Refugee's First Thanksgiving at ECDC 2018

The Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) held its annual Thanksgiving dinner for newly-arrived refugees to America.

Score of volunteers from Arlington and ECDC staff served up a festive meal for the immigrants from many quarters of the globe. Attendees were from Afghanistan, Central and South America, East and West Africa, Syria, and other distressed spots around the globe.

It was a particularly poignant event in light of the severe restrictions on asylum that have been put in place by the current US administration.

The event points out the attraction of the Columbia Pike corridor to people coming to our community hoping for a better life, and to the welcoming supportive environment provided here.

Photography by Lara Ajami.

Maria "Pete" Durgan

"Next door is the house I grew up in, and where I live today is the house my grandparents built. I grew up here on this block, went to school in Arlington, then when I was twenty-one, moved to Richmond, got married, came back briefly, got settled, but couldn't afford to live in Arlington.  We moved to Alexandria, rented there and then moved South Alexandria, and lived there for a long time and then moved to Herndon when my ex got transferred there. And then we split up, and I moved back here.

My grandfather was one of thirteen kids in a small town in Mexico. His father was the town doctor and his mother was the town nurse. A tuberculosis epidemic hit the town and both of them died. Their oldest daughter was the town pharmacist and she had to figure out what to do with all these kids. My grandfather had a talent for music and so they said, “all right, you can go to the conservatory in Mexico City,” and they shipped him off there. He roomed with my grandmother's family, got a room there; that's how they met.

He was young and dumb, in school, and playing in a bar, and who walks into the bar, but this up-and-coming political figure named Pancho Villa. Pancho Villa said, "Hey you know, I'm getting ready to go on a stump tour. I need a band to play before I'm doing my speaking to gather people around. I like these guys… Hey y'all wanna be in my band?" They went, "Yeah, sure." I can honestly say my grandfather was in Pancho Villa's band. He was his clarinet player.

They played concert band stuff, popular music of the early 1900s. He immigrated to D.C. in 1925, so I'm a little unclear about when he exactly he came over from Mexico. He left Pancho Villa in the midst of some dispute involving Federales on a train. He threw his hands up in the air and said “I'm outta here!” He then came across the border to Texas and played in pickup circus bands and traveled around a bunch. Apparently he was really, really, good, and somehow he got into the US Army band in Houston. He was good enough in the Army band that he got recruited to play in Pershing’s Own, the main US Army Band, based here at Fort Meyer. At that time it was a cavalry band so you played while you were riding a horse.

So he moved here, bought this little plot of land near the fort, went back to Mexico and got his wife, and built this house. She used to say, "I dug the foundation of this house with a shovel and a level." They built the house using scraps because they didn't have any money. There's some wood downstairs that came from a barn over at the Lee Mansion. They were tearing down Robert E. Lee’s old barn, so he got the good wood, brought it back and used it to build part of their house. There was also an embassy downtown that was being torn down, so he and a bunch of buddies went over there and got some bricks. The house is almost a hundred years old now. This is where he and my grandmother lived. They had one kid, my dad, and he grew up here. When he got married, they bought the lot next door and my father and my grandfather refurbished it. After my mom and dad got married, they moved in, and that's where I grew up.

My mom's originally from DC. They got married in 1953 at Saint Dominic's Church in DC. Because my father was Mexican they couldn't get married in Virginia at the time, because it would have been race mixing. The law against race mixing didn’t apply just to African Americans, but to anybody who wasn't fully white. Saint Dominic's was her church, so that's where they would have been married anyway.

The population in the neighborhood was white, lower class, blue collar. Nobody had a lot of money. Lots of Army people who were stationed at Fort Myer were nearby, and government workers, of course. When I was growing up, this area was mostly tiny little houses. Our house next door was considered a big house, but it's not that big by today's standards. Most of them were built on stilts, so people would dig them out and add the basements. Most of them are gone, the only ones that remain have been spiffed up. My niece bought the house up the street and that one is a nice little odd house.

My mom is very involved with Catholic church. She is one of the main fixtures at Saint Thomas Moore church. I went to Saint Thomas Moore Elementary School and to Bishop O'Connell for high school. Those schools were barely integrated at the time. I think there were two female black kids and one male black kid at Saint Thomas Moore.

The Butler Homes neighborhood near us was a black neighborhood. And of course Green Valley was black. South Rolfe Street and all the streets down by Lady Queen of Peace were a black neighborhood. People really didn't mix back then. My brothers had a friend who was black and he'd ride his bike over, and he was asked not come down the street. People weren't real kind about some things.

It took a long time though for things to change. There were no Latinos around here. It's funny. I was raised like a white kid and I felt like I was a white kid, but looking back on it when I got older, I realized some of the things that I didn't understand might have been related to the fact that I was a dark-skinned kid. I was just kind of ignored in school and that kind of stuff, and caught a little more flack from the teachers than some of the other people. Not terrible flack but it was there. Not with my schoolmates, they never were a problem. It was the older generation.

My grandparents had a piano, it sat right in the living room and my grandfather used to play hymns on it all the time. He used to write hymns, he was mega-religious. He and my grandmother were fixtures at Fort Myer Chapel. They were Mama and Papa Flores, everybody knew them, and as each of them died, they gave them this wonderful Army Band send off. It was really sweet. When my grandfather died they had a cello and a string quartet playing. It was beautiful.

My grandfather played music until he lost some teeth and he couldn't play anymore, and then he retired. After that, he worked for a while at the airport and fixed airplanes; he was very mechanical. I remember my grandmother working in the laundry over at Fort Myer. She was a very dark woman and worked in the laundry. She spoke English but it was not great, it was very heavily-accented English. I realize now it was a step down for her because she had been a teacher in Mexico. She came up here and couldn't get work except at the laundry because of her language skills.

I came to music through the family I guess. Because of my grandfather, and my dad played clarinet and sax, too. He was very proud of his years in the marching band at Texas A&M University. I learned piano when I was a kid, but eventually lost interest in it. I picked up bass in my thirties because my ex played guitar, and my brother Joe played guitar. We had this family band and used to practice over at my house. At the time there weren't many women bass players. I'm not saying it was terrible, but there were some awkward things. I always was treated well in my groups, but if you were working with a sound guy, you were automatically dismissed. I used to have to take men with me into the music stores because nobody would wait on me. I am not kidding. Roll's Music in Falls Church was dreadful. I’d go and wander around and try to find somebody to help me with something.

Our family has also been doing a big Memorial Day picnic for years. Fifty-three years ago my mother got to be friends with some nuns at Saint Thomas Moore Cathedral and decided she wanted to throw a picnic for them. It was really nice, and next year, they did it again. This time she invited her family and her family is huge, so it just kind of grew as time went on. As we kids started playing music, we'd bring our bands and play at the picnic and that was fun. I guess what happened is when you get older you get more friends, and your friends come and then your friends have kids, and then your friends’ kids come and then your relatives, too. I have thirty-two first cousins and they all got married and have kids, and then they all come every year. My mother's church friends come and of course the priest at Saint Thomas Moore would come and it just got bigger and bigger. On perfect weather days, we have something like two hundred and fifty people. People think of it as a family reunion but it's more than just the Flores and Gambino folks. It's a community tradition.

My mother's maiden name is Gambino. My grandfather who is Italian came here in around the turn of the last century. He was from a town east of Naples. The Irish side, my grandmother's side, probably came over about the same time. They were from Donegal, Ireland. My Italian grandfather married a person who is of Scotch-English descent in West Virginia. I had an aunt Francis Gambino, who did a genealogy search of that side of the family and traced us back to Jamestown or Yorktown. She joined the Daughters of the American Revolution.

What's interesting, is they said, "Don't trace your Irish relatives," because they didn't want us to know why they came over. It was probably because of the potato famine. They were probably potato pickers, which is fine, everybody does what they have to do to better for themselves. But this cousin of my mother’s did a further genealogy search and found that the people who came over from England were likely kids picked off the street, thrown on a ship, and sent out of England just to get them off the streets. Apparently they just picked people up off the street back then if you were a vagrant, threw you on a ship, and there you go. The Brits were not very kind people.

I’ve seen changes in the neighborhood over the years. There’s more affluence. It’s much more diverse. When I was growing up, there was only one other family in our church who was of Latino descent. It was a Mexican family called the Garcia's; they're still around. Mike Garcia, the insurance guy who has a business on the Pike, Mike on the Pike. There was no Latino community when we were growing up. In the 1960’s it was considered un-American for your children to speak any language other than English, and so we grew up not knowing Spanish, purposely not knowing Spanish. It was real typical child rearing practice, where parents wanted their kids to speak English and not the mother tongue. But we’d eat the food. Oh my God yes. I grew up eating tortillas and tamales and my grandmother had such a knack for spices. Oh man, she was good. Her mole, chicken mole. I became a vegetarian but I still think about her chicken mole. My dad used to take my grandparents to Manual Pena's Spanish store in DC. That was the only place around where you could get masa. You needed masa if you wanted to make your tortillas or tamales, because you couldn't buy tortillas anywhere, there weren’t even Doritos back in the day.

I really can't put a time on when I noticed more people coming into the area. I have to admit, I just loved it. Before I went to Richmond for college, after high school, I had some friends who were Ecuadorian. We used to hang out at parties and stuff. And so I got kind of into a circle of Latino friends.

I think the first big wave of immigration happened in the mid ‘70’s while I was in Richmond in school, but it must have begun before, because one of the reasons I realized it was time to leave Richmond was when I heard a Spanish accent on the bus and got this huge wave of nostalgia and knew it was time to leave. They had no Latinos in Richmond, you were either white or black, and here you already had more diversity. Honestly I might have been blind to it because it was just happening, and it was cool. You know how you sort of stuff happens and you don't even think about it?

I was here when the Vietnamese wave came through. I used to go to Clarendon all the time. MyAn Fabrics was one of my favorite hangs. The nice ladies helping you with your fabrics and then the guys in the back playing pool.

I fully retired in April. I worked in health care. I worked at MCV in Richmond for a couple of years. Later I went to work for G.W. Hospital, and worked there for fourteen years as Director of the Medical Staff office. I did that for a long time, then freelanced for a little while and then I got offered a job at MMG in Rockville, Maryland. I commuted to Rockville for 15 years. Right now I'm with a six piece band called The Curbfeelers that plays soul and blues. It’s lots of fun. We play at the Celtic House on the Pike about once a month. I also play in this band called NovaZanz, which is a mix of everything from country to standards.

I am currently the Penrose Neighborhood Association president. Mostly that involves keeping up with Arlington County government stuff, keeping the neighbors informed. Trying to make sure people get issues resolved..

Right now we have a bike path we’re working on. That's how I got involved, because I wanted to see the plans for the bike path. After much back and forth, they finally started building it and it should be open soon. There were also some issues related to a group house where the residents were not behaving properly, and it turns out that the people who were running the group house were not screening their people really well. They were sending people with behavior issues and it was scaring the neighbors. That got resolved. I was also on the Career Center working group which was put together to come up with some guidelines and vision to manage what we do with the site. We have the Career Center which has bunches of different programs in it. There's also the community high school, the Fenwick building, and Patrick Henry Elementary School, which is going to be superseded by Fleet School when it opens. A Montessori program is going to move into the Patrick Henry building. There's lots of concern about parking, because there are people in Arlington who think nobody should ever own a car. I don't think that's too much of an exaggeration. They don't want any parking onsite there, they think people should just not drive cars there, even if it's an option school where people from North Arlington would send their kids over. At the same time they're talking about removing residential parking restrictions. I'm trying to keep abreast of all that.

The main thing is in the short term, they told us we cannot remove any buildings, but in the long term they said, if you want to really build a full-service high school, you have to get rid of Patrick Henry, consider getting rid of Fenwick, and then consider what you want to put on the site. It was a very interesting and very frustrating process. On the one hand, you had a lot of meetings and a lot of back and forth and a lot of consensus building, but you were doing it in a vacuum of information. I think that really goes back to the School Board not really thinking things through in a long term way. I went into it with an open mind, thinking I'm not going to be biased in all this, I'm going to represent Penrose, I'm not going to represent myself. We have a PhD person in our association, Christine Brittle, who works in with surveys and focus groups professionally. She helped us survey the community. We got a fairly decent response, so I had some guidelines to use. I represented what we learned.

The School Board went back and forth regarding the Career Center site about whether they wanted a neighborhood school there or whether they want an option school. It's not big enough for a neighborhood school because you don't have room for all the field space that you would require. At one point they were talking about it being a neighborhood school but it wasn't going to have quite a few of the facilities that at Wakefield, Yorktown and Washington and Lee have. No soccer field, football field, football stadium, pool. So back and forth, back and forth. As it stands now, the School Board still doesn't know what kind of curriculum they're going to put in there. We told them they can't put a neighborhood school there without appropriate facilities. In the far future, they need to raze the Patrick Henry building so that they have enough space for fields and the stuff that you need to have an equitable kind of high school experience. Even if it's a STEAM school, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math, you can't short those kids on basic high school things. Those programs save kids in school, because if you're just doing academics all the time, sometimes people just burn out. You have to be equitable. There was a lot of north versus South Arlington kinds of feelings raised about why would you consider building a neighborhood school in South Arlington that has vastly inferior facilities.

I meet and work with the other civic associations along the Pike. We have a monthly meeting called Pike Presidents Group and we meet at the CPRO (Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization) and keep each other up to speed on what's going on. It’s one of the best perks I get out of being president, is I get to go to that meeting. Adam Henderson from Douglas Park chairs it and he's an awesome leader.

We look at things like transportation up and down the Pike. There's always been concern on the Pike about transportation. Because the streetcar got nixed, we were promised a rapid bus transit, which never materialized. There's a lot of frustration with some construction that's going on and contractors who aren't following regulations and working all night and not being done by the time they're supposed to be done, causing traffic jams and that kind of thing. We learn about the developments, making sure we're all up to speed on the Harris Teeter building. They call it The Centro now.  It’s going to be a beautiful Harris Teeter with apartments up above and residential and it's going to have this cool little park in the front.  I made sure, as best I could, that people knew what the plans were.

CPRO is doing some interesting things all on the Pike, like the banner program on the western Pike, and the Farmers Market up at Arlington Mill. They keep us up to speed on stuff that they're doing. They're supposed to be an economic development assessment done of the western Pike to try to make it more vital. It's really odd because on the one hand, I love the diversity and the people who are there. I call them the Little Brown People on the Pike. I'm one of the little brown people on the Pike, and I love them and I want them to stay. But on the other hand, economic development means they're probably all going to be priced out. So I'm in the middle. I can see the need to spiff things up, but on the other hand, really? Do we really want to do that?

I did a booth at the County Fair for Penrose and Arlington Heights, we try to boost membership and sell our lovely “Proud To Be From South Arlington” T-shirts. It was fun, but we heard that realtors steer people away from South Arlington by telling them that the schools in South Arlington are inferior, which pissed us off. Some people seem to think that being around kids that have English as a second language is going to drag their kids down. Your kids will be fine. And they'll help the kids learn. We know people who are coming here and going “that's the best kind of education for my kids.” Schools are really good here. Our local schools would be high-end schools in probably 95% of the country. But when you talk to people from North Arlington, there's this perception that they're inferior and realtors steer people away. Of course you know if you buy in North Arlington, you're going to pay 100,000 dollars or more than you would if you bought the same house in South Arlington. So the realtors make more money that way. We have our 1.5 million dollar mini-mansions here in Penrose too, they happen. People have a right to do what they want to do with their property that they buy. The people I've met who live in those places are great people who made choices related to the neighborhood and they like it here.

People who move to South Arlington know what they're getting. I've heard from people who've moved around here who have kids. They want their kids to have the experience of all the ethnicities in their schools. They like the fact that you're in this kind of big ole melting pot of all kinds of people and it's cool that we all get together and hang out the way that we do. You can be in an apartment building and you can have an Ethiopian family next to a family from Honduras next to people from Thailand, et cetera, et cetera. And that's unique and cool and so people who move here, they like it, they want it."

Photography and interview by Lloyd Wolf.

Larry Yungk

Larry Yungk was flipping through the pages of the Living Diversity book. “This wall reminds me of a wall that was in our neighborhood. I think it was 1998, when I was still relatively new in the neighborhood and got roped in to join the Alcova Heights Civic Association (AHCA). My neighbor Walter Green and I were taking pictures for our revised AHCA Neighborhood Conservation Plan. The Plan is kind of a blueprint for neighborhoods to use with the County to address community concerns and make improvements. One problem was that there was only one block left on Columbia Pike with no sidewalk, and it was in our neighborhood. It was a dangerous spot where pedestrians had to step into a busy street. On the day we took pictures, a kid came down the sidewalk bouncing a basketball and stepped into the street and Walter got the shot—with a bus looming in the background.

“A year later I was the President of the AHCA. We presented our plan at a County meeting and we included the photo with a proposal for the sidewalk and wall for this block. (We did this as a PowerPoint back when few people still knew what that was!) And we got the funds to build the sidewalk.”

The Alcova name comes from the Alcova House, a historic property in the neighborhood.  Alcova stands for (Al)exandria (Co)unty, (V)irgini(a), Larry explains. “The Alcova Heights Association back then worked with the Country to get the funding that built a playground, pavilions, bridges and made other upgrades in Alcova Heights Park. All those upgrades in the park benefited us and others in South Arlington. There was one last unpaved street in Alcova Heights and we got that fixed too. It’s a lot of work to put the plan together and create your wish-list, but it was worth it.”

“Arlington is one of the very few places in the country that has this system—money raised by a county tax that neighborhood associations can apply for to use to fund ideas to improve their communities. I think the fund has ten to twelve million dollars in it. The bottom line is that except for the final County approval, it is all in the hands of the neighborhoods. Someone asked me if it actually works. You let citizens plan what happens next in your neighborhoods? Yes, I said. You do and it works.”

“My first Arlington apartment was at Fillmore Gardens near the Career Center in 1988,” Larry said. “I had lived in a lot of places—Maryland, Northeast DC, Southeast, Northwest DC, Takoma, Beltsville and even Annapolis. But it was here that I met my partner, Dang in 1991. It turned out Dang lived in a condo right on the other side of the Pike on Walter Reed. We both took the bus a lot and Dang knew everyone on his commute as he went into DC for work for years. It was so convenient and easy biking (even though I had to carry my bike up 3 floors to my apartment). We went out for a couple of years and eventually decided we should buy a place together. DC was expensive and we both liked South Arlington, so that is where we wanted to be.

We looked around and eventually put a bid on a house in Alcova Heights but didn’t get it. The day after, Dang drove around to look at the house one last time. On the next street, he saw people going into a house, one of whom he knew was a realtor. He stopped and asked the realtor, and learned the house was about to be put up for sale. It was owned by the original owners, who had been there since 1941—it still had the original stove (which we kept for a long time). Later that day, we came back to look at the inside of the house. Then we went into the backyard and it stretched on forever. We asked the realtor, ‘Is this all part of the house?’ The yard was 250 feet deep, which as it turns out is not that unusual for Alcova where some yards are twice as deep!

The Middletons, who we bought it from, were vegetable gardeners and they had fruit trees. And our neighbors knew so much [about gardening]. When things started growing around our garage after we moved in---it looked like a bush---we asked the neighbor Doug, ‘what is this?’ He said it was fig! When we moved in, I knew a little about gardening, and Dang, almost nothing. Over the next 25 years, Dang became an expert gardener, and now the yard has gardens everywhere, and we have even been on several garden tours.” 

Our neighbor at the time was Doug True. He was in his 80’s and was the first to welcome us. That was a big relief to us as a same-sex couple. And we learned so much about the history of the area from Doug. In his backyard he had a great red oak, 60 feet high planted by his grandfather. The land our house was on was once owned by Doug, and he sold it to the Middletons. He told us that in the 1930’s Arlington streets were renamed to the alphabetical and number system we have now (which is why streets like 6^th street have so many separate parts!) The National Foreign Affairs Training Center is located behind our house in an area called Arlington Hall. During WWII, Arlington Hall used to be an army base and there they did the code breaking during WWII—the Japanese code was broken there. Doug said, when they put roads in—like Quincy and 6^th (my street) they made them extra wide so Army vehicles could go on them. There were once guards who patrolled the perimeter, which was just outside our backyard.

“In the 1990s, there were still so many of the original owners. Now most of those original neighbors are gone. Mrs. Middleton was 84 when she sold to us. When we moved here in the 1990s there were very few families with young kids. Then when they had kids they moved out. We do have houses now where the owners’ kids have moved in with their families. Now in the last two years dozens of houses have sold and it seems everyone has kids!

“Maybe it was a Southern thing, not walking through front yards—but we pushed for 15 years to have sidewalks put in on many of our streets. On many of our streets they only got put in over the last 10 years or so. Now so many people are out walking, and kids riding their bikes. I think the sidewalks made us a more family friendly place. Also, people got fed up commuting from far suburbs and I think younger people are happy with the smaller houses here. Some were cottages, some hunting shacks converted into houses. For a few years, many folks were tearing them down and building big but now people are just adding additions to the old houses. The neighborhood is younger, youthful, noisier. Someone told me your neighborhood is halfway between Manhattan and Mayberry.

So the battle continues—trying to keep both people’s visions happy. In the Arlington “Urban Village” idea the County promotes, I think the needle is more toward Manhattan.  Our neighborhood has changed from blue to white collars. I remember when we were buying, our realtor tried to reassure us by saying, “The area between Route 50 and Columbia Pike is really Central Arlington and not South Arlington.”  But it is South Arlington. And what we have liked here is the diversity that we found on the Pike and in the neighborhoods, which is different than you find in most of North Arlington.”

When I came to DC in 1980 it was a different. I originally came to go to law school, but dropped out of and began to work with refugees. In 1987 I started with the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and retired as senior resettlement officer in Nov 2017. I have known The Pike since the early 80’s when I did resettlement work and you could find affordable housing for refugees here, in places like Culmore, PG County, and even in neighborhoods in DC that were then cheap, like Adams Morgan. Most refugees liked living near bus lines, ethnic stores, and restaurants. There were many Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian refugees in Arlington but many later moved farther out as they wanted to be in houses, more suburban. Others, like the Ethiopians, seemed to like the urban feel of The Pike. Many came here from cities in Ethiopia and Eritrea. We still see Ethiopians and other Africans now but it’s not as many as in the 80’s. The immigrants here now are more Latino. But there are also others like Mongolians — most people don’t know, but Arlington has the largest concentration of Mongolians in the US.  Some refugees are still here in Alcova, I know a Cambodian family who have been here since the 80’s.

“There is another kind of diversity here with three couples on our street and more in the neighborhood from the LGBT community. It has always been a very welcoming neighborhood.   Not just me, but other LGBT folks have been officers in our Association.  Anytime you move, you take a chance on being accepted, but being in Arlington, you know it would work. Dang is Thai and had a friend who lived in the neighborhood who was a Lao refugee so that was also a plus for us.

““Overall, Alcova is a mostly white neighborhood but there is still diversity. There are several African American families here and Indian American families too.  We also have many Latinos living here. Sometimes you see plants in front yards and wonder what’s that? Later you learn they are things like Asian pears, curry plants, or Japanese persimmons.

Not everyone in Alcova Heights owns their home.  There are a lot of rental houses where you see Latinos and others living in groups trying to make it in the US. Later you see many of these folks moving from rentals into owning their own houses.  

Then there is a diversity of the kinds of jobs people have. There are many military people here, which is not at all like where I grew up in Ohio. We have people working in the private sector, government, for museums, in the Foreign Service, musicians, and stay at home parents - all living side-by-side.  We’ve had an award-winning AP journalist, a cartoonist, and a cellist who plays at the Kennedy Center Opera. There is diversity in ages as well, although the neighborhood is definitely getting younger.

“One thing that’s my favorite is nature and how much of it we still have here. So you see deer walking down the alleys—yeah we still have alleys. We see herons, owls, and this year the most Monarch butterflies ever! We have foxes and ducks live in the park in the spring. (It’s one of the reasons we do a neighborhood park clean up each year.) The only thing we haven’t seen yet is a bear. I’d love to see one but not in my backyard! Dang and I love nature. We just sit in our backyard and listen to the birds. We have more nature than you’d ever expect being this close to the city.

“One of the things I loved most while Il lived here was learning photography, the old-fashioned film kind, at the Career Center. I was part of the Adult Learning group who met there for 15 years. It was not just the photography, but I made a lot of friends there – and it was a great break from the usual work. Unfortunately, this year the photo class had to be disbanded as the Career Center had to use the space for other things. Also, we lost the oldest and most beloved classmate this year. I still feel those losses.”

“Now we are retired, and are planning to move to Cincinnati. My parents live there and now need more help. Also, this is an expensive area for retirees. We will miss a lot of the benefits of living in Arlington. Dang loves the convenience of Columbia Pike and public transit so when we decided to move to Ohio it has been hard to find the right place as it is so different from here. When I showed him Route 4 there he thought it was like the Pike. And then I took him to see the huge Jungle Jim’s grocery—you know Dang is a chef. Once, he saw all that international food he finally felt he could survive even in Cincinnati.”

Interview by Sushmita Mazumdar of Studio Pause. Photography by Lloyd Wolf.