Mark Nigro

MR. LIN FROM THE CHINESE TAKEOUT I don't know how many hours Mr. Lin works in a day. And I can't remember exactly how many daughters he and Mrs. Lin have. But I do know that for years, maybe 30 years, as I've stopped down at his takeout, the last real business in the empty strip plaza, he has been there, over the burners, moving like the wind. Mrs. Lin has been beside him, synchronized, each of them cooking, feeding my family and some evenings it seems like half of our town. Hours on end, years on end, growing gray in our service. With the girls at a table by the window in the front. Coloring and drawing when they were younger, pouring over their homework when they were older, hopping up to run the cash register or take an order. Remembering the names of everyone in town, addressing us all as Mr. So and So or Mrs. So and So. Happy family. That's always what I order. Happy family. And that is what they are. A happy family. In the land of the free. One of the best personifications of the American dream I've ever seen in my life. For years, it seemed like if it wasn't a Lin girl who was the valedictorian up at the school it was a Medina boy from out on the farm. The two best families in town were the two whose parents spoke the worst English. We went to Lin graduation parties, we cheered as they played soccer, we heard reports back from college, we kept the secret when one was dating a boy from a couple of towns over. We wondered at how Mr. and Mrs. Lin could work so hard. We wondered how they could keep it up with the girls almost all grown. And we love them. They are good people. A good family. Wonderful daughters, and a mother and father who were best judged, like Jesus said, by the fruits they bore -- the girls they raised, the business they ran and the community they served. Until today. In the brilliant sun of a cool autumn day. In a town named after the financier of the Revolution; in a county named after a signer of the Declaration; in a village where the man who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance was born. Until today. In a traffic stop as he drove to work. A couple of heavyset fellas, in tactical vests, with one of them in a Buffalo Bills cap. Within sight of the takeout which Mr. Lin may never see again. Within sight of the takeout where the mayor and school superintendent would soon gather to support the family. It was federal officers. Agents of an administration that's a stickler for civil immigration law but seemingly blind to constitutional constraint. An administration I voted for but which has metastasized into a cancer on the body politic. And today my country embraces Putin and kicks out Lin. And I've had enough. It makes no sense anymore. But my problem is fixed with a voter-registration form. I don't know how to fix Mr. Lin's problem. I don't know how to convince an autocratic government that snatching up a salt-of-the earth family to meet a deportation quota is immoral and wrong, and contrary to the values that made America great. The politicians say we need to keep it quiet. But that didn't work in Iraq or Syria or Guatemala or Argentina or Pakistan. Silence in the face of evil is complicity. And when the Declaration said that all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, it meant all. Even the man who cooks your Chinese takeout. And a country or a political party that isn't smart enough to figure out how to throw out the bad people and keep the good people has larger problems than immigration. Mr. Lin is a better man than I, and he has proved it year after year down at the strip plaza, where he and his wife raised their girls and fed our town. He has earned the right to be here, as assuredly as my birth gives me the right to be here.