Louisville Magazine

JUL 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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70 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 In Burma, when loin boner Jolly Paw was six, he ran with his fatherless family, hid in the caves when the Burmese soldiers raided his village. e soldiers killed chick- ens, burned rice farms, houses, the school. ey shot people who didn't get the warning of an invasion from the neighbor- ing village in the mountains. Paw sat in his secret cave, quiet not to cry. He cried on the trip to the Korean Revolutionary Cen- ter to become a 12-year-old soldier. ere, he was safe inside the borders, gates, walls. Until the Burmese government changed its strategy and invaded the military base. Paw was sent to a refugee camp in ailand from 1984 until 2008. He'd build small bamboo houses, leaves for the roof; eat the NGO-provided rice, beans and chiles; serve as camp leader. Paw came to America in 2008. "I thought, 'I don't want to go to the U.S., because I want to stay and take care of my mother,' but my brother told me to leave," Paw recalls. "So we did, because I couldn't return to my country. It's not easy for a refugee to return to their home." On the line, the only Spanish Richard Gallo could speak to his friend Sergio Cabrera was "Gallina con pollo" (chicken with chicken). Real dramatic, different inflections. Cabrera laughed and laughed. Trump-supporting Gallo and Cabrera from Cuba. Friendship. "I'd look at someone else, then I'd look at him. And he'd know I was about to bust their chops," Gallo says. "You talk to a guy and you can't understand a damn thing he says, but he knew and I knew." Gallo still doesn't know if Cabrera's tumor started in his brain or a lung. Cabrera returned to work with only a month left to live. "is is a guy who knew he was done. It's adios. And he's working every day. Helping his family," Gallo says. "Most people would've given up." Lines bordered the casket and bordered a man at the end of the line. "It's Butchertown! What do you ex- pect!?" says 85-year-old Gloria Parker, who lives on Washington Street in the neighborhood. "I wish these new people would leave the packinghouse alone!" She is pink-sweatered and comfortable in her warm home. Her husband sprawls in the recliner. A wall decoration of Jesus hangs above the TV. A young Gloria lived with her uncle and his wife, who both worked at the packinghouse. "She'd have five long, white coats for every week that she'd wash and iron on the weekends," Parker says. (Now the company washes the smocks at the plant.) She used to live where the speakeasy Lola is now, back when that building was apartments. She and her husband never worked at the pack- inghouse, but it has never bothered them, not even the pigs that workers used to push down the streets. (An old underpass mural marks this history: crazed-looking butch- ers, knives in-hand, chasing leaping pigs.)

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