “concealment” that goes with living among more powerful, “volatile” peoples like the Burmans.

What about all the interpreting, the P-Patch and the doctors’ offices, and the waiting on hold to reach the right officials? Peddling food to help support your family in the refugee camp? Coming to a new land and helping so many others find their way? Helber stared blankly. These are things you do, not things you brag about. But okay, whatever it takes. She started writing.

It was getting late in the little apartment off Tukwila International Boulevard. P’lae Say rolled out the mat and eight-year-old Shel Ster curled up in a fleece blanket. On the TV, grinning Japanese fishermen and diners held up marine prizes in a hectic montage. “You know what Japanese eat?” Helber asked. “Fish that’s not”—she blanked on a word—“burned.”

Raw, I said. Not cooked. She filed the term away and grimaced. “Uck, full of worms. You eat that?”

A Korean chanteuse came on the screen, crooning a torchy tune. “I like singing, every kind of song,” said Helber.

I asked if she played a musical instrument. No, she said, adding, as she does at every such question, “I want to learn.” She’d chosen art instead of music at school this year, she said, pointing to a smoothly rendered pencil portrait of a horse tacked on the wall. But they’d sung a song at school that eluded her, and she’d hummed along. Did I know it? “Ohsay can you seee….”

That’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I explained. The national anthem. Almost 200 years old. She gasped—so much older, and younger, than the Karens’ national history, which is ancient though their political nationhood is still, at most, embryonic.

“Star spangle… Write it down,” she said, fishing for a pen. I did my best, forgetting “broad stripes and bright stars.” She watched and mouthed the words and asked about those she didn’t understand. “’O’er…is that ‘our’?”

It’s short for “over.”

“Okay, let’s sing it.” I had not sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” without the cover of a stadium crowd in 21 years, not since I held my sleepy five-year-old daughter atop a stack of hay bales in Maine and watched small-town fireworks burst over the fields. Helber and I started weakly but hit our stride by the time dawn’s early light broke. “Sing it again,” Helber insisted.

“They love to sing and do not grow weary of it, however late the hour,” old Reverend Harry Ignatius Marshall wrote of the Karen people. “One more time?” Helber cajoled, and we sang the tune that drives tuneless Americans crazy again, and again, until we’d sung it as well we could hope to and Helber had the music and the words—most of them, anyway—down. And I realized: Helber and her family weren’t the only ones coming to America. I was, too.