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Eugene Sit’s grandfather was one of the twelve thousand Chinese immigrants who were paid one dollar a week to build the Central Pacific railroad in the 1860s. But before the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were all but forced to return to China by the Chinese Exclusion Act legislation of 1882. Although the Sit family prospered in China, the Japanese invasion of World War II and Mao’s subsequent takeover put an end to that. Sit’s father had escaped to the U.S. in 1938, and his son was finally sent to join him in 1948. His mother stayed in China and was a political prisoner for thirty years.

Today, Sit has rebuilt the family fortune, and then some. He is the founder of Sit Investment Associates, which has built an initial $1 million investment portfolio to over $6.6 billion under management. But what he’s most proud of these days is the Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund, which he started with $1 million of his own money. He has continued to raise more to give financial grants to every Minnesotan serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in a combat zone since September 11, 2001.

Were you in the military yourself?
I was in ROTC, and I was excused when I started having a family.

You have a son, who went to the Air Force Academy and served in the Air Force.
Yes. Roger. We chose Roger to serve because we felt very strongly that freedom is not cheap, and every family has to do its part.

You say, “We chose Roger.” Did Roger have something to do with the discussion as well?
In his letters from first year, it was clear he was not a happy camper. “Get me out of here, get me out of here” every day. But later, he became an upperclassman …

Why did you start the MMAF?
Basically the genesis of it is, we understand the sacrifices that are being made by the military in terms of the financial sacrifice, the personal hardships, the family hardships. Most of these people are citizen soldiers, part-time soldiers who are giving up their regular jobs, not only career opportunities, but taking fifty- to seventy-five-percent pay cuts. It’s hard enough for a middle-class family to make ends meet, but then when you separate the family, losing the heads of the household, families take a tremendous financial hit. That is something we need to recognize.
We realized that relatively few people are doing the heavy work for us. There are only a few of us that are really making sacrifices, and that is quite different than in other conflicts—Korea, World War II, even Vietnam.

And the third part of it is that it is part of our values, our family’s values, that I truly believe that when you are doing well and are fortunate, you should think really hard about giving back to the community.

You have said that the fund takes no political position. Do you personally?
Well, I do and I don’t. I’m a pragmatist. I’m a patriot. I’m appreciative of what we have in this country. I’ve voted both Democrat and Republican.

What would a pragmatic person do in this war? That’s a loaded question.
I think there were many mistakes made in the beginning. But having said that, the alternatives are so bad that we have to find some way to give it one last try and hopefully send a message to the factions that “Listen, we’re not going to be here forever. We believe in helping you, but you guys are going to have to cut this ethnic conflict between yourselves.”

We have to find a way to stabilize the situation and find some way to extricate ourselves.

It’s very hard on our men and women.

You suggested that you think people could be doing more. Do you think there should be a draft?
I think we can have something similar to that for young people, and maybe old people like me, whether it’s community service, whether it’s neighborhood service, whether it’s helping in the Appalachians—I think all these things would be very good.

You are in the finance business. I have a financial question around the topic of sacrifice. Do you think there should have been a tax cut while we were at war?
Number one, I believe in the private sector. I believe in the market and the economic system. We’ve had growth twenty-four of the last twenty-six years. A lot of that could be due to economic policies that I call incentive economic policies, which included incentives for people like you and me to be enterprising, creative, and entrepreneurial. Lower taxes on capital gains allow us to invest more, to be more competitive, and that contributed to the growth of the economy. But having said that, I do believe in times of war, we should not have a segment of society bearing the burden. I think the whole country should be asked to join in to make this a unified effort. We should have had a gas tax and a higher tax on people like me.

I don’t believe we should mortgage the future—putting the burden on future generations.

You are an immigrant. What advice would you give to new immigrants coming to the United States?
This is a great country, a great community. You can do a lot to help yourself. There are a lot of things here that will help you. And don’t forget to be responsible and do your part.

In the looks department, I’ve been compared to the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings with a big afro—not exactly George Clooney. Only adding to these charms is the fact that I have Crohn’s disease and a catalog of allergies. And yet, I am by far the luckiest man alive because I’m married to the most beautiful woman in the world. After five years of matrimony, my wife’s honey red hair and rosy Irish cheeks still have me whipped. If she ever leaves me, the lights will go out; there’s zero chance of my landing someone of her caliber again. Naturally, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make her happy. And so, earlier this year, when my wife was upset about turning thirty-three (she thought she was getting old), I set out to make her birthday extra special. I promised anything her heart desired.

“Stop snoring! Stop snoring!” she blurted out like a game-show contestant. This anger over my nocturnal emissions had apparently been building for some time.

I wasted no time in addressing her concerns. Within days I was sitting on my doctor’s table imploring him to help me cure my snoring. He peered down my throat and up my nostrils. “It’s a mess in there,” he said, snapping off his flashlight scope. “You’re probably suffering from sleep apnea, sinusitis, or allergies. I’m gonna have you spend the night in a sleep clinic.”

The back parking lot at Methodist Hospital was eerily deserted when I arrived, just weeks later, for my 9:00 p.m. appointment. I rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Stray wheelchairs littered the hallways; a security guard was slumped in a folding chair. I pressed a buzzer and, in so doing, summoned a bookish middle-aged white guy in scrubs who met me at the sleep clinic’s door.

Ken’s hand was limp and moist; he was creepy in a Jeremy Irons kind of way. I imagined he spent long hours sitting in his one-bedroom apartment, bare-chested in cut-off shorts, typing anti-government manifestos.

My dubious docent gave me a quick tour: The room in which I was to stay looked as if it had been plucked from a cheap motel. But instead of a stain on the pillow, there was an enormous machine at the headboard with allsorts of blinking lights and buzzing tubes. Next to the bed, there was a dresser with a Bible in it, which I imagined might come in handy later on as I warded off the ghost of Vincent Price.

Ken attached wires and pads to my scalp and explained how they would measure my eye movements and sleeping depth. Straps were applied to my torso that would monitor breathing, snoring, and heartbeat.

I told Ken I was at the sleep clinic because I wanted to stop snoring. He spun me around on the swivel stool so that we were nose to nose.
“The only way you’re going to stop snoring is if they pound it out of your face,” he said threateningly. For a second there, I thought he was going to clock me.

“Excuse me?”

“A doctor told me they can cut open your face and pound out the crap that’s clogging your sinuses using a special hammer and chisel. Then they put all the crap in a dish called ‘The Custard Cup.’ ”

“Yucky,” I replied.

Ken wished me sweet dreams and turned out the lights.

I missed my wife.

The nurses out in the hallway made microwave popcorn and the room filled with the aroma of buttery goodness. Buttons beeped and bells dinged like the arcade at Chuck E. Cheese’s. I tossed around for more than an hour, the wires on my scalp, neck, and face twisting around my throat. Clearly, this was never going to work. I clicked on the Minnesota Wild game. I love my wife, but my mistress is hockey, and she eventually seduced me into a few hours offitful rest.

The results of my sleep study showed the snoring was caused by a compacted sinus and massively swollen tonsils. I underwent a medieval sinus scraping and tonsillectomy shortly thereafter. The anesthesia from the surgery made me sick, so I was given a pill to control the nausea. Since I couldn’t swallow the thing, the pill had to be inserted up my backside. I asked my wife to do the honors, but she declined. Needless to say, if the tables were turned I would have happily obliged.

A few weeks after the surgery I was healed and no longer snoring.

My wife said I was the most romantic man she had ever known; going through the painful surgery showed her I was a person of serious conviction. For the first time in years we fell asleep together. Bliss reigned supreme in the home of Todd J. Smith—until one day, when I came home from work and scattered my muddy clothes all over the basement floor. As my wife walked by, she let out a frustrated sigh and quipped: “Is there a pick-your-shit-up clinic you can go to?”

Brother Finbar McMullen entered the Winona Middle School woodshop at just before seven on a recent Monday evening with several door-sized pieces of cardboard balanced on his arms. They were material for the eighty-three-year-old’s community education class on the least commercial, but perhaps most intriguing, of his varied pursuits: building furniture from cardboard.

This is the second year he’s offered the class and the first year he’s taught it (no one signed up last year). McMullen built his first cardboard concoction thirty years ago in a decade of disposability, and continues to hone his technique today in an era of recycling, where the latest buzz-phrase is “carbon neutral.” Still, he often jokes that cardboard furniture construction isn’t widely popular because it hasn’t yet caught up with the times.

McMullen is short and trim with buzzed hair and the face of an ex-marine, square and etched with wrinkles that disappear into weathered flesh when he laughs. He’s endlessly social with the exuberance of someone half his age, despite an increasing reliance on hearing aids and a wooden cane.

Just before class was to begin, student Marla Markhamarrived, a middle-aged woman with a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and an unrelenting fear of X-ACTO knives. “Too much time in the ER,” she deadpanned. She wished to build a decorative garbage can, but her husband, also enrolled in the class, was at home studying Greek and unavailable to do the cutting. She decided to stay anyway, partly to draw up blueprints, but mostly to talk McMullen out of some of his cardboard.

Two other women came in, both roughly Markham’s age, and McMullen began the lesson. Building with cardboard is simple, he said, if you plan ahead and use various tried-and-true design tricks (build surfaces with the grain running horizontally so they don’t sag; place reinforcing honeycombs of cardboard between the smooth layers). A barebones toolbox includes an X-ACTO knife, a framing square, a pizza cutter to crease corners for bending, and copious amounts of Elmer’s glue.

In 1940, McMullen joined the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a worldwide Catholic ministry, to get an education of sorts. He enjoyed the life so much that he never left it. The Brothers took a vow of poverty in the 1970s, and McMullen took up building with cardboard. It was around that same time that St. Mary’s University in Winona hired him to manage its dorms. Retired for almost a decade, he still receives free room and board and, most importantly, has full access to the woodshop.

Over the years, McMullen has crafted enough cardboard accoutrements to furnish an entire apartment, including tables, chairs, bookshelves, desks, and dressers. His unpainted designs are boxy and simple, as if a craftsman had cut a frame but never bothered with sanding or making curved edges.

He used to score plum cardboard from computer boxes, which came by the hundreds as St. Mary’s entered the digital age. When that supply dried up, McMullen turned to the dumpsters behind the nearby ShopKo. “If they came out, I would say, ‘Hey, recycling. Conserve resources. Don’t get mad at me,’ ” McMullen recalled. That source evaporated also, when Winona’s city council passed an anti-dumpster-diving ordinance. Now, McMullen collects mostly from the university, though he still occasionally calls on local furniture stores. Their boxes, he said, are the sturdiest.

McMullen’s friends call him an inventor, though he is more modest, claiming only to solve problems, such as with his handmade cane, are placement for a metal one he left in a gas station in Montana. “It’s always something I need,” he said. “It’s not a matter of some bright idea rattling around in my head unrelated to my life.” He invented the Finbar Hood, a piece of insulated camping headgear so popular that Ann Bancroft wore one on a trip to Antarctica. And Finbar’s Fabric Tucker, a corn-skewer-like device that assists in the sewing of hoods, sold thousands in craft stores.

The lesson concluded with McMullen imparting a few rules of construction (cut twice so the cardboard doesn’t tear; always use more glue than seems necessary). Then his class of three was let loose in the shop. One student worked on a desktop organizer. Another drew plans for wall shelves. Markham pulled a Palm Pilot from her purse and scribbled down garbage-can dimensions. “I really want to put it in the bathroom,” she told McMullen.

He nodded, thought for a moment. “If you take long showers it’ll get soggy,” he said. “Just put it outside when you’re showering.”
Markham frowned. “My husband will never remember to do that.”

“I got it,” McMullen said. “Get a can of spray lacquer and the cardboard won’t absorb the moisture.”

“That’s a good idea,” Markham said.

McMullen laughed congenially and then turned to help another student with a different matter: how tall to build her organizer.

It can be difficult to find one’s way in Northeast Minneapolis’ labyrinthine Northrup King Building, an old seed-warehouse-made-creative-center housing more than 130 artists’ studios. But on a recent Saturday night, painter Patrick Pryor was hosting an event and had kindly started a trail of flower petals out by the front entrance that led to his studio on the second floor.

The crowd assembled there was impressive for both its attractiveness and broad age range. A couple of middle-aged women, sleekly dressed in black blouses and slacks, squatted side-by-side on leather stools, chatting and sipping complimentary cherry martinis. A young mother carried her swaddled newborn through the crowd, bouncing him while surveying Pryor’s collection of paintings. A forty-something woman stopped by to discuss Pryor’s work. She explained that she had purchased one of Pryor’s paintings in 2005. “It looked like that,” she said in her Russian accent, pointing to a gestural rendering of black vines painted over a flat, seafoam green surface. “It could be blood platelets; it could be cherries,” suggested another attendee of the curious red fruit that hung from these painted stalks. In any case, said the woman, she and her husband have been fielding invitations from Pryor ever since.

Another attendee, Karin Olson, a marketing consultant, described herself as a fan of Pryor’s. Her affinity was understandable; Pryor’s art strikes the eye as playful and cartoonish, with allusions to winding foliage and bulbous ladybugs. Having made this point clear, however, Olson quickly segued to another topic: As of late, she said, she has been recruiting fabulous Twin Citians to host parties for her client, Level Vodka. In fact, according to Olson, it was she who had initiated this event by offering up free liquor to Pryor and his fashionable guests. (An alternative to reaching her target market through advertising, she said.)
Since this was Pryor’s eleventh such “Music Sketch,” an event that combines improvisational piano and painting, the occasion might have happened even without sponsorship, as it has every time before. After a couple hours of mingling over stiff drinks—Level Vodka with grapefruit juice, Level Vodka with rosemary—fifty or so partygoers were told the main attraction was about to get under way. Filing out of Pryor’s studio, everyone followed yet another flower-petal path to a larger room upstairs. A grand piano and blank, six-by-ten-foot canvas awaited. The Level Vodka bar staff, dressed entirely in black, was there, too, pouring generously into plastic cups.

As with prior Music Sketches, Pryor invited his friend James Tyler O’Neill, a pianist, to provide accompaniment to his live-action painting. The structure of the exercise was explained like this: “Basically, I play an hour or so on the piano, and Patrick paints,” said the no-nonsense O’Neill. If an onlooker hadn’t yet noticed the thirty-three-year-old Pryor’s super-friendly, down-home style, matched by his wide, child-like smile and rosy cheeks, he certainly would now. Speaking over some hullabaloo, Pryor made a short, breathy speech concerning a recent incident in which Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten recruited virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell to play in a metro station during morning rush hour. As it turned out, commuters hardly noticed the superstar. In his indignant chronicle of the experiment, Weingarten gave an account of a child who demonstrated interest in Bell’s playing, only to be yanked along by a hurried parent. Pryor spoke passionately, albeit a bit clumsily, of this remarkable episode before vowing, with signature earnestness, to indulge that inner child within everyone present.
Taking a drink from his cherry martini, O’Neill took his seat at the piano and started to play.

At first, his riffs were as unimposing as Philip Glass’s theater music—the ideal soundtrack for an uninterrupted workday. O’Neill’s benign overture found Pryor blotting yellow and green paint on the canvas and then pulling it westward in long, serpentine streaks, creating what appeared to be a gothic dragon. Several minutes later, Pryor’s use of fire-engine red seemed to inspire O’Neill’s aggressive, staccato playing. Soon after, smooth jazz ushered in primary blue.
An audience cannot be expected to behave perfectly under such festive circumstances. Over time, O’Neill’s simple melodies found percussive backbone in the constant crashing of the revelers’ emptied cups as well as the polyphonic ring of someone’s cell phone, which was answered in this instance by the tall, glassy-eyed blonde woman sitting at the center of the crowd, followed by the beat of her high heels rat-a-tat-tatting across the hardwood floor, as she exited for a private conversation.

As for the painting, in early moments, its swirls and billows resembled that of Vincent van Gogh’s. He might have stopped there and had something. But the exercise continued for another forty-five minutes. During this time, the amount of black- and flesh-colored acrylic squirted and dripped across the canvas was about equal to the amount of Level Vodka in everyone’s guts. Pryor’s messy mural ended up looking like a Jackson Pollock, if anything at all.

A few miles north of Bemidji, there’s an old-world mini Bavaria: A cluster of white stucco and brown-timbered buildings that surround a quaint central fountain. The street signs are auf deutsch, schnitzel and sauerkraut are on the menu, and the speaking of German is strictly enforced. When this Concordia language village, a German immersion camp for kids, needed a new dormitory, however, the staff voted to promote a modern vision of Germany rather than further perpetuate this idealized version of the past.

Enter Eddie Dehler. Lured from his native Germany in 1987 to work as a language teacher at the youth village, Dehler tapped into his environmental-studies background to initiate the construction of North America’s first certified Passivhaus: an airtight, super energy-efficient structure that utilizes passive solar and geo-thermal energy for year-round temperature control.

The project began in the fall of 2005, when special triple-pane, heat retaining, argon-filled windows from a factory in the Black Forest were flown in. The roof was covered with dirt and seeded with purple sedum flowers that help retain water, avoid erosion around the house, and provide extra insulation.

The project was not inexpensive. Concordia Language Villages built Dehler’s five-thousand-square-foot modernist Bauhaus vision at a cost of around $1.3 million. But owners of these ultra-green buildings are destined to save on utility bills. Beneath the house, a tube filled with food-grade glycol-water solution runs two hundred feet into the earth. This creates a constant-temperature mixture that gets pumped back up to the house and into a reverse refrigeration system, thus providing low-cost heating and cooling.

The house still uses some electricity. “It’s on the energy grid—so we could [improve efficiency by installing] photovoltaic solar panels on the roof,” Dehler said. With them, Dehler said, the building would actually produce more energy than it consumes.

In order for the house to be certified as an authentic Passivhaus, the structure had to be assessed to determine whether it met the German government’s strict standards. Gary Nelson, president of the Energy Conservatory, a local building-performance testing service, came to the language village to conduct something called a blower-door test.

“We created a negative pressure in the building to test every wall and window for air leaks,” Nelson explained.

Heating the building “requires less than one watt per square foot. A typical toaster or hairdryer uses 1,500 watts, so one of these could heat a 1,500-square-foot Passivhaus,” Nelson concluded. In the end, the house was deemed twenty times more airtight than required by German standards.

Using the Passivhaus (which officially opened in July 2006) as an instructional tool, the German camp now offers a four-week environmental credit program for high school students. Inside the big blue box with giant southern-facing windows, twenty-eight campers can learn about the first Passivhaus (built in Darmstadt, Germany in 1990), and about how passive solar heat, when combined with super-insulation, makes for one of the most energy-efficient buildings ever made.

Dehler proselytizes visitors to what he calls the “tightest home in North America” in hopes of spreading the German ideal for sustainable living, proclaiming that the extra money spent to reach these strict standards — around twenty thousand dollars — will be recovered through energy savings in as little as eight years.

“The Passivhaus uses about ten percent of the energy of a regular house,” Nelson, the house-tester, said. “The six thousand of them already built [in Germany and Austria] use the same amount of energy as six hundred regular houses. Why can’t we do that in Minnesota? If we made enough of them, we could shut down the Monticello nuclear power plant.”