(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for Off 90 is provided in part by, the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(birds chirping) (upbeat music) - Cruising your way next, Off 90, a dance instructor specializing in traditional Cambodian dance.

An author discusses his journey to the Armenian Genocide Memorial.

And asylee from Cameroon shares his story of seeking a better life.

These stories and more are coming up on your next up Off 90.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip Off 90.

First, we hear from Lina Choung, a dance instructor specializing in traditional Cambodian dance.

- My name is Lina Choung.

I was born in San Bernardino, California, raised in Long Beach, California.

Before I was born, my family came from Cambodia and because of the Khmer Rouge that was happening back then, my parents had came for a better life.

So when I was living in California, it's a very Cambodian-based state.

Very, like you can speak the second language and also speak Khmer in California and people will understand you.

You need to go to the grocery store, you don't know what something is, say it in Cambodian and they will understand you.

So it's that many people that live in California.

So being in California, I was taught dance and it was more of discipline, because it was very strict, you had to listen, you had to abide by the rules.

You couldn't get any scratches on your body because you are a dancer, you are very fragile.

And me back then, I didn't appreciate it at all because I was a kid, I was seven years old and I wanted to play and I wanted to get muddy, I wanted to get dirty and I just, I wanted to follow bikes and stuff.

But that didn't happen because I was busy being in class and my parents were busy working.

When I moved to Minnesota, the temple in Rochester, actually, I actually danced traditional dances for them.

And when this new temple, today, first was built, I was one of the first groups.

And after that, I kind of stopped because I didn't find it appealing, interesting, to be honest.

I was reminded very often along with the other children that grew up my age and older, that I was reminded, what they had to go through, what they had to run from, what they witnessed, all of the blood (indistinct) that they had to see.

And I was reminded that I am with them and I am alive, and I'm fortunate, because some of those back home didn't make it, and they don't live to tell the story.

So, now I understand that the reasoning why my parents put me through that is because, in real time, Cambodian traditional dances are dying and not a lot of people understand the meaning of it, the ceremonies and each hand gesture that is done and all the blessings that's done before each performance.

And not a lot of people understand how much hard work, how much detail is in these traditions, until, you know, you grow up with them.

So I started teaching and the first dance that I taught was the Flower Blessing dance.

And it was until they perform that's when then and there that I realized that I'm doing something right, because I saw the looks on the audience faces, the parents.

Some people are in tears.

And that's when I realized that, you know, I took traditional dance for granted and I didn't realize what I was being taught and how important it was.

I remind them each time that they do a performance, that this is for your family, this is for your parents.

And you're doing this because this is in your blood.

And, you know, you're giving good luck, prosperity, and hope to your family.

And I don't ask them for anything but their attention and they enjoy it.

And so when I see the parents and they see their kids, that's what does it.

It's like, you know, I understand parents get tired, they're bringing their kids over here so I can teach.

And, you know, everyone's busy.

It's just when they perform and when they're in their costumes and wardrobe, when the parents see them and they see them perform and they're videotaping, it's just, it's an emotional thing.

Because not a lot of kids now can say like, I know how to dance traditionally.

That's why I'm teaching at the Rochester Temple and it's through non-profit, and I love it.

(upbeat music) - Amarachi Orakwue is a poet based in Rochester, who you might be familiar with if you've seen "R-Town", the show about Rochester.

Now she joins us to perform her poem "To My Melaninated Self".

- My name is Amarachi Orakwue and the title of my poem is "To My Melaninated Self".

I love you, oh I love the quickness of your mind and thy soul, I waddle in your graceful perfections, curiously cast aside by a hater, by a lack of understanding, yet I shine, I glow, amidst pain, I swim faster than Michael Phelps in my teary lake, wide has the lake that laces my ancestral beginnings, Agulu lake.

Have you heard a little black girl stomp before?

Have you seen her flea in the face of fears she knew all too well?

In the hands of terror she felt all too well, Her womanhood beckons that little black babe, willing her to feet to stomp much loudly and prance around the ghost of her pasts.

Oh, does she dance, her glides bring her story into unison.

The hands of God raises her to her glory and wow ... she flies past the moon, intersectionality and glass ceilings.

She becomes because she is and always has.

(upbeat music) - Chris McCormick is an assistant professor for Minnesota State University, Mankato.

As well as an author of award-winning "Desert Boys" and "The Gimmicks".

For us today, he performs a reading of his essay, "We Are More: The Docent and the Novelist".

- I've been explaining the Armenian genocide all my life.

My mother immigrated to the United States from then Soviet Armenia at 19, and met my father, a white Midwestern transplant, working at Sears in Hollywood.

Because I grew up in a desert suburb far from any Armenians, many of the families stories I heard growing up had to do with a place none of my friends at school knew existed.

It's the place where Noah's Ark landed, I tried, but I should have known better.

And those fully American children I called friends would focus on the pairing of the animals, that lusty embargo against loneliness.

I wanted to pay attention to something else in the story.

And the difference between surviving and living, for example.

The way a shipwreck could signal deliverance.

See, I'd go on, there was a genocide in 1913, but even my kindest friends would change the subject after a few solemn, helpless nods.

A couple summers ago at the age of 32, I traveled to Armenia for the first time and visited the Genocide Memorial and Museum in the hills above Yerevan.

The capital city was celebrating it's 2800th anniversary.

And on clear days while I was there, I could see across the glinting valley to the white-capped twin peaks of Mount Ararat, Noah's supposed landing site.

At the Genocide Memorial, an asymmetrical, double-pointed tower casts its clock hand shadow across the grounds on visitors on one side of a tree-lined plaza.

At the plaza's far end, a stonehenge-like structure made of 12 enormous slabs of black stone configure in a circle, each leaning at a steep angle toward a shared and distance center.

To enter, you have to descend a set of steps hidden between the slabs.

And to descend, you have to bow your head.

In this way, you arrive at the eternal flame, which has been burning at the Memorial Center since its dedication in 1968, in a position of humility, even supplication, not unlike a reader over a book.

When I arrived, others had left wreaths and remembrances beside the fire.

What came to mind was not the unimaginable number of Armenians, one and a half million killed or disappeared in the genocide, but a memory of a memory.

My great grandfather hidden in the limbs of a tree, watching his own father's beheading.

Now, a century later, I stared into the flame considering this generationally exponential helplessness I'd inherited.

This indirect, but animated grief.

Soon, I was led away from the Memorial into the nearby museum for a guided tour.

The docent shepherded a dozen of us to the first of many multimedia information stations.

She was an Armenian of about my age, which meant she belonged to the first-generation raised in an independent, post-Soviet Armenia.

She led the tour in an accented but grammatically pristine English, and I paid attention to her in a way she couldn't possibly pay attention to me.

To her, I must've looked indistinguishable from the Europeans tourists in my group or from one of my colleagues back home, who reading my grant proposal had never heard about the Armenian genocide.

This docent spoke to me, to us, as if we were equally new to the subject.

At every enumerated station, from the larger Ottoman context leading up to the violence, to the Hamidian massacres of the turn of the century, from the arrest and torture of Armenian intellectuals, to the forced marches in the Syrian desert and the child refugees.

Our docent carried herself with the dispassionate instructionism of an HR rep going over our downgraded benefits.

At several points of the tour, she interrupted her memorized recitation to scold teenagers speaking loudly behind us.

I turned back to look at the walls, where grainy photographs of emaciated children had been beamed and blown up.

Damningly, I felt a more acute pity for the scolded teenagers who had come to Armenia to eat good food, to listen to good music and to meet a local girl or boy, maybe, with whom they might strike up a global summertime romance.

The docent returned to her memorized script, and I remembered my own family's renditions of these sad facts.

Why was I failing to feel what I'd felt before and what the docents so clearly wanted me feel again, so close to the source of all that pain.

It was as if I had gone from a participant to a spectator, but hadn't I always been just the recipient of my family stories?

A listener?

What had changed?

I still cared immensely about the facts recounted by the docent, still understood the enumerated stations to be a major chain in the amino acids that made me who I was.

And yet I felt, what?

Cold, no.

I felt annoyed and bitter for being condescended to, for being treated like a tourist who'd chosen Armenia as a destination by flinging a dart at the map.

For being mistaken for someone outside of the story.

My anger then flicker to shame.

How could I be thinking about my own experience when I was being presented with this enormous suffering?

It was the same problem I had encountered with my friends at school, and the same problem I'd struggled with while writing "The Gimmicks", which was set in Armenia and in the United States in generations after the genocide.

It seemed to me that a novelist could be a docent or an artist.

That a story could prove, or it could move, but it couldn't do both.

Still, how can we blame any writer for wanting to try to show the truth when the truth is so readily denied or, not worse, but painful in its own way, ignored, forgotten, or treated ambivalently.

I too feel the impulse to expose genocide deniers for the shameful frauds that they are.

But in writing a novel, I needed to use that impulse in ugly ways.

Yes, my novel needed to say the genocide happened.

Yes, Turkish eraser of the truth, the final perfecting stage of genocide as Bernard-Henri Levy writes, is painfully ongoing.

And yet, now what?

What do we do with our denied pain?

How do we live meaningful lives when one of the pillars of our identity is called into question?

What might justice look like?

What happens to indignation when it's inherited, generation after generation?

Where in that busy grief can we make a place for joy?

It occurred to me that the problem was a problem of tone.

What magical blend of outsider inquisitiveness and insider authority might invite my readers to participate in the story, rather than simply to receive it.

For me, the solution came when I invented a bifurcated narrative, "The Voice".

One perspective emerging from the story and another delving into it.

The braiding of the two was the closest I could get to what I felt entering the Memorial's 12 stone slabs.

To enter was to intertwine with it.

My wordless encounter with the stone and the flame redirected, not only my physical, but also my psychological and emotional postures.

The Memorial didn't explain a thing.

Instead, it asked what I'd carried all this way.

In the museum, the docent bid us farewell.

She had to take her 20-minute break before the next tour.

It was a difficult job, it occurred to me, to be forced by denialism and ignorance to explain great pain again and again, without an end in sight.

Suddenly, her memorized, dispassionate method made sense to me.

Much more sustainable, probably, to relay our pain than to relive it.

A protection novelists can't rely on.

(upbeat music) - Once again, we share a delicious recipe with local chef, Shari Mukherjee.

- Hi, my name is Shari Mukherjee, and today I am really excited to be here with you.

What I'm gonna show you is how to make a homemade aioli or mayonnaise.

So, to get started, two egg yolks.

To that we're gonna add a little bit of Dijon mustard.

We're gonna go with about a half a teaspoon.

And now we're gonna go ahead and add a little bit of garlic.

I'm gonna use one for each egg yolk.

If you want it more garlicky, that's totally fine, you can also adjust later.

So no need to go crazy right now.

We're gonna do a little bit of sriracha.

I want this to be spicy, so I'm gonna do about a half a teaspoon.

And if you have it, this is really great.

This is smoked paprika.

And what I like about this, is it adds kind of that smoky flavor that you just can't get from a sriracha or chili sauce.

Next, your lemon.

We're gonna go with about a teaspoon, so I'ma add just a little bit of salt in.

Go ahead and whisk this together.

Now, this is the tricky part of making a homemade mayo.

And when I say tricky, is really not that bad.

But the thing is, we need to emulsify this.

So we wanna start with just a couple drops of oil.

Then you can start kind of streaming it in a little bit more and just really whisk that.

You wanna get all that oil incorporated, because if you don't, it's gonna turn into a big mess.

This recipe, it is gonna take quite a bit of oil.

I like to use something like grape seed oil.

So something that doesn't have a lot of extra flavor on its own.

Olive oil is great.

A lot of people love to cook with olive oil, but it does have kind of a taste to it.

And, you know, personally, I don't always like that taste in my mayonnaise or my aioli.

With this beautiful little salmon cake, what I'm gonna do, is just simply take some of the sauce and I'm just gonna drizzle it right around.

And that's it.

In that short amount of time, we made this really beautiful dish.

Super simple.

If you are planning a barbecue, go ahead, whip some of this up, impress your guests.

I promise you, this is so much better than the store-bought mayo.

So until next time, I hope you guys enjoyed this recipe and I cannot wait to cook with you again.

(gentle music) - An asylee only from Cameroon came to the United States, seeking not just a better life, but a way to survive.

His journey spanned multiple continents as he sought liberty, not just for himself, but for those he left behind.

He shares his story with us now.

- My name is Christian Ngong.

I'm a Cameroonian.

I've been in the United States since January 8, 2020.

That's when I was granted asylum.

I am a human rights activist.

I am a political analyst.

I am the founder and chief executive officer of a humanitarian organization, The Voice of the Voiceless, in Cameroon that has been helping the needy orphans, of refugees, of internally displaced persons.

Cameroon is a country in Sub-Saharan Africa that was colonized by the British and the French.

It's a bilingual country, because of its history of colonialism.

So it's been split into two countries, which is the British-Southern Cameroon and the French Cameroon.

And up till today, we have a long history of fighting, a long history of wars in Cameroon.

And so when these two countries decided to come together in 1961, to form what was known as a Federal Republic of Cameroon, there were two parts.

But in 1972, the country from a unitary state dubiously by the then president of the country, Ahmadou Ahidjo.

Under the federal constitution in 1961, it was clearly stipulated that the form of this state will never be changed.

And when the president came in 1972 and decided to form what he called a unitary state, he organized a referendum.

He asked them whether they would like a unitary state and then the answer was yes and oui.

Now, oui in French is the same as yes.

And since my people did not know French, they were choosing, oui, hoping that they were answering no.

And unfortunately for them, they all voted to join the French Republic of Cameroon, which form the unitary states, so they were clearly duped.

There was only one answer.

The president of the Republic of Cameroon has been in power for over 36 years and he is a French speaker.

The second person in government is a French speaker and all the ministers, they are French speakers.

So growing up as an Anglophone or as an English speaker in Cameroon is hell on its own.

You live in a country where your education means nothing.

You live in a country where carrying an identification document as an English speaker means nothing.

So we were practically foreigners in our own country.

When the Anglophone crisis started in 2016, we called on the government to resolve the crisis.

And because we are in a dictatorship, any person that call on the government to perform his duty, its duty automatically becomes an opponent of the government.

And because I was involved, I was one of those people who was calling on the government of Cameroon to find a credible solution to the crisis that has killed more than 8,000 people, burned down more than 250 villages in Cameroon, displaced millions of people, created orphans, internally displaced persons.

The government saw me as threat.

So I decided to run away from Cameroon to save my life and to save these people, which I continue to fight for them today, even as I'm in the United States.

I left Cameroon and I had to move through high sea to Nigeria, which is the neighboring country Cameroon, because I could not cross any borders.

I could not move across, pass through the airport.

And I had to use the high sea because there was no security.

I got to Nigeria, and from there, I was able to secure a flight to South America, where I landed in Ecuador.

From Ecuador, I had to grapple with the police all along, moving through Columbia, walking across the Darien Gap for two weeks, day and night without food.

And I had to move through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, right up to Mexico, where I was able to get myself across.

I was able to cross the borders in the United States of America.

So from there, I was put under immigration custodies for seven months, until I was taken to court and acquitted.

Defining myself as a refugee, I believe that the United States has been a home, it's been my home for me right now, because that is the only home I have.

I can't call Cameroon a home when I'm not able to move back there.

I will tell you that there is hope, because there is always hope and you will always win where there is hope.

I believe that it's just a matter of time and some day, somehow, our lives will be back to normal.

(gentle music) - We've reached the end of this tour Off 90.

Thanks for riding along, see you next time.

But before we go, we once again hear from Amarachi Orakwue with her second poem, "Unapologetic".

- The title of my second poem is "Unapologetic".

It's a shorter one, and it goes.

To be unapologetic is to have grace, the grace to be, the grace to be whole.

Without endangerment to the thought, the mind, the acceptance of reclaiming thyself.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for Off 90 is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling)