California Stories Uncovered
Edited by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,William E. Justice, and James QuayAnnotated Table of Contents
Paul Beatty
Chapter 2 from The White Boy Shuffle
Vintage/Random House, Inc., 1996
Beatty is an award-winning slam poet and author of two novels. This selection follows Gunner, the token cool black kid in Santa Cruz, as he abruptly moves to an all-black neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Joan Didion
Chapter 4 from Where I Was From
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
Didion has been one of the strongest critics of California in the past 30 years and has written many books of fiction and nonfiction. In this selection from Where I Was From, Didion takes a hard look at the myth of “crossing” and ruminates on what kind of person it took to settle these lands when the cost in lost lives was so high.
Chitra Divakaruni
“Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter”
from The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
Doubleday Books, 2001
Divakaruni is an Indian American writer of great renown and the winner of many awards. In “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,” an old woman moves from India to join her son and his wife in California. She has a difficult time adjusting, notices tension in the home and, after a huge argument, sits down and writes a letter to her best friend in India telling her that she’s coming home.
Laila Halaby
“The American Dream”
from West of the Jordan
Beacon Press, 2003
Halaby is a Palestinian woman and author of the novel West of the Jordan, about four cousins each living in a separate place and having radically different experiences. “The American Dream” is the retelling of a family legend. Once, when Dahlia’s daughters were very young and Dahlia was working all the time, she came home and couldn’t find her children. They told a relative that they were going out for ice cream with “Uncle Hector,” only they had no Uncle Hector.
Khaled Hosseini
Chapter 11 from The Kite Runner
Riverhead, 2003
Hosseini is a writer and physician who immigrated from Afghanistan with his grandfather. The Kite Runner is his first novel. This selection gives an in-depth look at our narrator’s maladjusted grandfather who “loved the idea of America” but couldn’t stand to live there. His main source of community and diversion is the weekend swap meet, where he meets a comrade from his past, and our narrator falls in love with the comrade’s daughter.
James D. Houston
“The Light Takes Its Color from the Sea”
from One Can Think about Life
After the Fish Is in the Canoe
Capra, 1985
Houston is one of the most notable California voices of his generation. “The Light Takes Its Color From the Sea” is a quiet piece that details the slow exploration of his new home, across the road from Buckhart’s Sweet Shop, teasing its secrets, looking into its past, until it finally claims him and he it.
Francisco Jiménez
“Moving Still” from The Circuit
University of New Mexico Press, 1997
Jiménez, the son of migrant workers, teaches English at Santa Clara University. He has written two memoirs of his childhood. “Moving Still” shows the family just starting to get settled into a new place and our narrator enjoying his time in school. The students are assigned to memorize the Declaration of Independence, but the shadow of la migra falls over the family.
Dana Johnson
“Melvin in the Sixth Grade”
from Break Any Woman Down
Anchor Books/Random House, 2003
Johnson is a native of Los Angeles and her first collection of stories won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. “Melvin in the Sixth Grade” is the story of a little African American girl who moves out to a white suburb and begins to lose her identity while falling in love with another outcast, a tall Okie.
Maxine Hong Kingston
“The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” from China Men
Vintage, 1980
Kingston, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a California literary giant known for her depth, wisdom, and the poetry of her writing. “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” follows the adventures of her grandfather who helped build the railroads and dangled off mountainsides with dynamite, negotiating work with the demons who paid him and the dragons that roared down the tracks after they were laid.
David Mas Masumoto
“Pruning Generations” from Harvest Son
W. W. Norton, 1997
Masumoto is a farmer in California’s Great Central Valley and has written a number of books lovingly dedicated to his family’s farm and a vanishing way of life. “Pruning Generations” is about pruning grapevines after a harsh frost. As Masumoto discovers the design and intelligence of those who have pruned these vines before him, he ruminates on the ghosts that haunt and help rural landscapes.
Yxta Maya Murray
Chapter 2 from The Conquest
Rayo, 2002
Murray is a professor of law at Loyola in Los Angeles and has written three works of fiction. The Conquest, Murray’s most recent book, takes place in the basement of the Getty Museum and follows the life of a book restorer as she attempts to prove that a New World slave woman wrote a biography attributed to an insane monk.
James Quay
Interviews
During a sabbatical leave in 2003, California Council for the Humanities Executive Director James Quay asked three dozen Californians -- writers, artists, some prominent, some not-- the same series of questions on the topic “What does it mean to be a Californian?” Featured here are interviews with Claire Peeps, Cruz Reynoso, Father Greg Boyle, Pablo Espinoza, Uri Herscher, Cindy Alvitre and Pai Yang.
Luis Rodriguez
“My Ride, My Revolution” from The Republic of East L.A.
Rayo, 2002
Rodriguez is a writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry who grew up in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles and has become one of the leading activists in the Latino community. “My Ride, My Revolution” is the sleek, funky tale of a young man who drives a limo and belongs to a “revolutionary” rock band. He tells of his customers and shows off for some girls in his neighborhood, and everything is all right until one of the girls asks him if she can drive.
Richard Rodriguez
“Where the Poppies Grow” from Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000
University of California Press, 2000
Rodriguez is one of American’s leading essayists and the author of several books exploring identity in the new America. “Where the Poppies Grow” is a wrestling with what leaves California and what comes, what stays, and how this place is being shaped, welcoming us to “California c. 2000.”
Brian Ascalon Roley
Chapter 1 from American Son
W.W. Norton, 2001
Roley is a Filipino writer from Los Angeles. American Son, his first novel, is about two Filipino brothers growing up in Los Angeles and adopting a Mexican identity while raising pit bulls for celebrities.
Greg Sarris
“The Magic Pony” from Grand Avenue
Penguin, 1995
Sarris is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has written about the lives and stories of American Indian people in the Southwest and West. He is also an elected chief of the Coast Miwok Nation. “The Magic Pony” is seen through the eyes of a little girl who watches as ancient poisons threaten to destroy her family as more modern poisons threaten a horse her cousin claims is magic.
John Steinbeck
Excerpts from Travels with Charley
Penguin/Viking
First publication: 1962
Thousands of Californians read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in 2002 as part of the Council’s Reading the Grapes of Wrath program under California Stories. In this piece, Steinbeck visits his childhood home and a “flurry of nostalgic spite” arises as he tries to reassemble his memories in a place taken over by strangers.
Dao Strom
“Lucky” from Grass Roof, Tin Roof
Mariner, 2003
Strom, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, is the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof, a loosely autobiographical account of her childhood in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “Lucky” tells the story of a chicken, a septic tank, a visit from the in-laws and a hostile local man who accuses the family of murdering his dog.
le thi diem thuy
“Gangster” from The Gangster We Are all Looking For
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
Thuy and her family immigrated to California from Vietnam.The Gangster We Are All Looking For is her first book. This series of vignettes juxtaposes the poetry of childhood with a startling cruelty of insight as it follows an immigrant family trying to make a life in San Diego.
D.J. Waldie
Excerpts from Holy Land
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
Waldie has written two books about Lakewood, where he works as the public relations officer. Holy Land, written with rare grace and patience, is a minute history of Lakewood, one of the first suburbs designed with a mall, as well as a touching memoir of a man who has lived there his whole life.
Poetry
Robert Hass
“Palo Alto: The Marshes” from Field Guide
Yale University Press, 1973
Ruben Martinez
“Manifesto” from The Other Side
Verso, 1992
Gary Soto
“The Elements of San Joaquin” from New and Selected Poems
Chronicle Books, 1995
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
“Riding to California” from What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say
West End Press, 1998
Robinson Jeffers
"The Hands"
The California Uncovered anthology is a component of California Stories Uncovered, the California Council for the Humanities’ statewide story-sharing campaign designed to reveal the reality of California life beneath the headlines, statistics and stereotypes. California Stories Uncovered events, many of which will involve material from the anthology, will take place in April 2005.
For more information on California Stories Uncovered, please visit www.californiastories.org.