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Text of the page (random words):
d introduction to tropic of orange by karen yamashita august 8 2017 in experimental writing innovative writing los angeles literature multicultural literature urban issues urban literature 3 comments this is the ultimate book about los angeles because there s no ultimate book about los angeles there s no last stop on the l a railway whose yellow trolleys went out of service in 1958 there s no end to oaxacans zapotecs mixtecs central americans and bengalis inventing new lives in koreatown no one s heading to the ambassador hotel on wilshire to disrupt the assassination of robert f kennedy there s no end to white hipsters and creative types coming to los angeles from nyc and points east to make it big just like there s no last offramp on the 10 freeway from heading across the desert to texas and florida which is to say as the last city of the american civilization before the pacific plate subducts under north america and uplifts the ranges of the west l a never stops it never stops l a never stops tropic of orange dares to go there l a s the city at the end of the continent that grinds out industrial daydreams and nightmares for the rest of the planet hollywood will not rot on the windmills of eternity hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of god allen ginsberg wrote money money money shrieking mad celestial money of illusion this city industrialized the imagination of the species this city unspooled reels of buster keaton and w c fields killed sam cooke and janis joplin buried marilyn monroe and the shadows of ten thousand indians japanese and vietnamese who dared to attack john wayne and his cohort of innocents driving route 66 to the edge of the continent l a arrived at the end of the world first giant ants earthquakes aliens from outer space the city limits the outer limits time and again even as it was wiped out by martians in 1953 in war of the worlds or in 1964 while charlton heston drove the empty avenues of downtown in omega man looking for vampires to machinegun the city plowed the civilization s subconscious and planted alien pod plants roman polanski s 1974 noir classic chinatown ostensibly set in 1937 makes no mention of course that in 1936 most of chinatown was razed and buried under the newly built union station dodger stadium commemorates in no way the chicano neighborhood of chavez ravine whose residents were forcibly evicted whose properties were buried under landfill for baseball parking lots entire japanese american neighborhoods emptied of residents for concentration camps during world war 2 east san pedro japanese american residents were given 48 hours to pack and leave their fishing village then razed their boats sold or burned entire mexican american neighborhoods were razed and buried under famous freeways displacement dispossession and dislocation continues these days under the guise of gentrification these are stories that hollywood can t seem to imagine because they re actually happening look in vain for them in chinatown blade runner short cuts l a confidential the ostensibly intergalactic imagination of the movies doesn t begin to approach hard bitten realities reflected in the lives of the seven characters central to tropic of orange tropic of orange refracts the city s passion like skyscrapers against the setting sun this book holds in solar heat like a piece of granite even as the desert east of the san gabriel mountains refracts the city s energy like dream lightning in murky dreams of ex l a hipsters gentrified out to joshua tree in sun bleached dreams of old rock guitarists and rock climbers as wind scours trinkets of aluminum and plastic across the sand and gravel out there across the sand and gravel of his artist s compound noah purifoy s human scale monuments broadcast south central passion to the cholla creosote and the stars out there young black and latino families from the marine base shop at the yucca valley walmart out there errant music recorded in l a wafts like lost heat waves those lyrics those phrases and rhythms re emerge inscribed in these sentences in these chapters the revolution will not be televised recalls tropic of orange on page 218 even as a romantically entangled chicano and japanese american couple journalists tragically try to prove it wrong if l a is that recombinant hybrid of the culture s imagination and the civilization s final history of its weird and frequently terrible desires taken to their ultimate logical ends freeways and car culture cults and crazies a police state hidden behind sunglasses and sun tans few novels live to tell actual los angeles stories and effectively take anything like its full measure tropic of orange takes that apocalyptic tale on with surrealist nerve and futurist verve karen yamashita looks on what the civilization wrought on this place unafraid she doesn t turn away five years after the 1992 riots the largest civil disturbance in modern times 60 dead one billion dollars damage columns of smoke still rise from those conflicts of race and class seven voices each distinguished by a distinct voice and pov tell stories that sojourn the pacific traverse the sonora desert cross mean streets and ethnic divides to meet folding into one another in a wild and wildly imagined 7 days in los angeles in 2011 as visiting professor of creative writing at uc santa cruz i wandered into the lunch counter at a cafe that karen liked and found her hosting a party of out of town visitors she invited me to join them and as i pulled up a chair one of the visitors robert allen was talking about the port chicago mutiny the largest mass mutiny in u s naval history when 50 black sailors were court martialed in 1944 after 700 men were blown apart 320 died loading munitions aboard ships heading for the war in the pacific robert i said jumping up you re the only person i ve ever heard talking about port chicago i ran over and gave him a hug the last time i saw you was in nicaragua how long has it been twenty years he d written a book about port chicago and edited the black scholar journal for decades i d only learned about port chicago more than twenty years earlier and more than three thousand miles away in managua in 1987 when robert told me about it as we sat at a table with alice walker i ve only heard the story of port chicago twice in my life both times by luck the kind of luck and the kind of stories you get when karen yamashita invites you to sit at her table tropic of orange invites you try your luck you re in for seven kinds of l a stories that fold into an origami flower of razor sharp titanium sesshu foster see http coffeehousepress org authors karen tei yamashita blog is full to be continued august 21 2016 in uncategorized leave a comment not sure exactly why i did not figure out how to listen to the voice mail on my cell phone till this evening sorry if you called me and left a message and wondered what the hell there were two dozen messages some long messages from unknown numbers that consisted of muffled bumps and long stretches of silence some repeated calls from unknown numbers two calls were from my brother who died last november in one he thanked me for my help and wished me well that was his last message paul s tree is located at 11th st and ocean view dr pacific grove july 3 2016 in uncategorized leave a comment thanks to arborist al weisfuss photos in which you do not appear june 18 2016 in sesshu foster 2 comments mom s retirement party i read a poem the smallhouses drove down from northern california even emmy was there a hundred teachers balloons champagne and a mariachi group where were you on that day elliot came all the way from idaho from the nez perce reservation in town on business he came hanging out with us where were you our grandparents as newlyweds grandpa otokichi looks a lot like uncle bill and uncle bob according to records born in 1877 attended school till grade 5 in japan umeko yamane born in 1890 attended school till grade 8 grandpa had been in california since 1899 grandma had just arrived 1913 it was arranged they knew they didn t know hope the only little light they could hold forth you wouldn t recall anything about them they never knew you either though we met grandma a few times in the facility in santa maria when she was ill the methodist church rented them a room off the parking lot when they returned from camp grandma worked in the fields in strawberries and other crops and every day after work nursed her husband laid out ill from a stroke all those eyes feel them look out of our eyes do you feel it were they watching you at rest sitting on a downed tree on the trail standing trees of the forest alone waiting for the the quiet waiting out the roaring that never ceased even when the frequencies shifted beyond hearing smoking certainly maybe sucking a tall can in a paper sack waiting to feel a little peace descending in bird song and tobacco smoke occasional sounds from town needless to say there s a thousand little snapshots of family gatherings where you never show up you felt sorry for yourself especially during the holidays you felt an exile who are those people i don t even know them anymore you said to me after i sent you news about them many letters hundreds of postcards told you how people were doing what they were up to every time we met that was the kind of bullshit you d get back to me with it s true many of these people i didn t know any better than you did so what that s what the city is good for you live with all these people sometimes you see them sometimes you don t you don t know them all you can t you may meet someone new on any given day i don t like to be around people in groups you said i have social anxiety disorder you always had some excuse handy even if you got it going around to a doctor s office on the off chance you might get a prescription our aunt mary agawa stands above her mother during their one trip to japan mary returned from the trip ill with tb and died in her mid 20s shortly afterwards grandma lost her two eldest children to tuberculosis when they were young adults by the time we met her husband had died long before and her health was broken best of everything terry kubata all these pictures with these stairs or palm trees in the background were taken in boyle heights mid 1940s where aunti fu and uncle john met at the fellowship hostel on evergreen avenue a block from evergreen cemetery terry kubata would have been a resident like aunti fu and uncle john all these young nisei released from the camps i don t know if uncle john ever went to camp because he spent the war isolated in tuberculosis sanatariums the barlow hospital in elysian park or one in the valley many of them just out of high school just starting their lives released from the camps the war was over the quakers american friends and other churches took in internees released from the camps japanese americans were given a bus ticket and 25 and told to go in most cases the families had lost everything their properties confiscated or sold for pennies on a day s notice the week they left for internment or they had their goods stolen from storage facilities like the bekins warehouse on fair oaks avenue in pasadena these young nisei grew up in a california of racist asian exclusion act laws anti miscegenation laws that prohibited people of color from marrying whites their parents prohibited by law from owning land racial real estate covenants were the law of land made targets of violence and hatred and marginalized to mixed race areas like boyle heights with its catholic churches buddhist temples and jewish shuls and centers and then all of that was too complicated for you what did it have to do with you the hostel is still at the corner of evergreen and folsom it s almost exactly the same 70 years later i m not sure why here s a snapshot looking toward folsom we walked around inside the three story old fashioned tenement building with an interior courtyard and the fountain long dry tiny often windowless rooms open to long dim hallways with bathrooms at the end at the bottom of the stairs in the basement showers were provided in rough cement stalls with low concrete walls a couple mexicano caretakers live inside it nowadays at least one of them with woman and kids one was washing with a garden hose an old upholstered lounge chair in the parking lot at the rear of the building their music and tv can sometimes be heard coming out of the windows maybe it was like that in the old days here s one of the guys who ran the place arnold nakajima he looks like my optometrist the houses in the background are no longer there the steps are exactly the same the same sunshine the people passed from the scene as if shadows 35 a month meals included although i think the residents were required to help in the kitchen why not this was a new era they were no longer imprisoned uncle john no longer confined to sanataria his older siblings tom and mary had died from tb while he had one lung left the common treatment of the time to collapse one lung in the hopes the other got stronger seems to have worked for him and for aunt kay it was a new era they had new lives ahead here s uncle bob fresh from the military just a kid eh he always reminded us of uncle bill i don t really know but my guess is that grandpa spoke in the same flat limited register as several of his sons i feel that i have that voice too uncle bob died this month his memorial will be in hayward in july you never wanted to go to any family gathering like that you don t appear in wedding pictures group pics when uncle bill died and i flew back to los angeles for the funeral we took a boat a little ways from the pier to toss his ashes and a few roses into the ocean off guadalupe beach i asked you if you wanted me to pick you up you said nope nope no way what for to remember what those people did to each other what they did to me that s why you never met or knew uncle bob he was a totally different guy from bill even if they looked and sounded remarkably similar it s true that the violence of racism etched into their characters some of them like uncle bill s poisonous anger which he took out on us as children for others a certain timid smallness of personality the dutiful attentions paid by other nisei to assiduous assimilation of anglo culture but that wasn t all there was too it not by a long shot they built whole lives of loving and generous care like you could have but they took a shot at making their lives they came from those margins from the 25 and one way ticket one jacket and whatever they could carry with them and they built new lives you had your chance at it like anybody your daughter plans to plant a tree on the rec path that overlooks monterey bay west of point alones where the chinese fishing village was burnt out may 16 1906 your daughter wrote a haiku to go on the plaque you felt intensely fearful that you wasted your life deeply ashamed you grieve...