California Stories Uncovered
An anthology of California writing edited by best-selling author Chitra Divakaruni, CCH Executive Director Jim Quay and William Justice of Heyday Books. Published in 2005 by Heday Books and the California Council for the Humanities.AUTHORS
Paul Beatty
from The White Boy Shuffle
Paul Beatty, poet, performance artist and novelist, was born in 1962 in West Los Angeles. He received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from Boston University. His books of poetry include Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is also the author of the novels Tuff and The White Boy Shuffle. He currently lives in New York.
In the early chapter of Beatty’s debut novel presented in the anthology, The White Boy Shuffle, published in 1996, the teenaged narrator, Gunnar, reflects on his years as the “cool black guy” in a mostly white neighborhood in Santa Monica.
Joan Didion
from Where I Was From
A fifth-generation Californian, Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and raised in the Central Valley. Although an accomplished novelist, her renown springs from her essays, which combine highly personal commentary with an apocalyptic view of American politics and culture. Her books include The White Album, Democracy, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Run River, and her most recent book, Where I Was From, a deeply critical collection of essays about California myth, history and culture. Her literary career officially began in 1956, when she won first prize in Vogue’s Prix de Paris. Since then she has won and been nominated for a number of awards, including the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1996. She lives in New York with her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
This selection is excerpted from Where I Was From, published in 2003. The book mercilessly dissects popular notions about Didion’s home state, exploring everything from its original settling to the Spur Posse scandal of the early 1990s.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
“Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” from The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a widely known author and poet. Born in 1957 in India, she lived there until she was 19, at which point she left Calcutta and moved to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English by receiving an M.A. from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been published in more than 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 30 anthologies. Her major works include the novels The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart and an award-winning collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage. She currently splits her time between San Jose and Houston, where she teaches English literature at the University of Texas.
“Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” is taken from the collection of short stories The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, published in 2001.
Laila Halaby
“The American Dream” from West of the Jordan
Laila Halaby was born in Lebanon in 1966 and speaks four languages. She won a Fulbright scholarship to study folklore in Jordan, and she holds an M.A. in Arabic literature. She currently lives with her family in Tucson, Arizona. West of the Jordan is her first novel.
The anthology excerpt from West of the Jordan is a kind of interim in the tumultuous story of four adolescent female cousins growing up in Jordan and the United States, and growing apart as they adopt the traits of the cultures that surround them.
Robert Hass
“Palo Alto: The Marshes”
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. His books of poetry include Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He is also the author or editor of several collections of essays and translations, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and he has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently A Treatise on Poetry. Hass has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and from 1995 to 1997 he served as U.S. poet laureate. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Khaled Hosseini
from The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the son of a diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980. Hosseini lives in northern California, where he is a physician. The Kite Runner is his first novel.
The Kite Runner takes the reader from Afghanistan to California and then back to Afghanistan. This selection in the anthology is taken from the middle of the novel, as the narrator, Amir, seems to be on the verge of escaping the horrors of his past and becoming truly American.
James D. Houston
“The Light Takes Its Color from the Sea” from One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is in the Canoe
James D. Houston was born in 1933 in San Francisco. He is the author of seven novels, including the trilogy Continental Drift, Love Life, and The Last Paradise, which received a 1999 American Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford, and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for fiction. Among his several nonfiction works is Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir of life in the Japanese internment camps of World War II, which he co-authored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. They currently live in Santa Cruz.
“The Light Takes Its Color from the Sea” is a lesser known essay by Houston written shortly after his return home to California after many years abroad. The love of California that informs the rest of his career is here presented with sensitivity and passion.
Robinson Jeffers
“Hands”
Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Penn, and was educated in Pennsylvania, Washington, southern California, and Europe. He eventually settled near Big Sur, Calif., where he composed the majority of his poetry, a large body of influential work that celebrated the rugged California landscape in that region. Jeffers published upwards of 25 volumes of poetry in his lifetime and, after his death in 1962, a dozen or more collections were gathered.
Francisco Jiménez
“Moving Still” from The Circuit
Francisco Jiménez was born in 1943 in Mexico and immigrated to the United States with his parents, migrant workers, when he was four years old. He is now a professor at Santa Clara University and the author of two books about his childhood, The Circuit and Breaking Through. He was named U.S. Professor of the Year in 2002.
Presented in the anthology is the last chapter of The Circuit, a collection of autobiographical stories about the author’s childhood experiences in California.
Dana Johnson
“Melvin in the Sixth Grade” from Break Any Woman Down
Dana Johnson was born in 1967 and is a Los Angeles native. She worked as a magazine editor before completing her M.F.A. at Indiana University, where she now teaches creative writing and literature. Her debut collection of short stories, Break Any Woman Down, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction in 2001.
“Melvin in the Sixth Grade” is the opening story in Break Any Woman Down. Loosely connected, the stories explore the intersecting realms of identity and love in a world shaped by race.
Maxine Hong Kingston
“The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” from China Men
Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, Calif. Her father was a scholar and the manager of an illegal gambling house, while her mother was a practitioner of medicine and midwifery as well as a field hand. Her undergraduate years at the University of California, Berkeley, coincided with the free speech movement, and Kingston has long advocated nonviolent means to achieve social change. Her novels include The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. She recently published The Fifth Book of Peace, a work of memoir and reflection. Kingston lives in Oakland with her husband, Earll, and has been a senior lecturer in the English department of UC Berkeley since 1990.
“The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” is taken from China Men, first published in 1980. The novel chronicles three generations of Chinese men in America through an expert mixing of myth, folklore, and history. China Men is a follow-up to Kingston’s first book, The Woman Warrior, both of which have won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
“Riding into California”
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was born in 1944 in Malaca, Malaysia. She is the author of five poetry books, three short story collections, two volumes of criticism, a novel, and a memoir. Her poetry collection Crossing the Peninsula won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1980 and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology won an American Book Award in 1990. She is currently a professor in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rubén Martínez
“Manifesto”
Rubén Martínez was born in 1962. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of four major works, most recently the nonfiction collection The New Americans. He has also contributed essays, opinions and reportage to a number of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice and The Nation. His awards include a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Freedom of Information Award from the ACLU, and an Emmy Award for hosting PBS-affiliate KCET-TV’s Life and Times series. Martínez is currently both an associate editor for Pacific News Service and a musician. He divides his time between California, New Mexico and Texas.
David Mas Masumoto
“Pruning Generations” from Harvest Son
David Mas Masumoto was born in 1954 and is a third-generation farmer as well as the author of many books, including Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm, and Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories. He received the James Clavell Japanese American National Literacy Award in 1986 and the San Francisco Review of Books Critics’ Choice Award in 1995. Masumoto grows peaches, grapes and raisins with his father on their organic farm in Del Rey, south of Fresno.
“Pruning Generations” is excerpted from Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil, which was published in 1998. With rich and disarming detail, this memoir tells of the struggle to take over and renew the family farm.
Yxta Maya Murray
from The Conquest
Yxta Maya Murray was born in 1970 in California. She is the author of three novels—Locas, What It Takes to Get to Vegas and The Conquest—and in 1999 she received a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction. She has taught at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles since 1995.
This excerpt in the anthology is from Murray’s most recent book, The Conquest, published in 2002. It is a literary detective novel linking two Latina women across four centuries and spanning settings as distant as the basement of the Getty Museum and the ships of Cortés.
James Quay
Interviews
As executive director of the California Council for the Humanities since 1983, it’s been my privilege to oversee hundreds of public projects in which Californians attempt to document, express, and interpret their unique part of the California story. The stories chronicled by these projects are by turns proud, angry, tragic, and inspiring, but early on I was as struck by their similarities as by their diversity. California is one of those places that has an image—usually characterized as “The California Dream” or something similar—suggesting equal elements of good weather, opportunity for striking it rich, and freedoms social, sexual, and artistic. But anyone who lives here for a time knows that the boundaries of the state encompass many Californias, and that generalizations about the state are reductive and usually ridiculous.
Nevertheless, “California” does stand for something in the global imagination and, while it was easy to dismiss the usual Sunday supplement definitions of California as dream or nightmare, I began to wonder what, if anything, it meant to be a Californian. I decided to find out by interviewing Californians from different parts of the state and different walks of life—writers, artists, scientists, activists, educators, public officials—some prominent, some not. I used the same set of questions for all of the interviews, beginning with how and why these people came to live in California and then exploring their particular identification with places or things that seem most Californian to them.
The state’s vaunted diversity asserted itself in the interviews, of course, but after the first dozen or so, I found that one particular word kept surfacing: hope. These people or their ancestors may have been drawn to California because of an image or a dream—something as grand as the gold rush or as simple as a job and good weather. They often encountered realities that tarnished or destroyed those initial images or dreams. But those who stayed—and everyone I interviewed has obviously stayed—spoke about the persistent sense of hope they associate with California.
So I added a final element to the interview, asking people to respond to the following idea, adapted to California from a statement scholar Samuel P. Huntington made about the United States in his American Politics: “Critics say that California is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. California is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
Some of the excerpts in the anthology are responses to that particular quotation, but all of them, I think, provide insights about the California hope that remains after we have awakened from the California dream, the one we embrace with our eyes open.
Luis J. Rodriguez
“My Ride, My Revolution” from The Republic of East L.A.
Luis J. Rodriguez was born in 1954 and is an accomplished activist, poet and author of many books, including the acclaimed memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in East L.A. and a collection of short stories titled The Republic of East L.A. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
“My Ride, My Revolution” is a story from The Republic of East L.A., published in 2002. The collection provides a realistic yet surprising glimpse into the lives of the Latino community in the San Fernando Valley
Richard Rodriguez
“Where the Poppies Grow” from Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900–2000
Richard Rodriguez was born in 1944 in San Francisco. He has written three books: Brown: The Last Discovery of America; Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez; and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. Rodriguez is an editor at Pacific News Service and a contributing editor for Harper’sMagazine,U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. He lives in San Francisco.
“Where the Poppies Grow” is part of the exhibition catalog Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity in California, 1900–2000, edited by Stephanie Barron.
Brian Ascalon Roley
from American Son
Brian Ascalon Roley was raised in Los Angeles. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Epoch, the Georgia Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere, and his work has been translated and anthologized. His novel, American Son, has been honored as a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize finalist. He is currently a professor of English at Miami University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The anthology excerpt is the opening chapter of Roley’s debut novel, American Son, published in 2001, a story of identity, violence and longing in the urban ghettos of Los Angeles.
Greg Sarris
“The Magic Pony” from Grand Avenue
Greg Sarris was born in 1951 and grew up in Santa Rosa. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, the chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria (formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok), and an important literary voice exploring American Indian life. Sarris has written several books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts and Grand Avenue, a novel in short stories that was adapted into an HBO film.
“The Magic Pony” is the first story in Grand Avenue, published in 1994. Set in a small city in northern California, the novel’s 10 connected stories focus on Santa Rosa’s poorest neighborhood and, most notably, a group of Pomo Indians who live in dilapidated army barracks.
Gary Soto
“The Elements of San Joaquin”
Gary Soto was born in Fresno, Calif., in 1952. He is the author of 10 poetry collections, including New and Selected Poems (1995), which was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. He has also written two novels, Poetry Lover and Nickel and Dime, as well as the memoir Living Up the Street, for which he received an American Book Award. Among Soto’s other awards are a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum, and the California Library Association’s John and Patricia Beatty Award (twice), in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), and the California Arts Council. Soto lives in Berkeley, Calif.
John Steinbeck
from Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902 and was of German-Irish ancestry. His father was county treasurer and his mother was a teacher. Steinbeck attended Salinas High School and studied marine biology at Stanford University, although he never took his degree. His novels—including Of Mice and Men (1937) and Pulitzer Prize–winner The Grapes of Wrath (1939)—showcase his journalist’s grasp of significant detail. In the early 1960s, Steinbeck toured forty states with his poodle, turning the experience into Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962). That same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He died in 1968.
The anthology excerpt from Travels with Charley records Steinbeck’s brief homecoming, where the changing face of America, as seen throughout the book, takes on a fierce and bitter personal meaning.
Dao Strom
from Grass Roof, Tin Roof
Dao Strom was born in 1973 in Saigon, and her mother fled the country with her when she was a baby. Strom grew up in northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and several other grants. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is her first novel. She lives in Austin, Texas.
The anthology excerpt is taken from the middle of Strom’s semi-autobiographical novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof, published in 2003. The novel travels from war-torn Saigon to the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and is composed of multiple stories from many different points of view. The first part, “Lucky,” is told by an eight-year-old girl; the second, “Chickens,” through the perspective of her stepfather.
lê thi diem thúy
from The Gangster We Are All Looking For
lê thi diem thúy was born in 1972 in Phan Thiet, South Vietnam, and left the country on a boat with her father in 1978. She grew up in Linda Vista, San Diego, and her childhood there became the basis of her first book, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. She is an author and a performance artist and has been awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
The anthology excerpt is characteristic of the tone and style of The Gangster We Are All Looking For, published in 2003, which has best been described as “elliptical.” It follows a Vietnamese family shrouded in mystery through the difficult, drifting life of new immigrants to San Diego, as told through the eyes of the six-year-old daughter.
D. J. Waldie
from Holy Land
D. J. Waldie was born in 1948 in Lakewood, Calif. His books include Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, and, most recently, Close to Home: An American Album. In 1994 he received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and Holy Land received the California Book Award for nonfiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. He still lives in Lakewood, where he is the public relations officer.
The anthology excerpt is from the opening pages of Holy Land, published in 1996. Waldie combines a minute biography of Lakewood, the first suburb built around a shopping mall, with a lyrical and restrained personal memoir.