(A small digression.)

June 6, which ended few hours ago, is the 60th Anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. It’s also the 40th anniversary of my mother and I arriving in New York on an overnight flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I was twelve and half years old. My hand-luggage was my violin and a package of decorative display plates made of colorful butterfly wings arranged in geometric patterns, on which my mother had spent our last hyper-inflated Brazilian currency.

I had a buzz (!) haircut, knew a few phrases in English, and hadn’t seen my father in two years. He picked us up at Kennedy Airport – it may still have been called Idlewild – and we drove to Highland Park, NJ, about an hour away, in his blue 1963 Rambler American (which would later be known as “The Blue Box” by my friends when we got drivers’ licenses). I had never been on a four-lane highway, eaten potato chips, or had soft ice-cream. My total life-time hours of TV watching was less than ten hours, all of them in the week before departure, when we stayed with friends in the state capital, where there was TV reception. I would get to see the 1964 New York World’s Fair that my friends and I had read so much about. I would never see most of those friends again.

I thought about the above (and more) on the six hours of road today between Portland, OR and Lewiston, ID.

I will be spending Monday (June 7) on a 200 mile jet-boat trip up The Snake River that go to Deep Creek and Robinson’s Gulch, the sites, in 1887, of the worse massacre of Chinese in American history. (I mentioned, in one of the early entries, that this was going to be a highlight of my trip and why.) Those thirty-some miners came to America, leaving their families behind, much in the same way as my father had done, and for the same reason: to make a better life for their loved ones at enormous personal sacrifice. The difference is that he had the probability that his family would eventually be able to join him, whereas those miners did not. Instead, they died a violent and horrific death far from home and without their families ever knowing what befell them. They also received no justice from the system then and to this date, given the neglect and subsequent cover-up of the history of this heinous act. There is not even a historical marker at the site.

I was going to write that it’s debatable whether my parents’ ostensible reason for immigrating to the United States -- to give me, their only one child, a better future – was successful or not. Compared to the fate of those miners, it was. And it’s worth celebrating one and memorializing the other.