'Mr. Cao Goes to Washington' and gets sent back home: Jarvis DeBerry

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http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/10/mr_cao_goes_to_washington_and.html

We are at the April 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference, held on Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao's home turf of New Orleans. A woman is telling a moderator an awful story of cultural domination, except she doesn't recognize it as a story of cultural domination or even as awful. Her parents' first language was French, she says, but that was beaten out of them. They were struck whenever they dared speak their native tongue at school.

You'd think that daughter would find her parents' story upsetting, but instead she says, "But today I have to press 1 for English?! And I want it stopped!" The crowd leaps to its feet, roars its approval.

Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant whose own English can sound halting, sits in the last row. There's an empty row of chairs before him, which means he sits apart from those whooping it up for English. He doesn't move or speak. He just sits and silently observes his party. What must he be thinking?

Of all the scenes in "Mr. Cao Goes to Washington," a documentary screening this weekend at the New Orleans Film Festival, that one best illustrates the unlikely congressman's dilemma. He's a leader in New Orleans' Vietnamese community, but outside that community, he's a misfit. He's not convincing when he tells a group of stony-faced Young Republicans it's a shame he's the only nonwhite Republican in Congress. He's not convincing when he tells black folks -- presumably Democrats -- that President Barack Obama needs him in the House as a persuadable Republican.

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