March 4, 2005
By Michael Fitzgerald
Record Columnist
In Calcutta, Michoacan and Guandong, the people dream of California, and they come here, full of hope.
That's Act One.
Act Two is masterfully told in "California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century," the latest and best anthology of California writers from the California Council for the Humanities and Berkeley's Heyday Books. This book gets California right.
The diverse writers -- Anglos, Blacks, immigrants from Vietnam, Mexico, India, Afghanistan, elsewhere -- write with artistically mature voices. Voices strong enough to tell stories, but also to challenge screwy ideas such as "colorblindness" and even the California myth itself.
Afghan Khaled Hosseini writes classically about that myth: "I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins. If for nothing else, for that, I embraced America."
But California does not always return the embrace. Francisco Jimenez quotes his fearful father, a field worker: "You can't tell a soul you were born in Mexico. You can't trust anyone, not even your best friend. If they know, they can turn you in."
Pai Yang takes homesick Hmong from Fresno to Yosemite's unspoiled high country. "... Some of them start crying, and not just crying, but start howling; ... (in Laos) they lived above clouds, you know. ..."
"California Uncovered" goes well beyond such familiar stories to second-generation crosscurrents even the educated and successful must fight.
In "The Conquest," Yxta Maya Murray's Chicana narrator, an employee of the Getty Museum, confesses to a "whiff of collaboration" with conquistadors and cultural imperialists whose plunder from Latin America she helps restore.
Paul Beatty humorously recalls growing up Black in Santa Monica surfer culture. His adolescent race relations are so far ahead of his teachers' vapid colorblind curriculum that their well-intentioned multiculturalism comes off as surreal.
"Dude," his schoolyard friends harangue him after he loses a footrace to a white girl, "why did you let her win? I lost four Grape Pixie Stix. What the (bleep) is wrong with you, man? You're supposed to be fast. When's the last time a white sprinter won a race?"
A big theme of "Uncovered" is that immigrants' dysfunction is equal to their disenchantment. There are many poorer places than Los Angeles, yet L.A. suffers much more violence. Why?
"A disconnect of hope," theorizes Father Gregory J. Boyle, who helps gangstas. "... Hope denied; ... it's an ingredient that isn't present in a lot of other places where the promise isn't so full and out there." To lose hope in California is to become dead. And dangerous.
But even thriving natives struggle. Writes James D. Houston: "In California I have watched mountains change their contour, seen orchards swallowed by bulldozers, known whole towns to sprout in a summer, watched familiar roads inflate like inner tubes to thrice their size, and felt square miles of asphalt raise a valley's temperature until seasons lose their shape.
"One has little choice in such matters, of course. I have no place else to be from, but here."
Write Fitzgerald at P.O. Box 900, Stockton, CA 95201; phone (209) 546-8270; fax (209) 547-8186; or e-mail michaelf@recordnet.com
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