You Can’t Be Serious(81)
5?I’m not making this up!
6?Yes, we’ll probably do koozies for the wedding reception.
CHAPTER NINETEEN HAVE A HEART
There was no such thing as a typical day in the Office of Public Engagement. It’s sort of like how no two subway rides are alike. Some mornings the Duke Ellington School jazz musicians you expect to see on the Red Line platform are replaced by an old, weathered Chinese man playing a jinghu, and let me tell you that dude is a real bummer if you’re hungover. Working as the president’s liaison to different constituency groups was kind of like having a real-life version of the giant magnet that Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson talk about in the crossover episode of Family Guy. When the White House turned it on, it could bring everything in its vicinity together. In politics, Peter Griffin’s giant magnet is called convening power—if OPE invited people to a meeting, they’d usually show up.
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Beyond the MILF memo, my time in government included meetings with health care advocates, conversations with aviation industry representatives, and summits with climate change activists. Our portfolio areas sometimes overlapped, like when President Obama hosted Chinese president Hu Jintao. As the Asian American and Pacific Islander liaison, I was to oversee a portion of the State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn. As the arts liaison, I had the honor of helping facilitate the official gift that Obama would give his guest.
For the latter, Tina suggested POTUS commission a painting by Chicago-based Chinese American artists the Zhou Brothers. Each week, I’d join a series of conference calls between the State Department, artists, and the national security team. Huddled around a packed conference table in the Situation Room, my small portion of the meetings—led by my friend Ben Rhodes (then a deputy national security advisor)—was to update the entire team on the progress of the gift. “The color red is auspicious to the Chinese, so expect there to be lots of red tones,” I’d say. “Eight and six are considered lucky numbers. The artists are going to paint on a canvas that’s eighty-six inches wide and sixty-eight inches high.”
What I enjoyed most about these meetings was that they allowed me to hear what people I admired had to say. The highlight was usually Samantha Power, (then the National Security Council Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights), who in the case of Obama’s gift coyly vented what I assumed were issues stemming from her own portfolio, “A painting eighty-six inches wide, wow. Eighty-six. Eighty-six… Eighty-six Uighurs who could be freed if we raised the issue with President Hu…”
The Zhou Brothers’ painting was being sent from Chicago and was set to arrive at the White House the same evening as the Chinese charter carrying President Hu’s gift for Obama from Beijing. (We were told this would be a bronze statue of President Lincoln, created by Chinese artist Yuan Xikun.) Ice and snow led to delays in travel. Both gifts were finally cleared into the complex around 3 a.m. Standing with Secret Service agents at a door adjaccent to the South Portico when the truck finally pulled up, the frigid air slapped my face awake.
“We’re going to take the crates to screen further. Do you want to wait until that’s done to see everything out of the boxes?” an agent asked.
“No, I’m good now that it’s all here. I know what our painting looks like, and I’ve seen statues of Lincoln before.” I hailed a cab home and went to bed.
The morning after the gift exchange, word around the office was that President Obama had prominently displayed the Lincoln statue on a pedestal outside the Oval, so that it was visible to the visiting delegation. I was looped into a quippy email chain of AAPI staffers: “Kal, have you seen the bust of Lincoln?”
I had quickly peeked at it from the back, in passing, but hadn’t gotten too close a glance yet. My friend Gary Lee wrote, “What’s with Lincoln’s eyes?” With mild concern that there may have been some damage to the statue during the unboxing that I missed, I surreptitiously walked by the Oval to get a closer look. No obvious signs that the statue had been dropped. I leaned in. Lincoln’s eyes looked… how do I say this correctly, his eyes looked… like they belonged less to President Lincoln and more to… President Hu? “Holy shit, they gave Lincoln Asian eyes.”
Power move, President Hu. Power. Move.
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Aside from dealing with statues and giant magnets, there were touching issues that were brought to our attention, sometimes more discreetly. One morning I received a joint letter from forty-three members of the House and six senators, asking that—as the president’s liaison to the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities—I encourage POTUS to take action on the issue of two Sikh Americans who were being denied the ability to serve in the military.
Army rules dictated that turbans and beards were prohibited, effectively preventing Sikhs from serving for decades, but when Tejdeep Singh Rattan and Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi enlisted, they were assured by their recruiters that their articles of faith would not be a hindrance to service. Both men trusted the process and completed four years of schooling, which the army paid for. When they showed up for active duty, however, they were promptly told to remove their turbans and cut their beards and hair. If they refused, they couldn’t serve and would have to pay back the army for the cost of school.