Letter From Minnesota: “There’s Some Good in This World...”

I bought my tickets for the theatrical re-release of The Lord of the Rings movies last year. This was before I knew that life on the weekends would be: clean your house, feed your cat, scoop litter, shovel snow, check in with kiddo, go to protest or community action, check in with friends and family, do what you can to contribute to the beautiful resistance organized by your fellow Minnesotans.

On the day they shot and killed a man I later learned was named Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse of reputed kindness and care, whose last words on earth were, according to the woman he was helping, “Are you OK?,” and who the people in the highest offices of this country are smearing in their press conferences as a domestic terrorist who was trying to cause harm when in fact he was doing the opposite, I went to go see The Two Towers.

My father, elderly veteran of the American War in Vietnam who, 50 years ago, along with my mother and older siblings, saved my life as the other side shelled the airport with rockets trying to kill us as we tried to escape our own country, had just called me and asked me, in Vietnamese, not to leave my house, here in Minneapolis where we both still live, because government men are in the streets shooting people left and right.

I was late because I had attended a protest at the site of Pretti’s murder, an area that I frequent and that I love. There was pepper spray or some other chemical in the air, so strong that a hot, perforating sensation got into my throat and I was coughing.

I know this area very well. We in Minneapolis sometimes refer to it as Eat Street. I was just there yesterday after a record-breaking protest where hundreds of businesses, institutions, and schools had shut down, and somewhere around 50,000 to 100,000 Minnesotans, depending on who did the counting, had hit the streets in -10F weather to march. I was looking for hot soup, and most of the stores had been closed in solidarity.

I want to tell them, and all Minnesotans: hold on to each other. No turning back.

During my college days, I lived in a studio apartment on 26th and 3rd, it had a murphy bed, which pulled down from the wall. From about the 1980s onward, the neighborhood has been heavily but not exclusively an Asian business corridor. Lots of small, family-owned and run Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Chinese refugee businesses there, alongside a long-standing Greek restaurant and a German restaurant with an urban legend about being haunted, and now, some Latinx businesses, a Jamaican restaurant, a Somali restaurant.

There are many more shops and restaurants on Eat Street representing many different cultures from all over the world. And there are places like Glam Doll donuts, a small, hip, independent donut place owned and run by two women, from which the video a lot of people have been seeing was filmed. They shot and killed Alex Pretti  in front of my favorite bánh mì place. Eggrolls that taste like my mom’s.

During the protest, the rage and frustration is palpable. People have formed barricades using dumpsters. There are photos later, and people claiming it looks like a warzone.

I leave and go to a theater in Saint Paul, barely able to concentrate on the film.

Near the end of the movie, there’s a heavy sense of dread—everyone feels hopeless, and exhausted. Frodo feels he cannot go on. Samwise Gamgee begins to speak.

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy?

…Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn’t, because they were holding on to something… That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”

I could hear, in the dark of the theater, some of my fellow Minnesotans sobbing in recognition.

I want to tell them, and all Minnesotans: hold on to each other. No turning back.