The Rake Magazine

Author: Adam Minter

  • "No News Is Good News"

    Bed 31 is covered with a thin white blanket, awaiting the post-surgery arrival of Deng Yilian, 52, native of tiny Malu in southwest China’s Hunan Province. To the left, on Bed 30, Deng’s daughter Cotton, 29, now of Shanghai, is seated, legs crossed; to the right, on a bed inexplicably labeled 31+, her son Mondy, 27 and also of Shanghai, is lying down. It was to be the weekend of his wedding, and his bride—Wenwen, 27, a willowy native of Shanghai—is sitting on a chair across from 31+, watching a kung fu soap opera on the television in front of windows overlooking a boulevard in Changsha, Hunan’s capital city. Just down the hall, three surgeons are working to repair the damage done by a botched back surgery from fifteen years earlier that has suddenly threatened Deng Yilian’s spinal cord.

    I had been invited to the wedding, and when it was postponed at the last minute, the family invited me to accompany them to Changsha. They were among my first Chinese friends five years ago, and now they are among my best. On the window ledge is a plastic bag containing cigarettes purchased for the wedding dinner in Malukou, an eight-hour drive into the mountains. Cotton and Mondy speak their native, incomprehensible Xiang dialect for much of the morning, and at one point, Wenwen and I smile knowingly at each other, bonding as unlikely compatriots in outsider-dom.

    “Let’s walk,” Cotton says to me, suddenly, shifting into the peculiar jagged dialect of English that she calls “Cotton-ese.” We descend five floors to the wide, dusty street, surrounded by tenements with first-floor shops and restaurants. Cotton, barely five feet tall but with an outsized charisma and beauty, squints at pockets of street life, miniature maelstroms lost in the boulevard’s broad spaces. She left Hunan ten years ago as a village shoe-shine girl; after graduating from art school in Guangzhou, she migrated to Shanghai, where she waitressed at an American-style café and now owns a beloved restaurant and bar located in a colonial-era French villa. Though not exactly the queen of Shanghai’s nightlife, she is certainly one of its princesses. “But I don’t feel like a princess in Hunan,” she tells me as we round a corner where wiry, sweat-soaked workers crouch with their rice bowls, eating. “That’s why I can’t come back here.”

    We wander through a market that sells second-hand refrigeration equipment, televisions, and motorcycles. My presence—a white face in a run-down section of Changsha—is cause for smiles and finger-pointing. “The life is hard here,” Cotton says. “Nothing to do but be bored and worry about the money.” She reminds me that the high school where Mao Zedong was a student, and later taught, is just a few minutes away. But her mother’s surgery, which was supposed to last five hours, is in its fourth, so we head back to resume our vigil.

    In the hospital room, Uncle Zou—second husband to Cotton’s widowed mother—is laying across 31+. He will sleep there for the next two weeks, caring for his wife, and generally fulfilling the functions of a nurse. In a Chinese hospital, the concept of visiting hours is foreign. Chinese families, no matter how fractured, won’t leave a sick family member alone. Uncle Zou will handle the bedpan and hospital staff will handle the blood pressure. So we sit, and we wait. Cotton goes to the front desk and inquires about her mother’s progress. She is told that no news is good news. “Worry if we want to see you,” the head nurse says. A short time later, a doctor enters the room with a small white box that under other circumstances might hold earrings. He speaks softly to Cotton, and as he leaves, Cotton and Uncle Zou open it. Inside, she tells me, is a piece of one of her mother’s vertebrae. They gave it to her, she explains, to prove that they actually did the surgery. It’s a common practice, made customary by the profiteering and outright fraud that has rendered much of China’s public health system inaccessible to its residents. Cotton, however, can afford a private hospital for her mother. “Most Chinese families would be totally ruined by this,” she tells me. “We’re lucky.”

    Finally, six hours after she was wheeled into the operating room, Deng Yilian is returned to her bed. She is unconscious, and her pale white face causes husband, daughter, and son to look helplessly at each other. Mondy takes his mother’s hand and I slip into the hallway.

    Later that night Cotton calls to tell me that her mother woke up hungry, and when I arrive the next morning Deng Yilian is sitting up in bed, being fed muesli and yogurt by her son. On the table opposite her bed, in tinfoil, is a spicy Hunanese duck cut into pieces for Uncle Zou. After a brief, sharp Xiang exchange between mother and daughter, Cotton turns to me with an exasperated laugh. “She wants the duck even though it’s bad for her stomach,” she exclaims. “Hunanese woman is strong.”

  • On Sofas and Sublimity

    I first encountered an Uta Barth photograph six years ago, wandering through a group exhibition of eleven artists at the prestigious Getty Center in Los Angeles. The works were high-concept, low-execution, clearly the product of expensive art school educations, and, like pretentious dinner guests, unjustifiably boring.

    Then, turning a corner, I stopped dead in front of a massive photo of a white couch, delicately brushed by the shadows cast from a window frame. The photo next to it showed little more than the feet of the same white couch and a slice of impeccably clean gray carpet. With perfectly balanced lines and angles, these exquisite compositions seemed to serve no other purpose than to highlight the exceedingly good taste of the owner of this living room. I had never before so carefully examined the feet of a couch, and for some reason, as I wandered through the otherwise insipid show, I found myself repeatedly circling back to these images. After a half-hour of this, I realized it wasn’t just the composition that attracted me, but also a sharp sense of the deficiencies of my own living room. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get that languid, well-designed, luxurious feeling from the shadows cast by my window frames. The untitled photos, part of a landmark series named … and of time, were created by Uta Barth, a German-born artist who has spent the last two decades revolutionizing photography from her perch as a studio art professor at the University of California, Riverside. Since that first encounter with her work, I have spent countless hours fixated on Barth’s exhibition catalogs, filled with gorgeous photos of easily overlooked everyday subjects from her life: that sofa, an empty backyard, the power lines above her house. They are riveting because they are unexpectedly beautiful, particularly for the majority of us who find little in the way of unexpected beauty in and around our domiciles. This month, Barth’s newest works, forty-eight untitled images, are on view at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis (1021 E. Franklin Ave.; Minneapolis, through November 4)—their first-ever U.S. showing. Measuring roughly two feet by two feet each, the mounted images wrap around the gallery in a single line. The images are grouped into sets of two to five, each of which examines still lifes on Barth’s window ledge.

    For example, one grouping features an exquisitely composed image of a water glass and vase, both holding flowers, framed against hot white sunlight coming through the window. The first image in the group has an easy elegance and beauty, and if it were framed just a bit downward and to the right, the Martha Stewart Living magazine logo would be right at home in the left windowpane. Next to this image is a polarized version of the same scene, rendered in blood-red, highly saturated ink—an art student’s mere trick of the light. Finally, on the opposite end, the still life becomes a totally unfocused wash that resembles nothing so much as blood in water. It is a stark, menacing contrast to the flowers it complements, yet in its echo there is something familiar.

    Moving from left to right—from the elegant flowers to their final, bloody exposition—Barth seems to be embracing and then repudiating her attachment to the still lifes that have defined her work. According to her, however, the new images are actually about “what happens with your eyes closed.” She is literally representing the process of getting over an image. As she was quoted in db artmag:

    “Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact optical after-images seen after staring into the light. At first, you’re still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of what you’ve looked at.”

    Barth’s is a hard, domineering vision. Not content to just show you a picture, she’s determined to demonstrate how you will experience it when you blink or after you look away. Nothing is left to the imagination, to the sense that one’s personal experience can define the photo in an individual way. The images are about seeing, and the flowers are just a means of exploring that topic. Barth said she chose flowers as the subject for her new series because “they are completely invisible” to her. Over the course of several months, she photographed them at odd angles, imitating how a passerby might briefly notice them, then not notice them at all. In time, as viewers linger on the images, she hopes they will see “that something else might be happening other than describing my home.” The images are not, she insists, “a reverie about flowers.”

    Of course, that’s a highly esteemed professor of art talking. As a fan of the artist (not the professor), I unabashedly admit that I find the flower photos awfully pretty, and I’ve spent enough time reveling in them to have had my own epiphany of sorts. It is this: Professor Barth keeps fresh flowers around the house, and I don’t. It may be the case that she buys so many flowers that they’ve finally become invisible to her, but I can’t remember the last time I had a vase of fresh flowers perched on my window ledge. Whether she recognizes it or not, I (the audience) have a connection to the flowers that Barth doesn’t. For me, her work is aspirational, the fine-art equivalent of the Room & Board catalog. Like Barth, I once lived with a white couch (purchased from Room & Board, no less). Sure, sunlight used to fall across it, but I swear it never looked quite as timeless as Barth’s.

    In the introduction to Barth’s 2004 catalog of photos, which includes images from …and of time, one critic declares her work “the visual equivalent of silence,” and another comments that they are a “study in sameness that attempts to reduce all activity and purpose to pure observation.” In interviews, Barth says similar, deeply philosophical things. But for me, the real draw of the … and of time couch photos is the way in which they induce an almost visceral desire for a living room just like Barth’s. The artist and her admirers, however, are insistent in their denials that object lust might have anything to do with her work’s appeal (or, dare I say, its beauty). “It is hard to imagine subject matter that is less compelling than a living room floor,” is how the Albright-Knox Art Gallery explained its decision to purchase images of Barth’s living room carpet. Never mind that the average American bookstore is bursting with shelter magazines and decorating books that detail why living room floors are compelling; the lush images in most of them could have served as poor concept studies for Barth’s living room artworks.

    To my eye, what makes this artist’s images so compelling, so utterly hypnotic, is how they take the conventions of object-lust publications—magazines like Metropolitan Home and Dwell—and recast them as fine, minimalist art. Instead of photographing her couch straight on, in blinding Mediterranean light (see: Architectural Digest), Barth allows us a view of just the top few inches of the cushions and a shadow of window frame across the wall. In effect she is saying—to me, at least—“here are the object and the feeling you’d have if you were lucky enough to have my time and the means to enjoy it.” Or more directly: “Enjoy my couch.”

    To the best of my knowledge, Barth has never said anything of the kind, and who knows, maybe she’s never so much as flipped through an issue of Dwell. I doubt it, though. In fact, in the same way she insists that her new untitled series of flower images is not about flowers, she declares that her photos have nothing to do with her at all, and that, to the contrary, she strives for anonymity in creating them. “I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase,” she says. “Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters, and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject.” But how can Barth spend months photographing her surroundings—her couch, her electrical cord, her carpet, her windows, her backyard, the telephone poles above her house, her flower arrangements, and her window ledge—and somehow believe that her audience will automatically erase any readings into the personality of the owner of these objects?

    For me, these photos are far from anonymous. It is precisely Uta Barth and no other who emerges from them. Intended as patient studies of the nature of time, they also serve as patient studies of a character or personality who not only owns nice things but knows how to look at (and photograph) them in unique and exquisite ways. It is those barely revealed quirks, quirks that hint at a personality, that endear Uta Barth to me. The intentions and theories that she and her critics generate about her work are interesting and occasionally relevant, and I’m pretty sure I’ll start paying more attention to the blood-red retinal aftereffects of looking at photos in Architectural Digest. But really, in the end, it’s the lovely simplicity of her images that moves me. For whose couch, in the history of art, is more sublime than Uta Barth’s?

  • Gimme Grain!

    At 9:28 a.m. thirty-one grain traders are milling around a trading pit—an octagon about the size of a pontoon boat, recessed into the hardwood floor—at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Steps are wide and lazy, chests are thrust outward. Several of the men (and they are all men) discuss the price of downtown real estate; a few ruminate on Gophers football; nearly everyone chews gum, frantically. Then, at five seconds before 9:30, voices trail off, order books open, and feet are squared. A deep breath passes over the assembly and there’s a brief silence as attention focuses on the flutter of international commodity values changing on the price board above.
    At 9:30, exactly, a bell rings.

    “Half! Half! Half!” screams a muscular trader. His face is three inches from that of a man ten years his senior, who calmly scribbles something into a notebook. Nearby, a man in a red-and-black-checked coat bellows “Quarter!” as four traders crash toward him at the edge of the pit. Others collapse into scrums of shoving, screaming, raised arms, and pointed fingers—despite the fact that the trading floor surrounding them is a third of an acre of mostly empty, silent space. Things continue like this for roughly ten minutes, during which time approximately ten million dollars in business is done. Then, almost as suddenly as the action erupted, it subsides, and the traders mostly just stand around, watching the price fluctuations in Kansas City and Chicago, and occasionally calling out offers. By the end of a four-hour trading day, an average of a hundred million dollars has been transacted this way.

    For nearly as long as there has been a City of Minneapolis, the trading floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (known as MGEX) has been located just blocks from the Mississippi River and its flour mills. But unlike the mills, which now function largely as shells for high-end lofts, MGEX has continued to thrive as a grain-based business. In fiscal 2005, alone, nearly twenty-five billion dollars in business was transacted there, most of it centered on the spring wheat that has been grown and milled in the Midwest since farmers began homesteading here in the mid-nineteenth century. And despite the advent of electronic trading and international commodity markets, most of that twenty-five billion dollars was shouted out by a few dozen Minnesotans who regularly show up to use methods and rules first devised when the exchange was founded 125 years ago.

    During the 1870s, when Minneapolis mills became the primary destination for the burgeoning Midwest wheat harvest, the Minneapolis Millers Association colluded to fix the price of the grain. Enforcement was efficient and brutal: Member mills simply refused to buy grain from any trader competing with an association agent. Enter Colonel George D. Rogers, a young grain trader from Calmar, Iowa, who arrived in Minneapolis in 1873. Determined to compete, Rogers skillfully undercut the Millers association’s pricing and thus established himself as a rare independent Minneapolis grain trader. Nevertheless, Rogers knew that he could never fully defeat the Millers unless there was a centralized Minneapolis grain market and exchange where business was conducted in the open, out of the backrooms favored by the Millers.

    During the summer of 1881, Rogers recruited a group of Minneapolis businessmen to organize an exchange, and on October 6 that year, twenty-one men signed the articles of incorporation establishing the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce (the name was changed to the Minneapolis Grain Exchange in 1947). Within six months the chamber had 538 members—and enough money to build a headquarters, which was completed in 1884. The Exchange moved into a larger and quite lavish new building at Fourth Avenue and Fourth Street in 1902, which cost $700,000 and included interiors by John Bradstreet, the renowned local arts and crafts designer. The Chamber was justly proud of its edifice, and sang its praises in a commemorative booklet. “Its lines are beautiful, its proportions unassailable, its detail highly attractive,” claimed the author. “In fact it is, architecturally, a constantly increasing pleasure.” Pleasures aside, the building was also designed to be practical, modern, and masculine: “There is a stairway, but it is inconspicuous and little used—only fast elevators are equal to the demands of the grain men.”

    Early photos of the Chamber show dozens of traders in stiff collars and bowler hats crowded among rows of massive, altar-like wooden tables piled with samples of Midwestern grain that was in transit to Minneapolis. “The old-time buyers used to look at the actual grades,” said Randy Narloch, a trader with Archer Daniels Midland Company and a board member of MGEX. “They’d see it, smell it, even taste it.” Today, MGEX’s cash trading tables still cover more than half of the trading floor, but even when the action in the trading pits is loudest, the tables are almost completely empty. “Well, you can get a lab report on a sample faxed or emailed to your office,” Narloch sighed. “There just isn’t much reason to go down there anymore.” No surprise, General Mills and Pillsbury trust lab reports more than they do the senses of their grain traders, however experienced.

    Economic trends, too, have contributed to the decline of the rather quaint practices of the cash traders: With the advent of agricultural giants like ADM and Cargill, the small-scale, independent grain-trading company has become a thing of the past. “We lost a lot of companies to consolidation over the last twenty years,” Narloch pointed out. “Pillsbury, International Multifoods, Kellogg. Now we have maybe ten players.” Of them, “five or six” account for ninety percent of the business at MGEX’s once-crowded cash trading tables, their conversations occasionally pierced by a cry from the futures trading pits at the other end of the trading floor.

    Indeed, if MGEX merely served as a clearing house for grain shipments negotiated at cash trading tables, it would have disappeared long before the agricultural consolidations of the last twenty-five years. But grain traders and farmers are always looking for ways to manage the risk of price fluctuations between, say, planting and harvest, or shipping and delivery. As a result, in 1883, only a few years after its founding, the Chamber of Commerce authorized the trading of “futures”—essentially, a contract to buy or sell something in the future—as a hedge against the risk of price changes. Thus, a farmer concerned that the price of wheat will fall between planting and harvest can buy a contract to sell wheat at the current price before planting the crop (this is one kind of hedge; textbooks have been written about others). MGEX has marvelous archive photos dating back to the early twentieth century, and in them the blurry hands and frantic faces suggest that the business has always been loud, fast, and bruising, despite the stiff collars and Midwestern stoicism exhibited by the earliest onlookers leaning over the visitors’ balcony. A hundred years later it’s still more NYSE—New York Stock Exchange—than Minnesota Nice, with “fisticuffs every three years,” according to Mark Bagan, president of MGEX and a former floor trader.

    Every weekday, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., MGEX’s spring wheat futures contract is bought and sold by floor traders on behalf of themselves and clients worldwide. The futures is also popular among speculators, who trade it with little concern for their underlying commodity content. In fact, only around one percent of the contracts traded at MGEX actually result in the delivery of a train car full of wheat, and that’s because most traders regard a futures contract as merely something to trade. “It’s definitely a Type-A environment,” said Bagan. “But I don’t like to call it gambling. I call it risk management.” Whatever it is, speculators assume the risk that others hedge, and Bagan is quite clear that risk has its downside. “For every dollar made, a dollar is lost,” he said. “For every guy that makes it big, three don’t. That’s why you don’t want to get too close to anyone: You don’t know if he’ll be here tomorrow.” And if he’s not there tomorrow, members of the Exchange will be more than happy to bid-up his membership: In the last twelve months, a seat at the Exchange (they are fixed at 391) has more than doubled in price to fifty-five thousand dollars. Some members have more than one, and many never even set foot on the floor. “It’s a good investment,” Bagan said, by way of explanation.

    For a guy who was once in the trading fray himself, Bagan, who is forty-one, cuts a dashing figure: He wears good suits, his goatee is meticulously groomed, and he is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite. Nevertheless, he is an unabashed booster of the “open outcry” trading that occurs in the Grain Exchange’s futures pits, even as electronic trading overtakes the international commodities markets. In fact, ninety percent of the business done at MGEX is open outcry, despite the fact that the MGEX futures contract is available to trade electronically, worldwide. “If you know that a guy works for Cargill and you can look him in the eye—” Bagan shrugged. “That’s the sort of information you just can’t get sitting at home, trading on your PC.” He leaned against the rail of the visitor’s balcony and looked down at the trading pit. “Change isn’t always good,” he concluded with a smile.

  • The Mysteries of Dr. Evermore's Forevertron

    The southbound highway out of Baraboo, Wisconsin, passes Delaney’s Surplus and then, in rapid succession, a fifteen-foot radiator penetrated by a giant key, a twenty-foot iron heart with a ray gun protruding from it, and a giant scrap metal chicken with plumage partially constructed from brass doorknobs. A dirt road hairpins from out of this incongruous display, parallels the highway, rolls past a giant scrap metal moth, and approaches a wooden fence that opens to reveal a one-hundred-foot long, four-story,-four-hundred-ton scrap metal collage topped by ray guns, a telescope, a viewing platform for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and a giant glass ball shrouded in a copper egg.

    The hand-painted sign announces “Guineness [sic] Book of Records … World’s Largest Scrap Metal Sculpture ‘The Forevertron,’” but the owner of the sign and the Forevertron—takes exception to the description. “The art idea, that’s a judgment thing that some people have made up,” grumbles prickly Dr. Evermor, 67, at his table in the Blue Spoon Creamery Cafe in nearby downtown Prairie du Sac. “To begin with, the Forevertron’s purpose is to perpetuate me into heaven in a glass ball inside a copper egg on a magnetic lightning force beam.” He pauses, eyes flashing beneath arched, bushy eyebrows, offers a half smile, takes a deep breath that fills his imposing frame, and glances at elegant Lady Eleanor (also known as Eleanor Every), his companion of more than forty years, who sits beside him. Suddenly, the bluster of Evermor slips into the soft sigh of Tom Every, career scrap metal man. “Actually, the reason for that device is that I don’t like lawyers or politicians or that like,” he adds. “I’m from the scrap world, where people are honorable.”

    Despite first impressions, Dr. Evermor and the Forevertron (located in a just-renovated “Historical Artistic Memorial Metal Sculpture Park” beside Delaney’s Surplus) are more than Midwestern roadside curiosities. Major museums, including, recently, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, have organized visiting delegations; academics, critics, and curators have written treatises exploring the meaning of the Forevertron, its inventor, and its aesthetics. Yet Every, who has even had the recent honor of addressing an academic conference, isn’t impressed. “I’ve got a bunch of college professors making a bunch of money running all over the U.S. talking about the philosophy of Doctor Evermor,” he says with a deep, open-mouth laugh. “What a bunch of shit! I’m just a small-time scrap guy from Wisconsin who used to drive a Ford truck.”

    Born in 1938 and raised in the central Wisconsin town of Brooklyn, Every started collecting rags and newspapers with the Cub Scouts when he was eleven. Soon he struck out on his own and expanded his scrounging to include scrap iron, used tires, and anything that seemed remotely salvageable. “People always ask Dr. Evermor where he got his Ph.D.,” Every says. “And I tell them the School of Hard Knocks and the Jewish School of Technology.” While earning those degrees, he ran a highly successful demolition business that completed more than “three hundred and fifty major wrecking jobs.”

    Despite financial success, in his early thirties Every began to feel restless. “I was getting a little tired of having nothing to show for what I did,” he recalls. “You know, you move a pile of scrap and then it’s gone.” He was still a long way from becoming Dr. Evermor, but he began to look at his demolitions in a different way. “When I was wrecking something, I’d start to look at is as something else. I’d ask, ‘What’s it good for?’”

    In 1983, under the influence of the Dr. Who craze and pesky politicians, Every developed a back story about a 19th century inventor named Dr. Evermor who builds a machine to launch himself into the heavens. Utilizing a large collection of 19th century industrial cast-offs, he built the Forevertron to appear as if it were constructed in the 1890s. “I love the old machines,” Every explains. “They often have artistic integrity, so I saved them.” Every’s collection of 19th century machinery, as preserved in the Forevertron, is so complete that it has served as a classroom for industrial history and design students. Space buffs also have taken an interest in the Forevertron: A decontamination chamber from the Apollo moon missions is a major component. “It’s best not to go into how I got that thing,” Every concedes.

    Every still has plans to attach another “couple tons” of metal and “the fiber optics” to the Forevertron. More dauntingly, he is determined to relocate the entire machine, all 400 tons of it, across the highway to the boiler room of the abandoned Badger Army Ammunition Plant. “I mean, there are people who come here, hold hands, dance jigs around it. They think it’s the mother egg! And who knows? Maybe it is!” he exclaims. “But that’s the point. What the hell is it?”—Adam Minter

  • Made For America

    Why rent when you can own? At my neighborhood shop in Shanghai, well-ordered racks are full of the latest Hollywood releases, the Hollywood catalog dating back to the mid-1960s, and a middling selection of Chinese films and television series, most of which sell for between eighty-five cents and two bucks. The majority have English and Chinese subtitles, and all of them, of course, are pirated. On a recent visit, I slipped past a twentyish professional couple considering a boxed set of Desperate Housewives and greeted the store clerk. He’s a helpful guy—he once located a pirated copy of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz for me—but when I pointed to a poster for Chen Kaige’s The Promise, a $35 million martial arts epic that is the most expensive film in Chinese history, and asked if he had it yet, he shook his head no.

    Quality pirate copies of Chinese films often circulate in the weeks before an official theatrical release. But in the case of The Promise, which will begin screening internationally this month, unusual precautions have been taken to prevent piracy. “Wait until it is released in the theater,” the clerk said. “You’ll be able to go and see it in English.”

    Until recently, Chinese films in English were rare (and, if dubbed, unwanted—in my case, at least). But as Chinese art house filmmakers like Chen Kaige increasingly look to the U.S. for mass audiences and Hollywood-sized money, the option becomes common. China may be the world’s third most prolific filmmaking nation, but its total domestic box office in 2004 was less—by some hundred million dollars—than what Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith brought in on the first weekend of its U.S. release. Indeed, last year China made more money by exporting its films than it did by exhibiting them in its own theaters. Of course, filmmakers there have learned from their American colleagues (and studios) who’ve come to count on foreign box offices to salvage action-film bombs. But in China, foreign sales are essential, which is why in the past five years the country’s erstwhile art-house directors have turned out a host of lush, artsy, martial arts epics geared to please overseas audiences.

    Ironically, though, “made for foreigners” is the blackest insult that can be directed at a Chinese film (or any other work of art, for that matter). To an extent, this is a combination of both pride and insecurity in Chinese culture as it opens to, and confronts, the West. The first group of Chinese directors to emerge after the Cultural Revolution was the so-called Fifth Generation, which was concerned with accurate depictions of rural Chinese life. Films such as Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1989) were quickly compared by foreign cineastes to the work of the Italian neo-realists of the 1940s and 1950s; however, unlike the neo-realists, the Fifth Generation directors never received a populist embrace in their home country. For example, Chen Kaige’s masterpiece, Farewell, My Concubine (1993), is still little known in China. Meanwhile, Zhang Yimou’s films were unpopular there (though this has changed with his recent international success), and heavily criticized for their unflattering portrayal of the Chinese countryside.

    However, Fifth Generation films were generating critical raves on the international festival circuit and in art houses, and also doing serious business. Red Sorghum won the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, while Farewell, My Concubine is one of the most successful Chinese films ever released overseas. Yet as the art house filmmakers prospered internationally in the 1990s, China’s domestic film market shrank, overwhelmed by a flood of foreign films (particularly from Hong Kong and Taiwan) that were more technically proficient and entertaining than the country’s own. So Fifth Generation filmmakers focused even more on generating publicity and awards and thus winning audiences and revenues from abroad.

    It was a risky strategy. Prior to 2000, the last Asian language film that was a major commercial success in the United States was Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon in 1973—and that was a Hong Kong production. Though most Americans refer to Hong Kong and China interchangeably, the two entities are linguistically, culturally, politically, and cinematically distinct. Known for their superbly choreographed action and fight scenes (as well as an irritating brand of slapstick), Hong Kong films have a highly developed visual style that continues to influence both Chinese and American cinema (The Matrix films were choreographed by a Hong Kong Chinese.) Chinese film, by comparison, is still in its youth, and remains a follower.

    That may partly explain the Chinese public’s near-insatiable appetite for imperial martial arts epics. According to Xinhua, China’s state news agency, twenty percent of all Chinese television dramas in 2004 involved “Chinese legends,” and that’s not counting all the imperial martial arts sitcoms, feature films, and documentaries. More so than Westerns in the United States, the martial arts period piece—which involves emperors, lavish period costumes, and lots of kung fu—is a well-worn genre, and one that the Chinese see as very much theirs.

    Enter Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Made by Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee (whose retrospective is currently screening at Walker Art Center) and released in 2000, it’s the most successful ”Chinese” film in history, having banked $213 million worldwide and $128 million in the U.S. Made in China with a Hong Kong and Chinese cast, the film appeared on the top ten list of virtually every critic in the U.S., landed ten Oscar nominations, and was declared a “Martial Masterpiece” by Time. In China, however, the reaction was nearly the inverse, with many critics dwelling upon the fact that the film’s story line was utterly hackneyed, even by the perpetually low standards of Chinese network television. Worse still, some of Lee’s Hong Kong cast spoke poor, heavily accented Mandarin that elicited derision in both theaters and reviews. Above all, Chinese critics, audiences, and even some directors seemed to resent the fact that someone from Taiwan—the island is considered a renegade province on the mainland—had profited from an overseas market by exploiting the most Chinese of genres.

    Despite the critical scorn, a $128 million U.S. box office is pretty much impossible to ignore in a country where a $5 million domestic box office is respectable. So when Zhang Yimou came out with Hero in 2002, no one in China was surprised that he tailored it for the American audience thrilled by Crouching Tiger. Even more than that film, Hero relied upon the tropes and clichés of Chinese period television; and again, the enthusiasm of Americans for this film was greeted with confusion in China. When I saw the film on Christmas Eve in a Shanghai theater packed with families, there were plenty of moments in which the dialogue elicited groans and snickers. While American critics praised the film’s three-stage retelling of Emperor Qin’s planned assassination, their Chinese colleagues rolled their eyes—for audiences in the country, the tale was as profound as a ride into the sunset at the end of a Gunsmoke episode.

    Zhang had also hired a Hong Kong fight choreographer and a sprawling team of foreign special effects artists whose credits range from Titanic to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, while Hero’s U.S. distributor, Miramax, came up with a savvy marketing plan that included a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” tag and targeted both the art house audience and the action-loving cineplex crowd. The result was a $57 million gross in the U.S., helping to make Hero the most lucrative Chinese film ever. “One of Zhang Yimou’s main goals is to recapture the Chinese made film-market share,” said Zhang Weiping, who produced the director’s most recent martial arts epic, House of Flying Daggers (2004).

    The inevitable accusations that Zhang had sold out may be fair, but the truth is that Chinese cinema sold out to foreign audiences long before Hero—and it did so only to sustain itself. From the beginning, the careers of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have been defined by the need to please foreign critics and award committees, which often serve as gatekeepers for directors seeking access to the art-house screens; with their martial arts films they have merely shifted to another, more profitable genre. Hero and The Promise are no more meant for Chinese audiences than Red Sorghum and Farewell, My Concubine. At the least, unlike the gritty plot of Red Sorghum, the martial arts epics are actually representative of the sorts of stories that many Chinese like to watch in their spare time. Ironically, what is new and interesting in these films are the visual innovations that large budgets (and foreign box offices) make possible. The lush cinematography of Hero was unprecedented in the genre, as were its gorgeously choreographed fight scenes. Though I have yet to notice Chinese network television mimicking Hero, there is no question that the film has set a new visual standard in the genre, much as John Ford did for the Western.

    Zhang Yimou recently confirmed that he is in pre-production on a contemporary comedy that will star Jackie Chan, the international kung fu/comedy superstar who is also a Hong Kong citizen. Several days after the announcement, Chan wrote in his blog, “When you watch Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern … the most brilliant dialogue might become a YES or NO when translated into English.” Nevertheless, he is optimistic about prospects for genres of Chinese film other than martial arts epics. “If the worldwide audience starts[s] to learn Chinese due to their love of martial arts films,” he continued, “then they would not only appreciate martial arts films in the future, but can also appreciate Chinese dramas.”

    With all respect to Jackie Chan, that seems doubtful. My DVD dealer says that the Chinese director most popular with his customers is Feng Xiaogang. He is largely unknown outside of China, because he has made a career (and a small fortune) writing and directing earthy comedies with distinctly Chinese humor. Last year’s domestic hit Cell Phone, for example, documented an illicit affair largely conducted via text messaging. Since text messaging is a national pastime, the film’s humor was so linguistically and culturally specific that even foreigners with vast experience speaking Chinese were simply unable to laugh along. It would be like screening Fargo, in English, for a fluent, English-speaking Shanghai audience.

    Even without a foreign box office, Cell Phone grossed $6.3 million in China last year and was considered quite lucrative. But China’s most popular director of comedies seems to have become restless for a larger payout. Following Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Ang Lee down the martial arts path to riches, he secured $15 million in financing from Chinese and foreign investors to make The Night Banquet, a martial arts retelling of Hamlet—set in the Tang Dynasty’s imperial court.

  • Who Are the American Muslims?

    A Saturday night in late summer and downtown Rochester was completely dark except for an exceedingly lively block of First Avenue Northwest. At one end, a tall Somali man leaned into the window of a black Chevy Cavalier and spoke with a woman wearing a red silk hijab, or headscarf. Behind the Cavalier, three Somali teenagers, one in a UNC basketball jersey, clustered around a Jeep Cherokee, inadvertently blocking cars trying to emerge from a parking lot. Meanwhile, men in their twenties chattered loudly in the lot while older men conversed on the corner of Broadway.

    Around nine o’clock, the street-side conversations began moving toward the entrance of the Rochester Islamic Center, a nondescript former VFW hall distinguished now only by the sweep of Arabic across a sign over the door. In the tiled entryway, the thin face of a Somali woman in a purple hijab peeked down from over the rail on the second floor. Inside are cubbyholes filled with footwear, and then a long, open space defined by a large window, several support columns, and strips of red carpeting angled in the direction of Mecca.

    A Somali man sat up front, a copy of the Koran propped between two worn blue velvet cushions in front of him. A dozen other Somalis in various states of repose listened intently to his lecture. Other men arrived and arranged themselves in line with the carpet strips. Some stood and prayed, hands clasped over their stomachs; others sat silently or chatted. Shortly after 9:30, a young Somali in a Fubu basketball jersey stepped to a microphone at the front of the room and turned toward Mecca. “Allahu akbar,” he began, chanting the call to prayer.

    When the call was finished, Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud, a thickly bearded, light-skinned thirty-six-year-old in an emerald green thobe (an ankle-length cotton garment), entered. He took a seat on a rolling office chair and looked out at the congregation. Three older Somali men approached him, and they chatted amiably. Around 9:50 they drifted away, and Mahmoud rose and turned toward Mecca.

    Approximately a hundred and fifty men rose with him, standing in straight lines along the carpet. Young boys stood next to their fathers; teenagers stood with their friends. At the front, older Somalis in skirts and turbans held dark wooden prayer beads, next to robed, stately Arab men whose faces were weathered in ways mostly unknown in Minnesota.

    Islam is America’s fastest growing religion, and it seems especially apparent in Rochester. In the early 1990s there were fewer than fifty observant Muslims living in the city, most of whom were South Asian; organized prayers were held only on Fridays, in makeshift accommodations. Today approximately five thousand Muslims live in the city, the vast majority of whom are Somali; they have the option of praying five times daily in a mosque owned by their community, presided over by an esteemed imam trained in Islam’s most distinguished university.

    Yet aside from the now-commonplace sight of Muslim women in hijabs and other coverings in Rochester’s public spaces, Islamic practice and tradition has largely been invisible to non-Muslims in Rochester, hidden behind converted spaces with distinctly American contexts such as the old VFW hall.

    That will soon change. Next year, the Rochester Islamic Center will be demolished to make way for a four-million-dollar mosque designed to hold eighteen hundred worshippers. Funded by a Saudi Arabian visitor to the Mayo Clinic and designed by a Syrian architect, the three-story building will be topped by a large dome and flanked by minarets that, at 180 feet tall, will rise prominently on Rochester’s skyline. Inside, ample and desperately needed classrooms, a library, and meeting areas are planned, along with a two-story prayer hall. When complete, it will be the first new mosque ever constructed in Minnesota.

    The Rochester Islamic Center is already unique due to the international community of Muslims who worship there. “Other Islamic communities will have national mosques,” explained Zaid Khalid, the president of the Rochester Islamic Center’s board. “In the Twin Cities, for example, there are Somali mosques.” That is largely a result of demographics: The Twin Cities are home to more than a hundred thousand Muslims. “But we only have enough Muslims for one mosque in Rochester,” said Khalid. An equally important factor is that the Somali population of Rochester fluctuates on the basis of job opportunities; as a result, educated professionals from South Asia and the Middle East, like the Pakistani-born Khalid, have largely assumed the leadership of the center. “But even with so many different cultures, we are quite unified,” Khalid concluded.

    Since 1994 the Rochester Islamic Center has been a religious institution concerned exclusively with spiritual matters. Though it has been asked, on occasion, to help assimilate immigrants, its leaders have neither the desire nor the means to do so. “That is something for the social services,” Khalid said. “And one-on-one contact.” Yet immigrant Muslims have quickly become an important and permanent part of Rochester’s cultural and civic life. And while many Americans question whether Muslims can ever truly assimilate, Rochester’s Muslims have spent the last ten years developing specifically Islamic approaches to being Americans.

    Thus, as the new Middle Eastern-style mosque rises over Rochester’s staid downtown, the city’s Muslims hope that the structure—like them—will not be viewed as something to be feared or avoided, but approached as a resource. “We hope that it will attract people to learn more about us,” said Shareef Alshinnawi, a spokesman for the Rochester Islamic Center. “We hope it means guests, speeches, classes, and understanding. We’re part of this community, and this new building in the middle of downtown will be one symbol of that fact.”

    Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud swept into the library of the Rochester Islamic Center in his green thobe and handed me a Diet Pepsi. “Please,” he said, and gestured for me to sit. At first we spoke a bit of English, which he is studying, but while being interviewed he preferred his native Arabic, and a translator soon arrived. “From the beginning, there is one thing that I would like to explain a little deeper,” he said. “The word ‘imam’ can fit anybody who memorizes the Koran and can lead the prayers. But that person doesn’t need to understand the Koran.” As Mahmoud explained it, an imam differs from a scholar. “The scholar is the person to be asked if you have something to know about Islam, its texts and laws.” He paused and chuckled, his dark eyes offset by a high brow and a wry, cocked smile. “Actually, the first time that I was called an imam was in America.”

    Mahmoud was born in Cairo, the oldest of six children, and grew up in a religiously observant family. “It was one of my father’s wishes that I become a scholar,” he recalled. “He used to invite scholars to the house, befriend my teachers, buy books for me. But in the end it was God’s will.” Mahmoud received an intensive religious education, in addition to a secular one, before entering Al-Azhar, the world’s oldest university and still the most distinguished source of scholarship in Islam. There he excelled in studying fiqh, or Islamic law. He graduated with a degree in High Islamic Studies and began serving at a Cairo mosque. “I wanted to continue with my studies at some point,” he recalled. “But circumstances prevented it.”

    Soon after, Mahmoud met an Egyptian physician who was then in the midst of a Mayo Clinic fellowship. At the time, the Rochester Islamic Center was looking for an imam to lead its prayers and serve as a scholar to guide the mostly Somali congregation. And so, upon returning to Rochester, the physician apprised the board of the young scholar’s qualifications. An invitation was soon extended. “At first, I decided not to come,” Mahmoud admitted. But then he was praying with one of his teachers and mentioned it. “Do you think that they can profit from me? That I can give them something?” His teacher, a renowned scholar, answered: “Definitely, with all assurance.” Mahmoud smiled bashfully as he recounted this. “So that made the decision.” He arrived in Rochester in January 2001.

    Fortuitously for his followers in Rochester, one of Mahmoud’s scholarly interests is a branch of fiqh concerned with applying Islam to the particular place and circumstances in which a Muslim lives. “The main point is not to have rigidity in religion, to remain flexible enough to be practical for everyone,” he explained. “So long as it doesn’t distort or alter or suggest improper interpretations of the Arabic text.” The caveat is a sensitive one, particularly in light of the extreme political interpretations to which Koranic verses have been subjected in recent years. But Mahmoud, as a graduate of Islam’s greatest university, has the standing and credential to make those judgments. In his modesty, Mahmoud waves off the suggestion that he has achieved the status of scholar, but the reality is that his congregants in Rochester treat him as one, bringing him questions of religious importance. “To an extent, I also serve as what would be called an Islamic judge back home,” he explained. “Performing marriages and also resolving conflicts and disputes.”

    Unlike an Islamic leader in the Middle East, Mahmoud has the added responsibility of teaching his followers how to reconcile their religion with aspects of American culture with which it is incompatible. In general, Mahmoud tends to discuss assimilation more in terms of cultural assimilation—for example, the incompatibility of certain Somali social mores with American ones. And on the particulars of how American culture interacts with Islam, he tends to emphasize the commonalities: “If something is prohibited in Christianity, then it is prohibited in Islam, too, with only a few exceptions of law.” Mahmoud’s ecumenicism has its limits, though, particularly when Islam disagrees with what is allowed in Christianity, or in American culture. “For example, yesterday an Egyptian asked to me to authenticate his wedding to an American woman,” Mahmoud recalled. “It was a new situation for me, because most of the marriages that occur in the mosque are Somali.” He attended the wedding, “but the moment I saw the champagne bottle, I immediately said, ‘Thank you’ and left.” He sighed with exasperation at the overt transgression of Islam’s prohibition of alcohol. “It is their tradition, it is a free society, and it is up to them. But by Islamic law I had to leave the moment I saw the champagne.”

    Twice a week, Mahmoud is tutored in English by an elderly Franciscan nun at the Assisi Heights convent. “We don’t speak much about religion,” he said. “Mostly we study English.” His four-year-old son, meanwhile, has entered Rochester’s public schools “so that he can learn English better and become assimilated.” Mahmoud has reservations about the American public school system—“there is no religious teaching, and a lot of times there is no moral or even ethical teaching”—but he is adamant that the best way to teach Islam to his children is by example. “If you tell them to do things, maybe they’ll do it,” he says with a father’s knowing smile. “But if they see you doing it, they’ll follow your example.”

    The call to prayer was suddenly audible through the wall that separates the library from the prayer hall. “Of course, we cannot really live Islam completely or to the fullest except in a Muslim society. And we will never be able to fully enjoy the mercy and the fruits of Islam except in a Muslim society.” There is a long pause and he smiles broadly before continuing. “Although that’s the case, we can also live in a non-Muslim society and by the will and grace of God still remain on the straight path and practice our religion to the fullest extent possible.” He paused to check his watch. “I do not believe that there is a perfect society in this world,” he concluded. “You always have good and bad people in every society. And you must always try to get the good part.”

    Rana Mikati answered the door of her split-level home on the north side of Rochester in a flowing black abaya. Her eyes were nearly as dark as its silk, contrasting with her red lipstick. She is forty-one years old, the mother of three children, but her fine skin and charm suggested a much younger woman. “Come in, come in,” she said, gesturing into her living room.

    Mikati served Turkish coffee spiked with cardamom. “I was born in Tripoli to an Islamic family,” she recounted in lightly accented English. “We were conservative, but not fanatic. We respected the rules of the religion.” They were also distinctly modern. Like other women in her family, Mikati wore the hijab primarily when she entered the mosque.

    Yet today, in America, Mikati welcomes strangers to her home wearing a garment that covers everything but her face, hands, and the exquisite jewelry on her wrists and fingers. “It is true,” she said with a nod. “I came to America and became more Islamic. It is how I remained connected to my culture.” Then a young girl strode into the family room in her pajamas. She glanced at her mother, yawned, and left. Mikati laughed, shook her head, and continued. “When I took the oath of citizenship the judge told me, and everyone at the ceremony, something very important,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Assimilate, but never forget your heritage. Because that is what makes this country rich.’ ” She sipped her coffee. “This is what we call jihad,” she said, her accent softly melodic as it glided over the Arabic word. “The real jihad. To find your identity. And to fight for that identity.”

    Mikati’s experience as an American and a Muslim is not uncommon. In many ways, in fact, it is distinctly American: Generations of immigrants to America have strengthened their faith as a means of maintaining a connection with their native culture. “When people ask me how I accommodate my life to America …” Mikati shrugged with a bewildered smile. “I don’t know how to answer. Islam is just a way of life. And I don’t see it as incompatible.”

    Mikati left Lebanon in 1993 when her husband, Amer, a pharmacist educated in the United States, was offered a job in Ohio. Like others before them, the Mikatis formed some of their first social bonds around an immigrant religious community. “We attended a mosque that had a very international following,” Mikati recalled. “And that was interesting because I always thought of Islam as being Middle Eastern.” The mosque was not just faith, but also social connections and, for Mikati, a place to maintain her “native Arabic tongue.” It was a catalyst for her evolving sense of her ethnic and religious identity, and she began to consider wearing the hijab. “The most important thing is to have the courage,” she explained. “Especially in a culture where it is not common.” Her husband encouraged her, but with two caveats: “He said, ‘Don’t change the way we live, and don’t cocoon yourself.’ ”

    On the first day of Ramadan in 1998, Mikati dressed in an abaya and went to the mall. “I felt more exposed than if I was naked,” she said. But whatever defensiveness she felt soon gave way to a distinctly Islamic female identity. “I avoid fashion entirely—how much more liberated and feminist can I be?” Indeed, for Mikati, the hijab is hardly a symbol of separateness or isolation. “Look, there is much more to being American than wearing cowboy boots,” she said archly. “And Hawaiian shirts.” She retrieved an issue of Rochester Women magazine that featured her on the cover in a black abaya, and Arij, her sixteen-year-old daughter, dressed as an American teenager. “When I was sixteen, I was not covered, so the choice is hers,” Mikati said. “And I pray for her.”

    When Arij Mikati enters a room she walks with a smooth confidence, even if she is stepping on the cuffs of her extra-long jeans. Her hennaed hair falls to her shoulders; in bearing and features, she is her mother’s twin. For her, the decision to cover herself is a matter of timing and courage. “You know, there’s already so much drama in high school,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And I don’t know that I’m really ready to add this drama, too.” Yet Arij hopes to cover herself before she begins college. She will do so mainly because it is a requirement of her religion; yet, in a uniquely American way, Arij also says that it is partly a matter of principle. “I really like being respected for who I am, not for how I look,” she said, sounding like any other irritated, individualistic American teenager. “So if I’m covered I know people will judge me for who I am.” Nonetheless, Arij is keenly aware that the hijab alters how a Muslim woman is perceived in her adopted culture. “It won’t make a difference for the people who knew me before,” she said. “But others are probably different.”

    The Mikatis moved to Rochester in 1998, when Amer accepted a job at the Mayo Clinic. Rana soon took a part-time job as a translator at the clinic and also became deeply involved in Rochester’s public schools. “Muslims in Rochester will tell you that raising their children in the way that they want is their number one concern,” she explained. “It is a constant challenge.” In meeting that challenge, she has what she calls “my red lines”—rules restricting her daughters’ participation in certain rites of American adolescence. Though Arij’s friendships with both females and males are not restricted, the teenager is prohibited from having a boyfriend or dating. “It is not our way,” Rana Mikati said. “And it must be very hard upon her.” The conflicts between her daughter’s faith and events like prom can be especially trying. “This year she was invited by three different boys,” Mikati said with just a trace of pride. “But she was not allowed to go.” She took a deep breath. “And it was just heartbreaking.”

    There are approximately a thousand Muslim children in Rochester, and by force of their numbers they have transformed aspects of the city’s public school system. According to Mikati, most of teachers are at least aware of the cultural needs associated with Muslim students, including dietary restrictions, space and time for prayer, and staying home on Muslim holidays. In those instances where understanding does not exist, Mikati has become adept at finding solutions. “There are Muslim families who don’t want anything to do with America because they think the American kids are ‘too loose,’ ” she explained. “But if you think that they are too loose, I say, ‘Don’t isolate yourself. Go to the school board.’ ”

    At six o’clock on a weekday evening, the second floor of the Rochester Islamic Center rang with the voices of fifty Somali children dashing around the room. Boys occupied the far end, clustered in small, loud groups mostly unconcerned with study; at the opposite end, girls dressed in a rich palette of abayas sat in study circles with a few older, willowy Somali women.

    Siyad Lohos sat in his beige thobe at an old card table in the middle of the room, where the students formed two lines—one for boys, one for girls. As they waited, some chatted and played, while others practiced reciting whatever they were asked to memorize for the day. When they reached Lohos, they handed over their notebooks and recited for him, often two at a time. Even though Lohos seemed focused on a group of roughhousing boys, he corrected the errors of the students as they recited, almost automatically.

    “I had memorized the Koran by the time I was fourteen or fifteen,” he recalled as he reclined on the floor after class. “I started when I was six.” A native of Somalia, the wiry twenty-nine-year-old received his high school education and two years of college in Egypt and then joined his family in Rochester in 2000. Since then, Lohos has taught Koran to the children of Rochester’s Somali immigrants. When I asked him the difference between teaching in Somalia and Rochester, he shrugged and looked around the room. “They are different.” When pressed him, he smiled broadly, stretching the goatee on his chin. “Look, in Somalia they are more serious because there are not so many distractions. They will learn Koran nearly full-time.” In Rochester, however, Lohos might see the students twice per week for a couple of hours during the school year. He is well aware that their public school education is a priority. “In Somalia, they might memorize a page per day,” he explained. “But here, if I teach them one aya [verse] today, they’ll maybe forget it tomorrow.” He shrugged. “When they grow up, maybe they will lose the Koran.”

    Across the street in a Somali cafe, Mahmoud Hamud, a board member of the Islamic Center, nodded when I mentioned the less intensive Islamic educations received in Rochester. “Back home, kindergarten was Koranic,” he acknowledged with crossed arms. “But here you want the kids to be ready for school because this is where they will live.” According to Hamud, it’s necessary to find a balance. “If your kid becomes too American, you might say, ‘What happens to me when I’m old?’ ” His eyes widened and the fifty-one-year-old shook a finger at me. “In Somalia we don’t put people in nursing homes. So the older people worry what will happen to them if the kids walk away from their culture.” From Hamud’s perspective, this is not necessarily an issue of religion so much as culture. He acknowledges that many Somali Muslims feel uncomfortable with aspects of American culture that they perceive as incompatible with Islam and Somali standards of social modesty—but then again, according to Hamud, they also keep in mind who provided them with refuge during and after their Civil War. “What is closer to Somalia: America or the Middle East?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, the Somalis remember that it was the United States who helped them, and not the Middle East.”

    Hamud’s story is not that of a typical Somali immigrant. After moving to the United States in 1974 to attend Cornell University, he spent most of his early career running relief and development operations in Somalia. In the early 1990s, however, the civil war that drove refugees to the United States resulted in Hamud suspending his work in Africa and focusing his efforts on social services in Rochester. In that capacity, he was deeply involved in nearly every aspect of assimilating Somalis, including efforts to find them homes and jobs and reduce tensions in the public schools. “Things are much better than they used to be,” he said. “But still there are language issues and cultural issues, and the school district isn’t addressing them.” In September, 120 Somali youths in Rochester began to attend a Somali charter school. “Isolation is a concern,” he acknowledged. “But the alternative is worse. The reason these families moved to the United States is for a better life, and if the children are dropouts they won’t get a chance for that better life.”

    Significantly, Hamud and other Somali leaders in Rochester do not view religion as a serious impediment to assimilation. “Islam covers a lot of cultures,” Hamud explained. “Each has its own baggage, and often the baggage is the issue.” He stares across the room at a dozen mostly elderly men drinking tea and having animated conversations in Somali. “It’s really no different than if they were sitting in Mogadishu. Nine guys, and only one, the one who works for the clinic, knows English.” In a corner, a pretty Sudanese teenager with a bright red kerchief around her head rose from a prayer mat. Hamud turned and spoke to her in Somali. “I don’t speak Somali,” she answered in perfect English spoken with long, Minnesotan vowels.

    For Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud, the new mosque is not a momentous religious event. “From a spiritual point of view it has no significance,” he said, smiling, seated in the Rochester Islamic Center’s library. “The importance is that it will last longer than the current building.” He laughed loudly and glanced around the cramped library before continuing in a more serious mode. “The new building will draw more attention to the Muslims than it will to the structure itself,” he added. “So it will be more important to exemplify the proper teachings for our children, and to exhibit the correct attitudes to other people.” As the spiritual leader of the mosque, Mahmoud appeared perfectly comfortable with his role in shaping that more public face of Islam in Rochester.

    “Whether we like it or not, accept it or not, we are a part of American society,” said Mahmoud. “We work in American society. We pay taxes in American society. All of the American laws apply to us.” A Somali man walked in unannounced, but when he saw the sheikh was engaged, he quickly backed out. “But the Somalis—and all of the Muslims—they are trying to keep the cultural background that they came with.” He became animated. “So they have these groups of Somalis, or Southeast Asians, just as you—if you are a fourth- or fifth-generation Minnesotans—might have a German or Scandinavian group.” He raised his brow. “The difference is that a Scandinavian does not have all the restrictions that a Muslim has in the way that we get to know, and get close to, people.”

    Mahmoud is explicit that those restrictions are primarily related to interpersonal contact, and do not extend to civic engagement. When asked whether he believes that members of his community should be active in Rochester’s civic life, including serving as elected officials, he answers immediately: “We live here, so we should be involved and integrated,” he said. “It is important for us.”

    In January, Rochester Mayor Ardell Brede asked the City Council to consider beginning its sessions with a prayer offered by rotating members of Rochester area religious communities. The proposal was not adopted, but Brede plans to introduce it again, and if and when it is adopted, he intends to invite Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud.

    When asked whether he would accept, Mahmoud tilted his head skeptically: “There is a big cultural and religious difference in what we consider to be prayer,” he explained. “In general, we Muslims we start our prayers with ‘Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem’ [“in the name of Allah the most merciful, the most gracious”]. That is how we are ordered to commence everything, every event. What we do is formal, and a heavily religious prayer.” There is a long pause and then he continues with renewed enthusiasm: “I’m ready to make any prayer that would be of benefit to Muslims, Christians, whoever! Humanity in general!” He opened his hands wide and smiled. “We are members of this community.”

  • Love Knows No Borders

    Viewed from room 1238 of the White Swan Hotel, the jagged ten-story tenements of Guangzhou, China, are softened by smog. Below, the United States Consulate complex sprawls beside century-old British colonial structures. “Pretty good view, isn’t it?” asks Paul Stueber, an earnest forty-four-year-old drum instructor from Minneapolis. He packs a baby bottle into a blue backpack. Beside him, his wife, Laurel, a forty-year-old schoolteacher, holds their newly adopted daughter, Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, age approximately fourteen months.

    “You have our passports, Paul?”

    “Yeah, I think I’ve got everything.”

    Paul makes a last, quick scan of the room where they have spent four days awaiting Olivia’s immigrant visa. The bed is covered with toys. A crib stands beside it. A folder stuffed thick with adoption-related documents is on the dresser. The Stuebers ride a dimly lit elevator car to the ground floor and join five families with whom they have spent the last two weeks traveling southern China. “Hey, Laurel,” exclaims an exuberant mother from Stillwater, her arms filled with her own infant Chinese daughter. “How’s Olivia?” The Stuebers merge into a mass group status report on feeding times, sleep schedules, colds, parent-child attachment, and current levels of apprehension regarding the transportation of the group’s six newly adopted children on long international flights.

    Unnoticed, the elevator discharges a young Chinese businessman and his two elderly parents. At first they don’t hesitate at the sight of white faces (the White Swan is favored by foreign businesspeople), but when the mother notices the Chinese babies, she stops mid-step, mouth agape. She and her family whisper through astonished smiles, and begin a slow circuit of the group, gazing upon them as if they were fine statuary. “Fat and healthy,” the mother declares in Mandarin. “Very good,” she adds in English, with a thumbs-up that is reciprocated by one of the new fathers.

    The elevator opens again and out walks Shirley Hu, a diminutive China-based adoption representative for Children’s Home Society and Family Services, a Minnesota-based agency providing adoption services across the U.S. “Everyone have passports?” The families fall behind her in a line out the door and into the lush colonial elegance of Shamian Island. “Families always call me Mother Duck,” confides the thirty-one-year-old Shanghai native, her voice rising into a giggle. “I hate it!” She walks in rapid, evenly paced steps, shoulders back, chin raised, and she never looks back. “They will not let me out of their sight,” she says with a confidence derived from leading hundreds of adoption groups through China.

    They pass dozens of American parents strolling with newly adopted Chinese babies and bypass shops with English language signs (Jenny’s Place, Susan’s Place) jammed with overpriced souvenirs and laundry services priced to beat the White Swan’s. At a parkway, they turn left and approach a long line of visa applicants awaiting interviews at the Consulate. Shirley walks right past them and shows the guard her passport and appointment letter. Immediately, she and the group are cleared to continue into a low-slung building where bags are X-rayed and everyone walks through a metal detector before crossing a courtyard and entering the ten-story consulate building.

    Inside, past another security checkpoint, a sign announces “American Citizen Section; Adoption Unit; Department Homeland Security.” Arrows point upstairs into a thirty-foot-long room dominated by a service counter and, behind it, the Adoption Unit’s office cubicles. Approximately twenty other families are already in the room, awaiting the oath that completes their adoptions. Shirley’s families are ushered to a small window where a secretary checks their passports against the consulate’s documents. When this is done, an American woman emerges from the offices with a microphone. “You are to be congratulated on completing this process and adopting your children,” she says, her voice broadcast through the room. “There’s only one last hoop to jump through. Please raise your right hand.” She pauses. “Do you swear or affirm that the information you provided the consulate is true and correct to the best of your knowledge?”

    The room rumbles with unsynchronized yeses and I dos.

    “Congratulations. Have a safe trip home.”

    At the far end of the room Laurel smiles at Olivia and coos, “Congratulations, sweetheart.” Paul places his right index finger into Olivia’s tiny left hand. “We’re going home,” he says in a high-pitched baby-talk voice.

    U.S. citizens adopt more Chinese orphans than children of any other nationality except their own, and it is a growing phenomenon. Since 1995, more than thirty-three thousand Chinese orphans have been granted visas to immigrate to the United States; in 2004 alone, 6,910 Chinese orphans, including Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, were granted immigrant status. “It seems like everyone I know happens to know somebody who wanted to talk to me about what it was like when they adopted in China,” explained a mother who was part of the Stuebers’ adoption group. “This is just not so weird anymore.”

    Paul and Laurel Stueber are not unusual adoptive parents; Ya Qun Luo is not an unusual Chinese orphan. The process by which they were declared a family was long ago organized into a set of steps, particularly in China, that can be precisely charted on a timeline. But just like a healthy pregnancy, that predictable process inevitably acquired its own unique narrative and personality.

    Around the corner from Southwest High School in Minneapolis is a tidy white bungalow. Solar lanterns line the straight front walkway, and directly in front of the house, hostas and lilies poke out in symmetrical rows. Though close to a school, the yard is unmarred by plastic toys or stroller wheels or sidewalk chalk.

    There is, however, one small sticker affixed to the front door, reminding firefighters of the pets inside—two pampered cats. Laurel Stueber gently brushes them from the couch before joining Paul on the love seat with a cup of hot coffee and soy milk. On the coffee table are two photographs of the little girl whom the Stuebers have yet to meet but are already beginning to call their daughter. “That’s our baby, that’s our child,” says Laurel. “Now she’s real. You see her face, you know who she is,” she continues, becoming tearful. “The waiting is so much harder because you know she’s there, you want to see her and hold her and find out everything about her and all you have is what’s written on the paper. So we look at her picture every day, and we miss her. It’s hard. It’s hard to wait.”

    That same anticipation permeates the small corner bedroom that awaits Olivia Ya Qun. The walls are a glowing salmon color, and the sheer appliquéd curtains grazing the oak floor are pulled back to allow the sun to shine through white mini-blinds. Two antique wooden dressers are polished to a gleam, and in the corner near the window sits the fully dressed crib. Despite the loving appointments, the room is, more than anything else, occupied by emptiness.

    “We had tried for a few years to have a child,” explains Laurel, “and then I was diagnosed with endometriosis. I was thirty-eight.” After a dizzying introduction to all the options for fertility treatments, potential surgeries, and the attendant odds and risks, the Stuebers turned away. “You’re considered high-risk for pregnancy at my age, and so you’re told about everything that might go wrong,” she says. “We considered all that, and the fact that fertility treatments don’t always work. We knew it wasn’t for us. We felt more comfortable with adoption, and we were drawn to international adoption right from the start.”

    The retelling is so matter-of-fact it makes it sound as if the decision to forgo childbirth was easy and painless. It wasn’t. “I didn’t have to grieve, exactly, over deciding between fertility treatments and adoption, because I did have—I did have a child that was stillborn several years before that,” says Laurel. She is staring to her left, beyond the picture window, and her eyes are filled with tears again. The cat jumps up beside her. “I just didn’t want to go through—.” Laurel stops and waits until she can speak again. “I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time. I had to go through birth in my fifth month, knowing. We just let it go after that, we didn’t really try. I wasn’t ready. We wanted to make sure we were stable in our careers. We just said for now we’re going to go on with our lives and so forth. Then when we were finally ready to try again, nothing happened.”

    Doctors determined that the stillborn child’s kidneys had failed to develop due to a rare abnormality. “They said it wasn’t genetic, just one of those odd things. But it was such a devastating blow, and then when you hear all the scary statistics, all the things that can happen when you get pregnant at an older age—I just didn’t want to go through that again. We were ready for a child and it wasn’t that important that it be a biological child. We just wanted a child to complete our family.”

  • Church and State

    Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. during the legislative session, Chaplain Dan Hall hosts a two-hour prayer meeting. It is held around a long wooden table in Room 118 of the State Capitol building, just around the corner from the governor’s office. Attendance varies, averaging about twenty people who know Hall from his work as a voluntary chaplain to state legislators and staff. “Welcome, welcome,” he said one recent Wednesday, gesturing to the overstuffed chairs that surrounded the table.


    Among the attendees were four middle-aged women from a Cannon Falls prayer group, a handicapped man who said he had “left the gay lifestyle” twenty-six years ago, and Myrna Howes, the wife of Republican Representative Larry Howes. It was the group from Cannon Falls, however, that commanded Hall’s attention. They were intercessors—individuals who pray for specific goals or people, sometimes for years. “We’re praying for the churches and the union,” said a puckish member in a pink sweater.

    “Good,” Hall said, nodding, his wide smile casting sincere and fatherly approval on the older woman. “Good!” In his mid-fifties, Hall is a powerfully built man, with wide shoulders and a broad chest. Yet his toothy enthusiasm for faith and the faithful softens that potentially intimidating physical presence into warm charisma. “That’s just great,” he exclaimed.

    “We’ve also prayed for some barren women and had some success,” the woman in the pink sweater continued. “My forty-year-old daughter had a baby.”

    “I remember praying in the early eighties for the Berlin Wall to fall,” said Charlotte Herzog, the group’s leader. “Thinking that maybe it would happen in our children’s lifetime. But it only took six years!”

    Hall checked his Palm Pilot and then announced the order of business. “We’re going to have some legislators stop by and talk about their passions. Then we’ll pray for them.”

    Chaplain Dan Hall is not a state official, nor does he serve in any official capacity. Nevertheless, his voluntary ministry at the state Capitol, which is funded by tax-exempt contributions, is enormously influential with legislators motivated by conservative Christian theologies and teachings on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. According to Lonnie Titus, the full-time official chaplain to Minnesota’s House of Representatives, who was elected by its members, “Dan serves as an issues person on the Christian side at the Legislature. He has been a rallying force for the conservative Christians, and he’s done a great job at it, too.” Titus added, carefully, “I can’t do that because I’m a chaplain to the entire House. But I’m glad Dan is here because it’s a growing need.” Indeed. According to Titus, fully one-third of Minnesota’s legislators “allow religion to play the important role in their life—Jesus in particular,” and their numbers grow with each election.

    Steve Sviggum, the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, entered Room 118 with long steps and an enthusiastic smile. Hall greeted him with a handshake. Though shorter than the lanky Sviggum, Hall has a gregarious presence that gives up nothing in stature next to power. “Mister Speaker, I was hoping that you could tell us about your passions.”

    Sviggum crossed his arms and stood at the head of the table. “First of all, I want to thank you for your thoughts and prayers,” he enthused. “You are so important to legislators.” For the next several minutes he delivered an innocuous lecture on the role of the speaker. When he was nearly finished, a striking blond woman entered the room. “Hi, Jackie,” Sviggum said. “I bet you’re here to talk about Fetal Pain, the Taxpayer’s Protection Act, and Positive Alternatives.”

    Jackie laughed. “Why don’t you do it, Mister Speaker?”

    Sviggum winked at the group and explained, “Jackie and I see each other almost every day.”

    Dan Hall paused to introduce her as Jackie Moen, legislative associate and occasional spokeswoman for Minnesotan Citizens Concerned for Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion organization. “Anyway, the speaker’s time is very limited.” Hall said. “Are there any questions?”

    The man who identified himself as formerly gay raised his hand. “I know we lost some seats this year,” he began. “So what can we pray to get more Republicans in the House and Senate?”

    “I’m not one to be so bold as to say my party’s always right, and God is always on my side,” Sviggum answered. “But I fight to be on his side!” There were approving nods around the table and Sviggum continued with renewed enthusiasm. “I think we should pray for wisdom, principles, and ideas. Of course, we want like-minded people to stand with us.” Slowly, he warmed to the question, and finally ended with the hard numbers: “If you look at demographics, we should probably have seventy-four, seventy-five seats in the House.”

    With that, Hall stood again. “Who wants to pray for the speaker?” Two women from the Cannon Falls group reached out and grasped Sviggum’s hands. Hall maneuvered behind him and rested a hand on Sviggum’s shoulder. All closed their eyes. “Lord, anoint Steve’s words with your wisdom,” the woman on his right prayed. “Anoint him with strength to make your will known and real.” In response, the room was filled with spontaneous whispers. “Yes, yes, yessss!” The prayer lasted five minutes, and included blessings for the speaker, his family, his issues, and the Republican agenda. After the final “amen,” Sviggum smiled broadly. “I—I feel stronger,” he said breathlessly. “And more comforted.”

    Hall stepped forward to get Sviggum on his way. “I know the speaker has a busy schedule,” he said again.

    Sviggum nodded. “I sure wish I could spend my whole day with you,” he said. As he departed, he gave the room a big thumbs-up.

    ***

    The Town Talk Cafe and Coffee Bar is located around the corner from Main Street in the central Minnesota town of Willmar. It is a crowded, stifling place, where the coffee tastes like burnt water, the ceiling is yellowed from smoke, and dice tumble across Formica. The Town Talk is also where, for the last thirty-one years, Dean Johnson, the Democratic majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, has enjoyed his Saturday morning breakfast with friends that range from a bison farmer to the guy who plows his driveway (the latter refers to Johnson as “numb nuts” to visiting reporters). On a Saturday in March, the mood is jovial and a little raw. Everyone is the subject of a joke, and Johnson usually joins with a giggle totally at odds with his otherwise rich, stentorian voice and his fifty-seven years. Yet despite Johnson’s obvious affection for the venue and its patrons, he is not entirely present. In between ribbings about, say, some guy named Taco Olson, he surreptitiously checks his cell phone beneath the table. Nobody seems to mind, though, because it’s a wonder that Johnson has time for the Town Talk at all. In addition to being the majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, Dean Johnson is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, a brigadier general in the United States National Guard, and the National Guard’s top-ranking chaplain.

    Yet there is an ironic twist to Johnson’s accomplished career as a minister. In the Minnesota Legislature, his moderate Lutheranism, which he defines as “a religion of devotion and tolerance,” is the exception among religiously motivated Christian legislators. And so Senator Dean Johnson, once a self-described “Eisenhower Republican” and a long-serving Senate Republican leader, is now the most unlikely of Democratic leaders: a rural pro-life minister with an esteemed military career.

    “The divisions really started in 1993 with the gay rights amendment to the state’s Human Rights Act,” Speaker Steve Sviggum told me. “I think what happened was that Johnson had told his Senate [Republican] caucus one thing, and then proceeded to the Senate floor and did another.” In 1993, Johnson was in his eleventh year as a state senator, but only a year into his tenure as the Senate Republican leader, a post he obtained as a moderate, consensus candidate. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Republican Party had just elected a number of social conservatives to the Legislature, including current Senator Steve Dille and Senator Linda Runbeck (since retired). The clash was not long in coming. Early in the session that year, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced legislation amending Minnesota’s Human Rights Act to include gays and lesbians as a class protected from discrimination in housing and employment. As the Republican Senate leader, Johnson was widely expected to oppose it.

    “At the time, I really didn’t know what I’d do,” Johnson recalls as he drives through Willmar after breakfast. “But I kept hearing from people who were saying things like,”—here, Johnson’s voice drops—“‘My daughter … y’know?’” So, just before the speech, he jotted some notes based on personal experience onto a napkin. “As a Norwegian Lutheran,” he began, directly addressing the gay and lesbian community, “I simply do not understand what you do in your quiet times, in your moments of privacy.” Then, very quickly he shifted to a reflection on his role as a National Guard chaplain, and the 180 religious denominations recognized by the U.S. military. “I will tell you that some of these denominations I do not understand. I do not begin to understand their theology,” he continued. “But the fact remains that I took an oath of office that, as a member of the Chaplain Corps, it is my job and responsibility to ensure everyone—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheist—the free exercise of religion.” Concluding, Johnson returned to his service as a senator. “Even though I don’t fully understand the … homosexual lifestyle, I think it is prudent … that we vote as a majority to give rights to the minority.”

    The last frustrated minute of Johnson’s speech presaged the course of his split, seven years later, with the Republicans. As Republican leader, he found himself catering to a caucus whose agenda increasingly was devoted to social conservative issues, rather than the practical and pragmatic quality-of-life issues—such as transportation, housing, and education—that Johnson found more pressing. “We deal more with moral issues in the Senate than I did as a full-time parish pastor in Willmar,” he concluded. “I want you to think about that. I want the people of Minnesota to think about that.” Then, as now, he blamed some legislators for obsessing over social issues, distracting Minnesotans from more urgent needs.

    Johnson managed to remain the Republican Senate leader for most of the 1990s, but his unwillingness to legislate conservative social issues placed him at odds with the growing influence of social conservatives in the Republican Party. “Eventually, Dean wasn’t even welcome to walk in the parade with the [Kandiyohi County] Republican party unit,” recalled Democratic Representative Al Juhnke of Willmar. “They wouldn’t even hang his banners.” As the 2000 election approached, Johnson and other political observers in Willmar thought it likely that he would be challenged in the Republican primary. “And I just wasn’t going to subject myself to that,” Johnson told me.

    Even five years after his party switch, the bitterness toward Johnson has persisted among social conservatives. They view him as a traitor not only to his party, but also to the Lutheran church. In 2004, when Johnson single-handedly prevented legislation prohibiting gay marriage from reaching the floor of the Minnesota Senate, the sense of betrayal again became personal. “What’s so amazing is that Senator Dean Johnson, an ordained Lutheran minister, would actually be leading the charge against protecting the civil institution of marriage,” proclaimed Tom Prichard, president of the influential and conservative Minnesota Family Council. “What Lutheran and other Christian traditions say about the importance of marriage to society would lead one to think he’d be leading the charge to protect marriage from attacks.” Prichard’s comments are representative of the feelings that many legislators on the right have for Johnson. However, of twenty Republican legislators contacted for this article, only one—Speaker Steve Sviggum—would comment on Johnson for the record.

    Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting attracts a range of high-powered guests, including lobbyists, but the group is most animated when legislators stop in to visit and pray. Thus, when Republican Representative Larry Howes of Walker was introduced, everyone straightened in their seats. “What you’re doing makes a difference here at the Capitol,” Howes began. “It may not always seem that way, but I can assure you that your prayers are heard.”

    “What’s your passion?” Hall asked.

    “Politics,” Howes answered, before transitioning into a detailed policy discussion about what’s really on his mind—namely, a nursing home in his district that is in danger of losing its state funding. “It’s a big payroll, and the loss of that would devastate our local economy,” he said.

    The formerly gay man raised his hand. “Should we pray that the governor will sign the bill for the nursing home?”

    “Sure,” Howes replied. “Yeah.”

    He then launched into another passion, concerning a letter someone had sent to Republican Representative Paul Gazelka, which disapproved of his support for a measure that would ban gay marriage. According to Howes, the author works for the Crow Wing County Human Services Department. “And I want you to know that I’ve already looked into de-funding that agency,” he announced with a pointed look at Hall.

    According to an online resume, Dan Hall has no formal religious training nor even a formal ordination, despite serving as an assistant pastor, administrative pastor, associate pastor, and senior pastor to four congregations dating back to 1982. This is not unusual. Among some Pentecostals and members of other independent, evangelical denominations, there is an institutional suspicion of formal religious training, and many of their church leaders are not ordained, at least not in accredited seminaries or divinity schools. Instead, they are accepted as spiritual leaders on the basis of their faith, leadership, and charisma. Hall, a married father of eight, seems to have established himself in that tradition and done quite well. In addition to being founder and executive director of Midwest Chaplains and its Capitol Prayer Network, he is city chaplain of Burnsville, where he ministers to police and emergency services personnel.

    Hall claims his voluntary ministry at the Capitol began after House Chaplain Lonnie Titus told him “he couldn’t handle it all on his own.” In contrast, Titus claims that Hall approached him about getting involved at the Capitol. Regardless of whose idea it was, nobody disputes that Hall’s Capitol ministry began in the fall of 2001, when he stationed himself outside the Senate chambers and introduced himself to members. Four years later, his routine hasn’t changed much. “I come down to the Capitol after the traffic,” Hall explains. “And I begin my route.” He starts on the top floor of the State Office Building. “I peek my head into offices, say hello to staff and legislators and just see where that goes. I see what I can do to help, and I always try to bring God into it.” When he is not busy with the individual needs of legislators and staff, Hall conducts “prayer tours” of the Capitol for groups interested in praying at the usual tour stops, such as the Senate chambers.

    Hall also maintains an email list of “Capitol intercessors” whom he contacts with specific prayer requests when a “moral or spiritual issue” such as abortion, gay rights, or methamphetamine use arises. “I’ve been told that because I’m a chaplain I must be a Republican,” Hall admitted. “I’m more conservative, yes, but really what I’m doing is based on Biblical truth. I call it ‘political evangelism,’ but it’s not politics.”

    Lonnie Titus disputes Hall’s depiction of his ministry. “I serve as a chaplain to all of the people [at the House of Representatives],” Titus explained. “But Dan, he’s the front guy if you’re pro-life, pro-marriage.” The distinction is important and legal. For Dan Hall’s ministry to be granted federal 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization it must meet several criteria, one of the most important being that it “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”—even, presumably, if that means influencing God to influence legislation. Bluntly, the regulations prohibiting religious organizations from explicit political advocacy do not allow for much interpretation, and Hall—otherwise a literalist in Scriptural matters—knows it. “A lot of pastors don’t stand up for issues and that’s how we got into the mess that we’re in today,” Hall said. “They’re all worried about losing their ‘tax-exempt.’” Intentionally or not, Chaplain Dan Hall and his supporters at the Legislature may be redefining the boundaries of religious political advocacy in Minnesota.

    ***

    Calvary Lutheran Church in Willmar is a yellow brick building topped by a rounded copper roof and a single spire. For thirty-one years Dean Johnson has served as a pastor to its congregants. “It’s really been a sanctuary for me,” he explains as he opens the church’s back door, which has a fallout shelter sign posted on it. “From politics and the military.” Inside, a narrow, short corridor ends with doors that offer a glimpse into the church’s sanctuary. On the left, an American flag poster with “God Bless America” printed across the bottom is taped to a wooden door, which also bears an engraved plastic nameplate reading “Pastor Dean E. Johnson.”

    The walls of Johnson’s office are covered with certificates, awards, news clippings, and photos of Johnson with a range of political luminaries. A highboy is piled with Bibles, prayer books, condolence cards, and a board game called The Amen Game! Opposite, two desks are crammed with paperwork, more Bibles, more prayer books, photos from confirmation classes, an open can of Mountain Dew, and an unopened bag of Fritos. “In the spirit of the separation of church and state, I maintain two phones,” Johnson says. “One for the business of the state, and one for the business of the Lord.” They sit on the edge of a desk, one black, one white.

    Dean Johnson was born in Lanesboro, Minnesota, and grew up on the Johnson family farm, homesteaded in 1858. “You worked hard,” Johnson recalls, “from five a.m. until eight at night.” For grades one through six, he went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then graduated from Lanesboro’s public high school. Along with education and work, religion played a central role in Johnson family life. “I wouldn’t say we wore our faith on our sleeve,” Johnson explains. “We attended church every Sunday, and as children we’d have evening devotional time.” Johnson vividly remembers his mother hanging plaques with religious verses on the walls. “The religion was one of devotion and not of judgment,” he says. “It was one of grace, one of forgiveness.”

    After earning a business degree from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 1969, Johnson attended Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul and graduated with a Master of Divinity degree in 1973. During an internship at a parish in Seattle, he was seriously thinking about military life, particularly due to the Vietnam War. Fortuitously, he met a former Army chaplain who introduced him to the Chaplain Candidate Program. The requirements were straightforward: good grades, a successful physical, a background check, and the endorsement of a denomination (in Johnson’s case, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America). The duties of a chaplain, meanwhile, were complicated: “First and foremost, you ensure the free exercise of religion for all men and women in uniform,” he explains. “As a practical matter, you console members of the military and their families, officiate at memorials and funerals, officiate at weddings, teach courses.”
    Today, Johnson is a brigadier general in charge of all 752 National Guard chaplains. He reports directly to Major General David Hicks, chief of chaplains to the United States Army. “I work on doctrine, deployments, strategies,” Johnson explains. “I also work on reunion issues for returning soldiers, and chemical dependency issues, too.” Above all, Johnson is responsible for ensuring that every National Guard soldier has access to a spiritual advisor of his or her creed. “It’s our role to be accessible to every religious group,” explains Hicks in a phone call from Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “Dean’s a Protestant, not a Muslim, but he would doggedly pursue the Muslim chaplain if the circumstances demanded it.”

    Johnson spent more than one hundred days on military business in 2004; in addition, he spent five months in St. Paul fulfilling his duties as a state senator. Yet he still relishes his part-time role at Calvary Church, where he performs a range of duties, including baptisms, pre-nuptial counseling, weddings, and occasionally serving as preacher and liturgist. “Also, I speak to the Adult Education Forum,” he says.

    The forum is held after services in a large basement meeting room. On one end is a darkened chapel; on the other is a room where elderly congregants receive blood pressure checks. In the middle, about fifty elderly congregants are seated with coffee, bread, and jam. Pastor Johnson steps to the pulpit. Today’s topic is the grieving process, something Johnson has come to know intimately, all too recently. Avonelle, his wife of twenty-one years, died just three weeks before the forum, after a five-year struggle with breast cancer. Johnson stands with his hands crossed on the lectern and talks to the congregants—his congregants of thirty-one years—without notes. He speaks with a steady, riveting cadence. The cooks in the kitchen emerge and stand against door posts; the blood pressure technician emerges and takes a seat at a corner table. Johnson talks of “bringing emotions into sync with thoughts,” and then he opens Janis Amatuzio’s book, Forever Yours, and reads an account of a woman’s near-death ascent to the “dazzling light” of heaven. As he does, tears slip down his otherwise implacable face.

    “Now, the hard part.”

    Avonelle Johnson spent her last days in a hospice across the street from Calvary Lutheran Church. Eight days before she died, her husband was seated beside her bed when she suddenly told him, “It’ll be OK.”

    “‘What’ll be OK?’ I asked,” Johnson recalls. “And Avonelle said to me, ‘You know.’”

    Johnson didn’t, and so Avonelle continued. “I saw the bright lights. I saw my mom and dad.”

    Johnson, looking out at his congregants through tears, admits, “About that time, I start to look around. I’d only been drinking coffee!” He pauses, his posture rigid. “I start to look around and outside the white snow is soft and gentle. I looked outside and everything was OK.” He takes a deep breath and credits Amatuzio’s book with giving him the courage to talk about his conversation with Avonelle. Then his voice chokes, but he says with determination, “One day we will see the face of God and we will be reunited with our loved ones. That is the faith we live with.”

    Bishop Jon Anderson oversees the Southwestern Regional Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, including Calvary Lutheran Church. “I personally have found Dean’s journey—this journey of losing his wife—to be inspiring as I’ve walked it with him,” Anderson said to me. “Lutherans like to talk about callings. Well, I saw a man caring for his wife at a very difficult time and carrying on his other vocations.”

    After the forum, Johnson returns to his office and gathers his belongings. “You’ll never hear a political opinion from me on Sunday morning,” he says. “That’s for Monday morning.” Likewise, it is rare that Johnson will invoke faith at the Capitol; there, as a legislator, his primary passion is transportation funding. When I ask him to describe what he believes is the proper role of religion in public life, he lays out his priorities without a moment’s hesitation: “OK, first, what is in the best interests of the people of Minnesota? Second, what is in the best interest of my district? And thirdly, and most difficult, what do you or I think about it, in regard to policy, policy change, and what are the moral and ethical considerations that surround it?” He smiles and reverts to politics. “If you can justify to your bosses—namely, your constituents—why you think the way you do, and vote the way you do, you’ll be all right.” He has no further thoughts on the subject.

    I ask Johnson if he knows Chaplain Dan Hall, and his answer is a clipped, two-syllable slap: “Oh, yeah.” Though Johnson is not aware of Hall’s prayer meetings, he does know of a weekly Bible study gathering attended by roughly twenty conservative legislators, staff, and Hall in a third-floor State Office Building committee room. I mention to Johnson that I’d attended two of those meetings. In both cases, it included the reading of two New Testament chapters and a discussion that very much took it as given that the Scriptures were literally the word of God. “I went once,” Johnson says. “And the room was filled with judgment and an errant interpretation of the Scriptures.” When I suggest that the people in the room wouldn’t exactly agree with such sentiments, Johnson shrugs. “No one person, no one theologian, no one pastor has the corner on the market to suggest that they are all right and everybody else is a bunch of sinful suckers. I just don’t see theology and religion playing out that way, as evidenced by the 180 denominations I deal with in the military.” Johnson espouses tolerance as a philosophy, but he has a difficult time extending it in this instance. “I try to be accepting and respectful of those folks, but it’s when they cross the line and portray that they’re better than the rest of us, that their little corner of religious practice is better than the rest of us, that’s when I become—” Johnson catches himself. “Well, we’re going to live in a pluralistic society, and we do have freedoms and the Constitution.”

    ***

    The last guest at Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting was Duane Coleman, vice president for Development at the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center in South Minneapolis. Supported by organizations like Best Buy, ADC, and General Mills, the center is a $12.6 million South Minneapolis project designed to help inner-city youth acquire secondary-school educations. Duane Coleman has been a repeat guest at Dan Hall’s prayer gatherings, and when he arrived on this day, Hall encouraged him to describe the results of the prayers he’d received the week before.

    Coleman said that, before last week, only the Senate version of the new bonding bill included cash for the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center. “So I came last week and we prayed over this,” Coleman explained. “And somehow, through divine favor, the money ended up in the House bill, too.”
    A late arrival, a woman in the back of the room, raised her hand. “Is your group Christian?”

    Coleman nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

    “So what are we praying for today?”

    “Success in conference committee!” Coleman replied.

    Like many before him, Coleman stood before the group with his eyes closed as the Cannon Falls ladies and Myrna Howes prayed for him. “Lord, my husband is a legislator and I know he received a lot of letters on behalf of this saying it won’t do anything,” Howes intoned. “Well, I hope those letters to turn to dust.”
    With that, the meeting was over. The group quickly dispersed into dimly lit Capitol hallways filled with legislators on their way to lunch. Charlotte Herzog, however, stopped to tell me how much she appreciates Dan Hall’s ministry at the Capitol. “You know,” she said. “Prayer is just so much more effective than all those committee hearings and meetings.”

     

  • A New Job

    On December 1, a mandatory three-day orientation begins for newly elected members of Minnesota’s House of Representatives. It all starts with a jovial chartered bus ride to a conference center outside of Monticello. Meanwhile, back in St. Paul, fourteen defeated, soon-to-be-former House members will be closing up their offices as part of a disorienting, but nonetheless mandatory, exit process. “It’s quite a shock, that’s for sure,” says Representative Tom Rukavina of Virginia, who, in the course of a two-decade House career, has seen literally hundreds of members lose and leave. “But if you lose, you lose, and you’ve got to be realistic about it.”

    Practically speaking, Election Day is merely the beginning of the end for legislators suffering the humiliations of defeat. They still have to pack and check out. And so, at some point during the two months between Election Day and the convening of the new legislature, they will surrender their perks and privileges to the Office of the House Sergeant-At-Arms, which oversees everything from parking passes to office furniture. “Most of them are courteous about it,” says Shawn Peterson, the Chief Sergeant-At-Arms. “And for the most part they’re out by mid-December.” Before they leave, however, each departing member must also submit to an exit interview to ensure that all state property receives a proper accounting. “Everything is bar-coded at this point,” Peterson adds. “Because in the old days—say, twenty years ago, and I’m speaking anecdotally here—members may have left with some things that were not theirs.”

    Nevertheless, sentimental members may keep their nameplates, including the one attached to the voting board in the House chamber, because “they’re not valuable to the state anymore.” They are also free to keep their House IDs, which some choose to do because they want “to use them for identification purposes.” Offices and papers are packed up in taxpayer-provided boxes. “They’re provided as a course of business,” Peterson explains, somewhat defensively. “It helps the efficiency of the legislature to move the old members out so that we can get the new ones in.” Defeated legislators under the impression that their boxes of official papers might interest future historians had better clear out some attic space. “We’ve found that the Historical Society doesn’t want much of that stuff,” Peterson says. “Maybe if a member went on to become governor or president, they’d want it in hindsight.”

    Despite the humiliations of electoral defeat, most legislators eventually get around to exercising the one perk that they are allowed to maintain for life: floor privileges. “Members who have lost, it usually takes a little longer, but they still want to come back,” Peterson says. “Some even come back two or three times per session.” However, defeated members looking to cash in on that access should note that lobbyists, including former members who have joined their ranks, are prohibited from setting foot on the House floor.—Adam Minter

  • The Man & The Woman on The Hill

    A red sun is setting over the lake, its hue cast through the shutters of a rustic living room where a small television atop a white wicker stand is tuned to a Twins game. “Get some hits, damn it,” seethes the increasingly agitated sports agent on the wicker couch. “Crying shame.” The agent glares at a listless Twins hitter, stands abruptly in anger, and steps out to tend to his steaks on the outdoor grill. His son—the other lawyer in the room—remains on the couch reading the New Republic, shaking his head in parallel disgust.

    For six innings, Brad Radke, the Minnesota Twins’ ace starting pitcher for most of the past decade, has pitched a masterful game, giving up just six hits, no walks, and one run. “He’s pitching a Van Gogh,” his agent, Ron Simon, says as he stomps back into the room. “And they aren’t doing a thing to help him.” It’s true: Despite the ace’s ace start, Twins batters are getting smoked by a twenty-year-old fastball phenom in just his second major league start. Simon takes a seat on the couch and grabs a handful of jalapeño-flavored potato chips. “Drives me crazy.” Radke goes to the mound, and Simon leans forward, chomping angrily. “Upper right corner,” he demands with a clap of his hands. “Change-up.” He takes a swig from a bottle of James Page and then quietly, gently confides, “I love watching him. Especially when things are going well.”

    Truth is, things are going very well for Brad Radke. At age thirty-one, he is the finest pitcher—and the finest player—employed by the Twins in a decade. His ability to throw a ninety mph baseball sixty feet, six inches, and have it strike exactly where he wants it, is feared, admired, and very well-compensated. Four years ago, Radke signed the largest contract in Twins history. However, unlike Kevin Garnet, a celebrity athlete recognizable on the basis of his silhouette alone, the Twins’s highest-paid player is a low-key, shy, and even anonymous presence in Minnesota. Yet as the 2004 baseball season comes to an end, Brad Radke’s profile is about to rise. The Twins, on the verge of another division title race, will depend on him as never before to be their clutch big-game pitcher. As a sideshow, the team will also deal with the fact that Radke’s contract expires at the end of the season.

    A ruthless competitor on the field, away from it, Brad Radke is a soft-spoken and retiring husband and father of two sons.

    His wife, Heather, is a successful businesswoman in her own right. She already spends most of the year near her family in Tampa, Florida—a town, she will have noticed, with its own Major League baseball team. Though deeply supportive of her husband’s career, Heather is quite open about the stresses it can put on a family. As she and Brad prepare to decide whether they will remain in Minnesota, it is those concerns, as well as the baseball and salary issues, that will carry the discussion.

    “They’re gonna relieve him,” sighs Simon as Radke finishes the seventh. “No runs, they’ve gotta do it.” Disgusted, Simon returns to the steaks on his grill. Meanwhile, the camera slowly follows Radke from the mound into the dugout as the score at the bottom of the screen is momentarily pinned on his chest. His head is down, his lips are tight and angry. He walks in short, petulant steps, his wiry body strung tight with competition and frustration. This is a man who makes a living by throwing very hard things very fast at other people.

    At 7:20 on a Wednesday night, halfway through the first inning, Heather Radke and her two boys—eight-year-old Kasey and four-year-old Ryan—arrive at their seats behind home plate at the Metrodome, in the section informally designated for wives. She wears a black coat over a white blouse and black skirt. The boys wear warm-up suits, carry baseball gloves, and clearly want to be somewhere else, even if it is their father who is standing on the mound, throwing strikes. “They ask me, ‘Why do we have to watch it up here when it’s on TV downstairs [in the Twins’ family lounge]?’” she says in her South Florida lilt. “And I tell them, ‘Baseball’s not forever.’” Hers is a modest presence, the only suggestion of baseball-wife status being a diamond tennis bracelet that hangs loosely from her wrist as she hands money to the hot dog and Cracker Jack vendors. “After the second inning, I’ll take them down to the family lounge.”

    Heather Radke attends most Twins home games. “Brad goes to the park at one, so by seven I’m ready to get out.” As she watches, she tenses, and her hands are clasped tightly. Strikeouts and pop flies result in short, polite applause; hits, hit batters, and home runs result in sighs. Her approach to the game is more nerves than emotion, except when she sees Brad in danger. Late in the game, when he rushes home to make a defensive play against a runner, she grabs my arm in alarm and exclaims, “They almost hit him in the head!”

    The pitcher doesn’t seem to share his wife’s concern. He returns from home plate with a glare at the first baseman—a glare meant to acknowledge the superb role that the first baseman just played. Later, when the first baseman makes a phenomenal out, Radke gives him another steely gaze, this time accompanied by a harsh nod. And when the catcher makes an athletic stolen-base put-out at second, Radke gives the young player a glare, a nod, and a stab of his index finger.

    “That’s always been the question,” explains Heather. “How to put together the Brad on the field with the Brad at home.” As she fiddles with her tennis bracelet, Heather relates how, after Brad was injured in a game two years ago, she rushed to the locker room only to find him “in game mode, with that fire in his eyes.” Her eyes go wide and she gives a slight shake of the head. “That was weird. I don’t see that very often.”

    The yellow Cape Cod-style house sits on a narrow gravel road that runs a hundred feet off the Lake Minnetonka shoreline. Parked in the driveway is a black Ford Expedition with Florida plates. Through the home’s front windows it is possible to see a sunken living room, overstuffed couches, and a breathtaking panorama of the lake glowing in the early afternoon.

    A soft presence passes in silhouette and the door opens. Just over six feet, slight, in sweats and a T-shirt, he is a boyishly handsome young man with a shy smile. “I’m Brad,” he drawls, extending a very soft handshake. “C’mon in.” His face is unshaved, his hair is wet. His walk is a slow, lazy shuffle, his bare feet barely rising from the floor. He runs his right hand through his hair, and the sleeve of his shirt falls to his shoulder revealing the rest of his lithe pitching arm. Walking beside him is blond-haired Kasey.

    Heather approaches from the hallway in black sweats and bare feet. “Brad, why don’t you sit over there,” she suggests, gesturing toward the dining room, with its massive wooden table set beneath a swirling baroque ceiling and an ornate iron chandelier. Doing as he’s told, Brad comfortably slouches into a chair at the head of the table and props a knee up on the edge. Heather gets some bottles of Dasani from the pantry adjacent to the dining room, stops in the kitchen for some large goblets, and places them on the table. She is just a shade over five feet tall, but I would not describe her as small; she moves with a sureness that is big. When she sits, she leans forward, elbows on the table, her chin propped, monitoring the bashful, brief glances that her husband gives me.

    “My dad played college ball in Bemidji and Mankato State,” Brad explains. “I was born in Eau Claire.” The family moved to Florida when Brad was one. “When I was two, three, my dad says I was throwing things. Rocks.” There’s a pause, a shrug. “I guess I just liked to throw things.” When he was old enough to pitch, his father—a schoolteacher—coached him, suggesting an unusual wind-up that emulated the high leg kick of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. As for further instruction, Radke shrugs. “Just throw strikes.”

    At Jesuit High School in Tampa, Radke could not only throw strikes, but he could throw them at “ninety, ninety-one miles per hour.” Naturally, pro scouts were aroused by heat like that. But there was another factor: Radke had the uncanny ability to locate the ball wherever he wanted it. “People always ask me where I get that from,” he says with a shake of the head. “I don’t know. It’s just what I do.” Radke is unfailingly modest and terse about his skills, but it’s not just politeness. He wears his talent with a quiet confidence that precludes questioning it. When pressed to define what makes him successful, he is more inclined to credit factors like “the zone” than his years of practice and training. So, for example, when discussing what went into a win-streak, he explains, “When you’re in the zone, you just see things better.”

    Heather, a Tampa native, was a friend of Brad’s older sister, and she recalls herself “and a lot of pretty girls” being around the Radke household while he was in high school. Two years older, she didn’t initially see herself as a potential girlfriend. But as time passed, the attraction grew. “I was so outgoing,” she explains, looking directly at her husband.

    “And I liked his passiveness.”

    The ace remains impassive at this revelation.

    They started dating on the assumption that the relationship would continue while Brad was pitching at the University of South Florida. But in June 1991, he was drafted by the Twins and so began a four-year minor league career that went from Florida to Wisconsin, back to Florida, and then Nashville. “We took it day by day,” Heather recalls of their early relationship. “It was the only thing I could do. I didn’t really aspire to become a baseball wife.” Early on, there wasn’t much reason to believe in a future. For example, during his summer playing in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Heather saw him only once, despite the $500 phone bills. “Sure, I would’ve liked to have seen him more,” she admits. “But from the beginning, I always thought that baseball should come first.”

    Brad seems a bit embarrassed by Heather’s revelation of self-sacrifice, but he acknowledges that baseball had to be the priority if he was going to make it to the big leagues. “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie,” he concedes. “But I’m not saying she was a distraction. I just didn’t think I was gonna make the team.”

    “That’s not true,” Heather retorts. “You always told me you’d make it.”

    Brad smiles bashfully. “But I didn’t think that way. I really couldn’t think like that.”

    Heather persists, recalling a trip the pair took to Wrigley Field in Chicago during a break in the Kenosha season. “I remember standing outside of the stadium and asking, ‘Will you make it?’” she says, turning to her husband. “And you said, ‘Yes.’”

    Brad, still smiling, looks down at the table. “I don’t remember that.”

    In 1993 Radke was promoted to the Twins’ minor league team in Nashville, and Heather went with him. They were engaged shortly thereafter and married in 1994. “We weren’t stressed, but we were strapped,” Heather recalls. “We ate a lot of mac and cheese,” Brad adds. While Brad played, Heather worked in the fragrance department at Dillard’s department store, where she made more money than he did. Alone much of the time, she became close to the group of wives and girlfriends surrounding the Nashville team. “When the guys were gone, we’d go to the movies, do other things.”

    Brad helpfully adds, “They had their hen parties, that’s for sure.”

    Meanwhile, Brad was beginning to show the stuff that would get him promoted to the major leagues. In the middle of the 1994 season, he pitched three consecutive complete games while allowing a mere 1.69 walks per nine innings for the entire season. He was invited to spring training during the strike-shortened 1994 season, and he was finally called up to join the Twins in 1995. During his first major league appearance he managed to bean Cal Ripken—who was then in the midst of his record-setting consecutive game streak. “Afterward, Heather asked me how it went and I didn’t remember a thing,” he admits. “I still get nervous. If you don’t, there’s something wrong.”

    When I ask him whether he ever feels vulnerable on the mound, he answers: “You’re alone out there. It’s kind of like you’re king of the hill.” Slowly, he windmills his pitching arm, working out some of the stiffness that lingers from the previous night’s strong start. “You kind of have to feel that way. Above and beyond. It’s like you’re at war. Sometimes when I’m doing my thing, it’s like, ‘If I can’t get this guy out, it’s like taking food from my kids’ mouths.’”

    Beside him, Heather visibly flinches at this admission.

    “When you’re getting hit around, sometimes you try to throw harder,” he continues. “But the right thing is probably to pull back. You’re fighting yourself, and that’s the mental side of it. You and the hitter, too. It’s a mind game. Sometimes they give me a look before they get in the box, just to get an edge. And sometimes I’ll look at a hitter—” he pauses, with his boyish smile. “I try and look mean, but I know I don’t.”

    Modesty aside, Radke’s ability to control the ball with consistency is his strength as a pitcher. In more than two thousand innings pitched, Radke has thrown just twenty-four wild pitches. That averages to one misfire for every nine complete games. Over his entire career, Radke has averaged 1.68 walks per nine innings. The league average this year is 3.37.

    Yet statistics also tell a different, more frustrating story with Radke. Dating back to the start of his career with the Twins, his win-loss percentage has mostly not been as rosy as the team’s. (There was that memorable twenty-win season that marked him for greatness in 1997.) Why? For the past decade Brad Radke has had less run support than almost any other pitcher in major league baseball. Many of his best performances on the mound ended in frustration; the Twins lost by one or two runs. Just this year, Number 22 had a long run of beautiful seven-inning games by failing to put more than a single run across. In fourteen losses in which Radke started this summer, the Twins produced an average of just 2.4 runs per nine innings. For all other pitchers this year, the team has scored twice as many runs. This has been the anemic pattern for most of Radke’s career in Minnesota. It is this more than anything else that had him considering the possibility of leaving the Twins four years ago. Ever the team player, though, he refuses to place blame. “Run support,” he says with a shrug. “Yeah, it’d be nice. But I can’t yell at them for not scoring runs. And the flip side is that when you get a lot of runs, pitching gets harder.” He pauses, considering how to describe the subtle shift in the mental game. “In a one-run game, you’re in it for every pitch. If I have more runs, I might not pitch so well.”

    Nevertheless, there have been indications during the 2004 season that Radke is becoming frustrated by the lackluster bats of Twins hitters. In June, after a 4-2 loss in Tampa where he gave up nine hits, three runs, and one walk, the ever-polite Radke left the stadium without talking to reporters. Meanwhile, influential Twin Cities sports columnists and commentators began to publicly note that if Radke had benefited from even average run support, he’d be approaching a twenty-win season—or perhaps even a Cy Young Award. Things came to a head on July 31, after manager Ron Gardenhire pulled Radke in the seventh inning of a game against Boston. The move was a bad one. The relief pitcher gave up a run and Radke ended up with a “no decision” instead of a win. After the game, he trashed the team clubhouse and openly questioned Gardenhire’s judgment to the media. Agent Ron Simon, when asked if the lack of run support bothers Radke, answers simply, “Oh yeah, it ticks him off.”

    Radke’s first two years with the Twins were workmanlike. “From my point of view, I didn’t think they were so great,” he admits. But the Twins, well known for their thrift and willingness to develop low-paid players, allowed him to grow. By the start of the 1997 season, Radke was showing some consistency, but there was no indication that by midseason he would be on the verge of putting together one of the most impressive and unlikely twenty-win seasons by a major league pitcher in recent baseball history. The first month of that year was not strong for Radke. But after a particularly poor start in Texas, “I took a couple of beers from the park back to the hotel,” he recalls. “And then I won twelve straight.” That is as simple as it gets in explaining how a pitcher could supply a team with nearly one-third of its wins (twenty of sixty-eight) in a season.

    Now, approaching the peak years of his career, Radke not only is relied upon as the team’s ace starter, but he is also a model for younger pitchers, who, prior to his starts, can be seen reverentially watching his warm-ups. Carlos Silva, a young Twins starter, refers to him as “the professor.” Radke laughs when I mention this. “Yeah, and get three or four bad starts and they don’t call you ‘professor’ anymore. They start calling you something else.”

    Heather’s earliest memories of being a baseball wife are not altogether warm. At the time Brad reached the majors in the mid-1990s, the culture of the baseball wife was very much about projecting a wealthy, conservative image. “Wearing suits to games, things like that,” she recalls from the Metrodome’s stands during the middle innings. There was a hierarchy—and a rookie wife, naturally, was at the bottom of it. “The tone is really set by the guy,” she explains matter-of-factly. “And Brad was a rookie.” She recalls a meeting of wives where a woman announced “everyone we have pregnant this year.” Heather was seven months pregnant at the time. “But she didn’t mention me.”

    The culture has since changed, according to Heather. “There’s a lot more camaraderie among the wives, and over the last couple of years there hasn’t been a pecking order.” She pauses. “There was a wife a couple of years ago who would say things like, ‘Great, there goes my husband’s win.’ But that’s pretty rare.” Nevertheless, Heather keeps her distance from the other wives. “There’s so much that goes on in baseball and in your own marriage.” She smiles tightly, reflecting on what happens when very young couples are confronted with sudden wealth and fame. “And I learned very early to keep my mouth shut.” Watching as her husband stalks—yet again—from the mound, she adds, “I used to worry so much about being pretty enough, young enough. The women calling after Brad at games, as he’s getting off the bus.” She stops. “You know, it’s flattering now. But it’s only in the last four years I’ve had that maturity. Now I have more important things to worry about, like what kind of men my boys will be in spite of all these blessings.”

    She is particularly proud to relate moments when her sons seem to reject the glamour of the life that surrounds them, such as when Ryan “blew off” Derek Jeter in the family lounge. Yet she is quick to acknowledge the challenges inherent in parenting “baseball children.” “When Brad leaves for spring training [in February] I go through weeks of hell to the point I’m ready to call in counseling,” she jokes. “I’m effectively a single parent until we get up to Minnesota [in May].” Despite their Lake Minnetonka home, Heather spends only three months per year in Minnesota (during school summer vacations), but even the extended periods in Minnesota don’t make the child-rearing challenges any easier. “It’s the same thing during and after a road trip,” she explains. “Those first couple of days after Brad leaves or comes back, the kids are difficult. It sort of puts me in the unnatural role of being a dominant parent, and Brad gets to be the ‘good guy.’”

    The dynamic that Heather first accepted early in her marriage—baseball comes first—is still maintained. Days when Brad is pitching are sacrosanct around the Radke household: “We try to give him his space.” Heather doesn’t really discuss the game with him, or even acknowledge it until he’s almost out the door, when she’ll say good-bye with a “good luck.”

    Though there is no denying the importance of the money in Brad’s 2000 contract, Heather is much more likely to cite the “no-trade clause” that Simon negotiated against the wishes of Major League Baseball (at the time, it was one of only two in the entire league). “The money allowed us to take care of our family,” she explains. “But we’ve had so much certainty because of the no-trade clause. It allowed us to buy a house and let the kids see Minnesota. That’s been really great. Not many baseball families have had that kind of stability.”

    In conversations with Heather, or with Heather and Brad, the phrase “after baseball” recurs repeatedly. Both are aware of and comfortable with the fact that Brad will not be pitching at age forty. “And when baseball is over,” Heather says. “It’s over.” In other words, baseball will no longer come first, and Heather is preparing for the change. Three years ago she started a prestigious salon and spa in Tampa with her sister and mother. “I always said that once Kasey entered kindergarten, I wanted to regain some independence. I didn’t want to wait until after baseball.” In addition to overseeing her business, she also runs the Brad and Heather Radke Foundation, which was established in 2000 and is the only such foundation currently operated by a Twins player or family. Its contributions so far have followed Heather’s interests. “We took a tour of Hennepin County Medical Center in 2001, around the time they started cutting health care,” Heather recalls. “And I asked for a wish list.” That list resulted in a major donation to the hospital’s neonatal care unit. The foundation also supports families with children in treatment at the University of Minnesota’s pediatric bone marrow transplant unit and underwrites performing arts programs for low-income children.

    On a cool summer morning, Ron Simon stokes the kindling in the fireplace at his lake home. He’s relaxed in baggy jeans and a polo shirt; his son sits across from him, still reading the New Republic. In a sports-agency career that began in the 1970s, Simon has amassed a client roster that could serve as a short-list for a Minnesota Sports Hall of Fame: Molitor, Hrbek, Broten, McHale. “You know, the thing about Radke is that I’ve never had a guy so quiet,” Simon says, when I ask him what stands out about the pitcher. As for Heather, Simon just smiles. “You know, Brad isn’t into too much socializing or business. That’s her thing.”

    Simon was introduced to Radke by Radke’s financial advisor. “I thought he was a pretty good pitcher. But I didn’t think he’d become a great pitcher. And I don’t think he thought so, either.” The twenty-win season changed perceptions. “My thoughts were that he’d probably want to leave the Twins and go somewhere he could win.”

    The 2000 contract negotiation lasted for much of the season, and both sides became increasingly frustrated. In the media, various suitors were mentioned for Radke’s services, and neither Radke nor Simon did much to dissuade the speculation. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Twins wanted the young pitcher, and they wanted him badly. Simon, meanwhile, was not only asking for serious money, he was also asking for that no-trade clause. The Twins, reportedly at the behest of Major League commissioner Bud Selig, were encouraged to reject the deal. They didn’t: Radke got the money, the no-trade clause, and a provision that would allow him to opt out of the contract after the first season (he never exercised it).

    As the next contract approaches, Simon and the Radkes are hopeful that the negotiation will be less contentious, and less public. Still, some issues could result in an impasse. “Well, one problem is that Brad lives in Tampa,” Simon says simply. “And they’ve got a young family.” Playing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays probably would not mean a significant boost to Radke’s run support, win total, or salary prospects. But that may not matter so much at this stage in Radke’s career. This next contract, more so than the last one, will be about stability and family. “It’s up to him. If he wants to stay with the Twins, I’ll put him there. If he wants to go to Tampa, I’ll make it happen.”

    At nine o’clock on a summer’s evening, the Radke residence casts a warm glow on the lake. Brad, who has just come in from an evening of fishing with Ryan and Kasey, is in a relaxed mood. He’s chatting happily in the foyer about his bass boat, and the other boat he has in Florida. Heather, busy making dinner, hears us talking and encourages us to sit in the dining room. The night before, Brad had started a no-decision game at the Metrodome. “It’s hard sometimes to come down, especially if it’s a loss,” he says. “It can stay with you.”

    Heather sits at the table. “He leaves work at work,” she says. “If he’s going to complain about something, it’s after the kids go to bed.” But if work stays at work, the opposite is not always the case. “If we have a rift, he has a good game. If he leaves the house and we’re mad at each other—he has a good game.”

    Brad continues the list of what might generate an inspired performance. “On the road, if something goes wrong—if room service is late or bad—that might give me the edge. Or maybe the luggage is late or lost.” More often than not, though, the life of a major league ball player offers few discomforts that occur on schedule. So, on pitching days, in hope of creating that edge, Radke drives to the Metrodome with Metallica and Kid Rock pumping in his SUV. “Some wives will drive their husbands to the game,” explains Heather. “But I don’t.”

    Radke leans back, his arms behind his head, and yawns. “It’s a great job, but when baseball is over, it’s over. I won’t miss the travel and bouncing around.” He glances at Kasey. “You just miss so much. And they’re growing up so fast.”
    As if on cue, Kasey announces, “I like it when Daddy is here to give us baths.”

    Brad smiles bashfully and says nothing.

    Heather, though, can’t help herself. “You act like a superstar, you get treated like one.”