Last Tuesday, as a reaction to the shootings that have targeted Jews, blacks, gay people, moviegoers, Christians, Muslims and schoolchildren, the Jewish Community held a meeting and invited law enforcement agents from the Santa Ynez Valley to help us with safety issues.
This is the new normal.
Human beings of all ages gathering in churches, synagogues, mosques and schools to learn how to avoid being killed by a crazed person with hatred and a semi-automatic gun. "See something, say something," we’re told. Don’t freeze, take some breaths. Do not huddle in place and become a target. Learn to apply a tourniquet. Run! Get out! That was the advice Lt. Eddie Hsueh and his two community resource deputies, Charlie Uhrig and Mike Guynn, gave us.
There will be more advice coming. One of the deputies is about to go to Carpinteria to learn ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate) training and will come back to train those communities who feel at risk — which these days means all of us.
But that isn’t what this column is about. This column is about Hsueh himself.
Why is this man, with an Asian name and somewhat Asian visage, in Solvang, California, where Asians (other than those arriving on tour buses) are so few? And he’s not just here, he’s here protecting us. I guess I am interested in how this wonderful valley of ours, founded by ranchers and Danish people homesick for Denmark, is peopled by others. I, too, am an “other,” and I am curious and delighted by these signs of diversity among us.
Hsueh was born in Santa Maria. He grew up with a rough crowd in a family with problems. Though he himself never got in trouble, many of his friends did. He thinks his own strong religious belief kept him from gangs and violence. His mom was a single mother and his grandparents abusive. By 17, he was on his own.
Hsueh says he “jumped off the train,” and that being alone at 17 was better than staying in that home.
Hsueh always wondered about his ethnicity. He knew he looked different than his mother and her family but was never able to get the complete story on who his father was, or even what his accurate name was: Shay, Shway, something like that, his mother said. She did tell him the street in Los Angeles where this mysterious man had lived.
When pressed, his mother showed him a picture of a handsome fellow who she claimed was his father. Hsueh learned later that this photograph was actually Mario Lanza, the famous opera singer. Like most people, Hsueh wanted desperately to know who he was. He felt that his mother’s family were not the kind of people he wanted to emulate.
Who then were his father’s people? Maybe they were the good family he so desperately wanted.
Hsueh entered police work. One day, 15 years ago when he was still a sergeant in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office he began, as he often did, to search the internet trying to find clues as to his father’s identity.
This time he struck gold.
He’d called many people with the name of Shay or Shway. They lived all over the United States. Often they were Irish. On this day, a man with a Chinese accent answered the phone. He lived in Washington state. Yes, the man said he’d once lived on the street in L.A. Hsueh mentioned. Yes, it was around the time of Hsueh's birth. “Are you my son?” the man asked, without skipping a beat.
Hsueh was on the next plane to Washington, where he discovered his father, a deeply religious man who’d immigrated from northern China. Hsueh also discovered a whole new family. There were aunts and uncles and cousins and even a half sister (who he’ll spend this Thanksgiving with) and brother. There was an aunt who’d been a mayor of her town in China, people who worked in aviation, were doctors, musicians. At age 40, he changed his name to Hsueh, harder to pronounce, but as he says, it's his “blood name."
That’s who is protecting us here in the Santa Ynez Valley, a man who grew up in a difficult, abusive home, but searched until he found people he admired and could call family. I feel safer here since I’ve met Hsueh.