It wasn't your everyday call.Maybe it would be in some places, but not here. In fact, I can't remember getting another one like it.
The caller's name was Joyce Yamada, and she was calling to report something we don't usually think of as being a problem in Boise.
"I can hardly go out of my apartment without being called weird or ugly or having somebody say I look like a foreigner," she said. "Hardly a day goes by that it doesn't happen. When I tell people I'm from here, they don't believe me."
Yamada, 64, is a Japanese-American. She was born in Boise, but moved to Washington, D.C., as a young woman. She's also lived in Germany and spent a little over a decade in Cascade before returning to Boise in 2005. She says she feels less welcome here than anyplace else she's lived.
"It wasn't that way here when I was young," she said. "I think it might be that some of the people who have come here from other places in the last 30 years see me as what they tried to leave behind, the non-white mentality."
At one point in the conversation, she remarked that I sounded surprised. She was right. Boise has never struck me as a place where people are especially intolerant of ethnic diversity.
We don't have a lot of it compared with many cities, but we've welcomed refugees from all over the world and reports of bigotry are relatively infrequent.
It was mid-April when Yamada called. She said the nastiness had happened either in her neighborhood or on city buses, which she uses often. I was tempted to write it off as an aberration until a Boise 9-year-old allegedly was called names and threatened for passing out a Cinco de Mayo leaflet, and a ValleyRide bus driver was accused of using a racial slur against a Hispanic 14-year-old just three days later.
Last week, I met Yamada at her home to learn more about her experience.
It turns out she's a third-generation Idahoan. She was born in the old St. Luke's Hospital and grew up at 17th and State streets.
"When I go places in Boise now, people ask me where I'm from and why I'm here," she said. "They seem to think I shouldn't be here. I was born two miles from here."
She lived in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., "and loved it. I lived there for a long time. People cared about me there. They encouraged me to finish my education."
In Cascade, where her father lived, people "knew my family and accepted me. It wasn't until I moved to Boise two and a half years ago that people started calling me ugly and acting like I didn't belong."
Petite and tastefully dressed, Yamada impressed me as being anything but ugly. Even in Boise, a city not noted for racial diversity, I didn't see anything about her that would stand out in a crowd.
So why the rude comments?
"Maybe it's just that in my neighborhood and the places I go I don't run across many people of Asian descent," she said. "I look different. Maybe if I lived in someplace like Seattle I'd blend in more."
Perhaps. But you shouldn't have to blend in to be treated with common courtesy.
Or maybe it isn't so common anymore.
The online comments at this and virtually every other newspaper are enough to make you wonder if the phrase is becoming an oxymoron.
To their credit, many of those posting reader comments about the stories on the bus driver and the 14-year-old were civil and open-minded.
Many, but not all:
"Yet another example of our Spanish-speaking friends causing more trouble than what they're worth," one reader wrote. " The bus driver didn't do anything wrong here - the kid obviously overstepped proper conduct, and should be reprimanded. Firing a white man over this triffle (sic) would be racist in the extreme."
"That's life in the big city," another wrote. "Move on and up-date that bus pass."
Or this: "Seems as though you could be just a pretty little mommy's boy making trouble for mean old white man that trashed 'little boy' of color."
One of the good things about living in Boise has been that we hear relatively little of that kind of talk. Is that changing, and if so what does it say about us?
Tim Woodward: 377-6409
