Western Impressions 
by Said Shirazi
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 13, 2007



 

I'm just back from California and here's what I saw.

San Francisco was so beautiful to my eyes that it seemed like a city of the future. New residential high-rises are springing up from Giants stadium all the way up to the Embarcadero, modern Miami-like buildings perched atop convenient groceries and coffee shops. The blessed citizenry were blithely riding Vespa scooters and even skateboards up and down the gently rolling streets.

But the friendly relations I observed between server and served out in Marin Country somehow struck me as more narcissistic than egalitarian. When I overheard a man holding a wax-paper wrapped package telling the butcher he was going to toss a few of the steaks in his smoker, I couldn't help thinking, Like he cares! And when the bagger picked up the Green Tea flavored mochi ice cream my sister-in-law was buying and said with delight, These are my favorite, I was similarly annoyed.

The next stop on my trip was Palm Springs, which was all oldsters dressed for the links. Even the airport, largely open to the elements, felt like you were at a country club. I spotted two Bentleys on a single outing. We drove on wide avenues past the desert houses, which were as low and featureless as machine-gun pillboxes and had about as much curb appeal as mausoleums. As in the Gulf states, water is wasted as a show of wealth by over a hundred golf courses and even a luxury mall, The River at Rancho Mirage, whose Cheesecake Factory enjoys the privilege of beholding its own reflection in the artificial canal that surrounds it.

There were new developments everywhere. Palm Springs is experiencing a housing boom fueled by rootless retirees who care more about cachet than the convenience of their family and friends, who live in a stupor of possessions and are rewarded with a climate as arid as their emotional culture. There are still lots of vacant storefronts in the downtown pedestrian area though, as the elderly tend to be tight with a dollar.

In Los Angeles location is a calculus of two variables, where you live and where you work. No neighborhood is good in and of itself; it is only good if it can get you where you need to go. The houses I have visited in Los Angeles are usually drafty, rambling and run-down. Most people don't even bother to pull their cars into the garage.

I learned a few of the city's secrets. Most of the authentic Chinese restaurants are hidden up in non-descript mini-malls that look like office buildings from the outside but when entered reveal huge open banquet halls with fixed menus, buffets or rolling dim sum carts. The food they serve is watery and gristly. Everything is so stunningly cheap it costs half your lowest guess; an eight-course meal is ten bucks, not twenty. Specials are not recited and it is assumed tea will suffice; if you ask for water, it may arrive before the end of your meal. Conversation at the tables is liberally sprinkled with the word Niga, which means “that.” It sometimes appears at the beginning of sentences and sometimes at the end, and after a week I still found it disconcerting every time I heard it.

The temperature is a little hotter in the melting pot out here. The races not only mix, they blend. At a dinner with extended family, two of the three younger couples were a union of Chinese and Mexican. Monterey Park and Alhambra are themselves both Mexican-Chinese neighborhoods, where a good Asian buffet will bring in plenty of adventurous Latinos looking for a bargain.

Uncle Yung Chu lived in East L.A. for many years and did as the Romans do, so to speak, calling himself Santiago and firing guns into the air on the Fourth of July. Yi Chung got her first bachelor's degree in Taiwan and a second at a Catholic college in Minnesota where every student had to have Rose somewhere in their name; no pale rose, she was rechristened Rosita. To this day when she feels like cursing she says God Bless America instead. Both of them assimilated into American culture in part through an intermediate step of taking on Hispanic names.

In general, the Mexican population here seems to be moving up through hard work, by accepting the terms of a bad deal and making the best of it, something I myself have never been able to do. They are waiting by the side of the road to take day labor at at any wage, cleaning out toilets in houses and hotels, mowing lawns and blowing cut grass and dead leaves into tidy piles. The women mind other people's children while their own are home with family. My sister-in-law says Mexican workmen routinely come into the county E.R. with fingers and even forearms severed on the job by power saws, a sight still less gruesome to the staff than the untreated diabetics whose rotting feet now require amputation.

In today's Los Angeles, the Hispanics seem to have more in common with the Asian than with the Black community. The American Black has no country, no cousins come from abroad for college, no team he really roots for in the World Cup finals, no daily newspaper whose editorialists give voice to his community, no land his people built which he can look to, no refuge to romanticize. He can't see America with the hopeful eyes of a newcomer. He is cordoned off and left without resources, neither schools nor hospitals nor groceries, only five-million-dollar infrared helicopters to monitor and harass him. He knows the dream is a lie and this weakens him. In the city of Los Angeles he is less than a slave, he is an internal enemy. His life is a siege he can only escape by abandoning his people, who can't seep into better neighborhoods gradually because realtors won't let them.

My take on the new Mexican-Chinese alliance is that it shows class matters more than race. It can not be said enough that race is a fiction, a myth. If you look hard enough, you can find a negative moment in the work of many young writers who seem to be promoting pride, a bitter grain of truth buried for those who have ears to hear it. The social meaning of a racial identity, its charge or valence, is the group's aggregate status level, its place on the ladder. It is class that gives race its meaning.

My brother-in-law, who lives in Mar Vista, was woken one night by a woman wailing. It went on so long that he got out of bed and saw the unfortunate woman collapsed in the middle of a four-lane road next to a dresser that looked like it had exploded, cars going around her as neighbors tried to talk her into coming inside. She was not the first person he had seen thrown out into the street with their pitiful possessions in the middle of the night by the sheriff's men. Sometimes they come in the morning instead, just tossing everything into the back of a rented truck with no time to even put it in boxes or bags, like a fireman's brigade that wrecks homes instead of saving them.

Meanwhile over at the Arcadia mall they have a kiosk selling freshly-baked dog treats. In Santa Monica I saw something that truly taxes credulity, a new low in the high life, if you will, namely an outdoor bar that hosts cocktail parties for dogs. While in Palm Springs I had been impressed just to see two Bentleys, on a twenty-minute drive from Pasadena you pass two Bentley dealerships. Why should anyone have to drive half an hour to buy a $200,000 car?

None of this is shocking to people who live there because they know the area, they know that Mar Vista means Blacks-getting-evicted and Arcadia means pets-getting-treats, but as a passenger and a guest being taken from place to place without a word of explanation to prepare me, I was forced to rediscover the bare human fact of shameful wealth and mutilating poverty living side by side in our land every day.

Landing back at Newark airport, I made an effort to see my adoptive home through a stranger's eyes. What does a Californian see when they come East? People wearing black, wearing leather, stylized versions of office wear . . . Italian-Americans with dark shiny hair, white working-class slobs, Indian-American professionals . . . Families harried and beleaguered, two perfect preps in pearls... A Budweiser plant visible from the tram before you even get to the parking lot . . . Livery drivers holding signs with the names of passengers they are waiting to whisk away . . .

And no one waiting to meet us, which meant that we were home.

Said Shirazi lives in suburban New Jersey. He is writing about music and television on-line for Printculture, where this article first appeared.

Other Articles by Said Shirazi

* Against Heroes
* Deal or No Deal
* Opting Out
* Who Owns the World?
* Facts About America
* Two Ideas of Freedom
* The Quest for Symbols
* Your New Enemies

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