Storytelling is the foundation of art — the starting place, the saga sung, the tale told in the evening around a fire, the spinning of a fantasy or a tale of true adventure, the memory of this thing that happened to me.

Although they might be made up, stories at their best are not the telling of a lie but the effort to put words together in a way that illuminates or re-creates a truth, whether large or small. And they can be a testament of deep human import, the “I only am escaped alone to tell thee” of The Book of Job and repeated by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick.

On the evening of Saturday, May 24, before a packed house at The Reser arts center in Beaverton, four storytellers told their own immigrant tales in the program I Am an American Live: Stories of Exclusion and Belonging — followed, after a brief intermission, by that other ancient form of telling stories, making music.

The evening, presented by the invaluable group The Immigrant Story, included solo stories by Asian immigrants Arun Storrs, adopted from Nepal and raised in Oregon; Shi Choong, born in Malaysia, trained as a chemist, and taking a surprise twist in her life in Oregon; Zarmina Ahmadi, born in a small Afghan village and longing to fly; and Vu Pham, a refugee from Vietnam who became a filmmaker in his new home of Portland.

The stories they tell are touched by hard times and narrow escapes and sometimes tragedy and other times opportunity and a dash of humor. Vivid and inspiring and well-told as they are, they are important to hear not just because they represent some of the vast variety of strands that weave into the tapestry of American culture. They matter also because they push back, simply by their unadorned honesty, against the Trump Administration’s belligerent anti-immigrant movement that seeks to unweave this rich tapestry and defy the poet Emma Lazarus’s words of welcome carved into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The war on openness and variety was launched with furious fanfare in the White House in the earliest days of Donald Trump’s second term as president. Gathering steam, it has swept the nation in virulent forms, ranging from banning foreign students from U.S. universities to shutting down diversity and inclusion programs to erasing mentions of equity on government websites to grabbing foreign-born citizens or visa holders off the streets and shipping them away, in contravention to Constitutional rights, to prisons in other countries.

One way to counter this sharp national veer into racially prompted selective isolationism is simply to listen to people’s stories, and tell our own, and let our vision expand in the process. Happily, that’s precisely what I Am an American Live does.

The evening’s quartet of storytellers, each introduced engagingly by Istanbul-born actress and Pacific University teacher Demet Tuncer, stood alone on the Reser stage, a brilliant blue drape behind them, faced the audience, and began their very personal tales.

Zarmina Ahmadi, born in 1994, lived amid the political unrest that roiled Afghanistan, from civil war to the dominance of the Taliban, an everyday reality that was simply the way things were. Unlike many Afghan girls and women, she went to school — it took her two hours to get there and two hours to return home — and she grew up attracted to the airplanes and helicopters that frequented the sky. She would become a pilot, she declared in her story The Girl Who Wanted To Fly, although in her world, “girls don’t fly. Not yet.” Against the odds, she became one of just five women in the Afghan Air Force — and as the Taliban captured the capital city of Kabul, narrowly escaped, landing first in Abu Dhabi, where she stayed for eight months, and eventually arriving in Oregon.

Arun Storrs’ story, Neither Here Nor There, was different: Adopted by an Oregon couple from an orphanage in Nepal when she was seven months old, she grew up in Oregon and considered herself, in many ways, “white.” She loved the stage, and eagerly auditioned for every school play available, but when she was cast it was never for a lead, always for a supporting or bit role. There just weren’t many roles for “people like her,” she was told. Yet she persisted, spending years in Los Angeles pursuing an acting career. Her life changed when she returned to the Nepalese orphanage where she’d spent her early months and began to care for the kids who weren’t adopted, providing them a safe home and preparation for their adult lives through The Kumari Project, which she founded and where she’s executive director. She now splits time between Nepal and L.A., where she’s a recurring character on Max’s television medical drama The Pitt.

Shi Choong grew up in Johor Bahru, capital of the Malaysian state of Johor, amid the hustle and bustle of the marketplaces, and eventually came to the United States to study, concentrating on the hard sciences. After college she was hired by Intel, which brought her to Oregon, and although it was a good job, she found herself longing for something different — something more joyous. She found it, she related in her story A Woman Who Dares, by taking a plunge into the world of events. “I am probably the only wedding planner in the whole Northwest,” she said with a laugh, “who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.”

Vu Pham’s story A Promise to My Mother came last, and with deep impact. He was five years old, six years after the fall of Saigon, when he escaped Vietnam via boat and bumped around several Southeast Asian refugee camps. Eventually he and his mother were picked up in the South China Sea by a freighter sweeping the waters for refugee boats, and finally they reached Portland. As perilous as their escape had been, something even more terrible — a crime of passion — happened in Oregon, and the sense of it settled like a pressing weight on Pham and the audience. If something haunting has stayed with him, it’s given impetus to his filmmaking, too, as Jacob Pander of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Oregon Art Beat noted a few years ago: Pham’s work, Pander wrote, “has a distinct, developing voice in his films, which manifests in a dark, contemporary noir style and tone. Pham’s work is tough and confrontational at times, but there is also a quirky dark humor and irony in the work.”

***

After intermission the storytelling took musical form, a mix-and-meet of classical Indian and Western string music, revolving around the splendid singing of Shivani Joshi, whose voice begins with a sharp precise attack that can turn into a round melodic tone and slur in a sophisticated manner from note to note before pausing and attacking again. I didn’t know the lyrics and so didn’t get the “story” of her songs, and yet the music told its own story, a meshing and marriage of cultures, creating something fresh out of two traditions.

The weave of traditions included the bright thump of Satya Vaidyanathan’s tabla, the pump and squeeze of Bhvanesh Mathur’s miniature organ-like harmonium, and the staccato beat of Mimy Manavihare’s drum set, joined by a Western string section of acoustic bassist Dan Schulte, violinists Shion Yamakawa and Andrew Poole Todd, violist Amy Roesler, and cellist/composer Dr. Joseph Harchanko.

The two traditions bobbed and wove and danced around and between and with each other, creating something fresh and new — at times at odds but mostly sparking off each other and creating a fluid merging movement. It was like living in two pleasing musical cultures at once, beginning to understand how they could work together rather than against each other; each in a way a creative immigrant in the other’s world.

Rather, come to think of it, like immigrants finding a balance between two cultures and creating a third.

***

Kim Stafford, former Oregon poet laureate, visited a music rehearsal for I Am an American Live at St. Andrew Lutheran Church, where, as Sankar Raman, founder of The Immigrant Story, says, “something beautiful happened.”

“During a break, Kim took a moment to speak with Shivani Joshi, the featured singer for the event, and me,” Raman said via email. “He seemed genuinely moved, not just by the music, but by the spirit of collaboration in the room. He was witnessing something that we often feel but rarely name: the quiet, powerful act of building something new together. He felt the energy of creation, of shared learning, and of something sacred unfolding.

“Half-jokingly, I said, ‘Kim, you should write a poem about what you’re feeling right now.’

“After the break, I got pulled back into the music, and I didn’t notice what Kim was doing. But as he left, he handed me two paper plates. On them, he had written a poem right there, in the middle of our rehearsal – and since he had no paper, he used the plates, the only writing surface he could find. He titled it Far Singers Join and dedicated it ‘to the music bearers who carry our common light across generations and borders.’”

Here, with Stafford’s permission, is his poem:

Far Singers Join

—— for the music bearers
who carry our common light
across generations and borders.

In their distant countries, each bird
drank from a different spring. Each
flew here from a different forest.
The sky was wide, their tongues small.
The wind loved their feathers all.

Far away each bird had hidden
where bullets flew. Some had left
a father behind, a mother, a fledging lost.
Here, a great silence awaited them.
At first they hid in the trembling leaves.

Around our clearing, each twig
held two small feet, and the soft
weight of a song we had never heard.
Wind stirred the leaves, and became
the breath of each singer.

Remembering their nesting grounds
far away, they sang their longing for home, as
their singing joined here in mysterious harmony
we had never heard. How but in music
could we know one another?