STRANGERS IN OUR STRANGE LAND : Newcomers From Abroad Speak Candidly About the Los Angeles They Expected, and the One They Found

When you’ve spent all your life in the same country, you don’t notice things that to foreigners seem both strange and remarkable. Few Americans, for instance, walk around saying, “Hey, we live in a classless society.” But, to people who come to California from more stratified and traditional countries, the marvel of that achievement is exceeded only by the fact that our telephone system works.

In fact, a newcomer’s view of us is at times so different from our own that we might have trouble recognizing ourselves. What we see as a healthy emphasis on fitness, foreigners sometimes regard as narcissism. What to us is forthright self-assertion can be seen by foreigners as self-aggrandizement and bluster. Although we Americans often berate ourselves for having lost both our Yankee ingenuity and our dedication to the work ethic, many newcomers see us as a hard-working people. And while our crime rates sometimes make us fear that our society is falling apart, to some foreigners we seem remarkably open and trusting.

The Times recently spoke with a group of newcomers from around the world who came to Los Angeles to live and work.

TONY and RUZICA PORTER

Tony Porter came here seven years ago from Yorkshire, England, with the hope of directing feature films. Instead, he ended up as a videotape editor for television. His wife, Ruzica, a former radio reporter from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, runs a skin-care business for women. They live in a woodsy, airy house in the Hollywood Hills.

The night Tony Porter arrived in Los Angeles he stayed with the family of an American girlfriend he knew from London. They lived in Beverly Hills and served steak and salad for dinner. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, the typical American diet.’ They were much larger steaks than we would eat in England. And the salads they give you here would serve four in London--if they knew what a salad was.”

Later that evening, the girlfriend’s brother invited Porter to sit in the Jacuzzi with him and his fiancee. “I had no idea what a Jacuzzi was. Then we went outside to the patio, and they took off all their clothes. That was a real eye-opener. I just arrived and already I’m in a Jacuzzi with naked ladies? I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to like it here.’ ”

Porter knew that Los Angeles “was vast and that there were palm trees and freeways. But I couldn’t get my bearings. I thought the film industry would be confined to a single street, not stretching all the way from Malibu to Universal City.” Furthermore, far from the “political hotbed” that he had expected, California felt “more like a vacuum. In England, people talk politics.” Here, Porter believes, nobody much seems to care. Instead, “they say, ‘So-and-so just moved to Universal, and I’ve just switched agents.’ ”

To Ruzica Porter, it’s strange that people here regard the Mercedes-Benz as a status automobile. In Europe, she says, if you want to impress someone with your car, you drive a Porsche or Ferrari. There, Mercedes is known for manufacturing buses and taxis.

To Ruzica, it also seems as if Los Angeles natives are very poor drivers, which is not surprising, she says, since the California state driving test seems so easy. “In Yugoslavia, you have to study six months to take a driving test. Here, if you fail, you come back the next day. Also, the larger the car, the less likely its driver is to signal. The driver thinks he is in his living room.”

Ruzica says she doesn’t much care for California men. “They do a lot more sports. They do a lot of body building. They are strong physically but weak otherwise. A man takes you out to dinner and expects you to split the cost--’We are all friends’--and nothing happens. In Yugoslavia, women want a strong man who knows what he wants and will earn money. Here, I get the impression that men are too busy to share their lives.

“I meet a lot of lonely women in my job, and they all complain about men. Of course, it isn’t all the men’s fault. The women here have lost their softness. A couple of months ago, I made a mistake on the road and pulled out in front of another car. The driver was a young woman with blond hair; she was beautifully dressed and was driving a yellow Mercedes. I opened the window to say I’m sorry, and when she went by she made the sign with the upraised middle finger. The women between 25 and 35 are very pushy.”

ANDREW Z . MASON

Before moving to Long Beach a year ago, Andrew Z. Mason lived in Chalfont St. Giles, a 500-year-old village 35 miles north of London where the English poet John Milton once lived. As a result, Mason says, he found it more than a little intimidating when, upon his arrival in Los Angeles, he looked out his airplane window and all he could see was a vast grid-work. “In the U. K. I was used to narrow lanes, wide enough for two carriages to pass. It’s a bit overwhelming to see six freeway lanes in either direction.”

Hoping to rent a house in the country, Mason once drove all the way to Riverside before it dawned on him that civilization here only “stretches as far as the water pipes. After that it is barren rocks and cacti and brush. I finally realized that Southern California is an oasis in a desert.”

Mason works as a marine biologist at the Molecular Biology Institute at California State University, Long Beach. Originally from Hungary, his family moved to England after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is modest and soft-spoken, and he is impressed by how hard local scholars work. “Here,” he says, “I find myself giving my first lecture at 8 a.m. In England, people are just getting up then.”

Furthermore, he says, the students here are much more “intense, enthusiastic and positive--perhaps because more of them are paying their own way.” They are more competitive and goal-oriented, too. “Their grade-point average is very important.”

At first, Mason says, he was alarmed by what people told him about the police. “I’d never even seen a cop carrying a gun before. I was told: ‘If stopped by a policeman, don’t run and don’t get excited. The police here are very formal and very polite, but they can’t take risks; and if you get them upset, they’ll pull out their gun and blast you away.’ ”

That, coupled with the fact that American TV shows seen in England portray Los Angeles as “all drugs and felonies,” made him wonder if he should buy a gun. Then, he moved into a small apartment on a quiet street and discovered that life in Southern California can be quite sedate. Before coming to California, Mason thought it would be an extremely progressive, cutting-edge kind of place. Instead, he says, it is “much more conservative, politically and socially, than I’m used to.”

Mason was pleased to discover that supermarkets are open at night and on weekends. “I arrived on a Saturday and went to market on Sunday. I walked in the store and the first thing I saw was the greengrocer section. It seemed to stretch out toward infinity.”

If anything about Los Angeles annoys Mason, it is what he considers the overly strict enforcement of parking regulations. “I already have five citations for parking--all for things you would never get tickets for in England, such as parking in the wrong direction or in front of a fire hydrant. You really have very conscientious law enforcement here; leave a car in a forbidden zone for two nanoseconds, come back and there’s a ticket on the windshield.”

Mason likes Californians but is “embarrassed by how friendly people are. After people have known you for a few hours they’re willing to do things for you they wouldn’t do in England till they’d known you 25 years.” But there have been other, discouraging occasions when he’s met people who have acted very friendly and who went to pains to get his telephone number, saying how much they wanted to get together. “And then I never heard from them again.”

In contrast to his more diffident English associates, Mason finds his American colleagues very aggressive. “I came to Long Beach State for two weeks in May of 1985 (for a job interview). I was in all kinds of discussions for three days. I never said a thing. It wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to say--I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. There were no pauses in the conversation. As soon as one person was coming to the end of a thought, the other person jumped in. In England, people normally are invited into conversation. So I learned to interrupt. Otherwise, I’d be thought to have no opinions worth offering.”

In a similar vein, he says, the two countries have vastly different attitudes toward professional resumes. In England, people are much more demure and modest and use fewer superlatives about themselves. “If, in England, you say, ‘I’ve dabbled in it,’ it means you’re almost an expert. But here people say, ‘I have a great deal of experience, and I’ve coordinated a program worth $8 billion.’ ”

As a result, Mason has found it necessary to create a version of his resume geared to American expectations. “Where I once would have said, ‘I have experience’ in something, now I say, ‘I have an international reputation.’

“I’m positively embarrassed by my resume now.”

LEELA

When Leela (who Americanized her single Indian name by shortening it from Hamsaleelavathy) came to the United States about a year ago for postdoctoral studies in demographics at USC, she was shocked at the high cost of living. In Madras, India, where she and her husband were college professors, they had a four-bedroom air-conditioned house, a cook, a houseboy and someone to do the laundry.

In this country, she and her husband and son first moved into a small, bare studio apartment near USC. It had a concrete courtyard, “Goodwill-style” furniture and a small fan for cooling. Americans, she discovered, don’t have houseboys. “You have to do everything yourself.”

On the positive side, she discovered that American food was cheap, good and readily available. “In India, the food is adulterated. You buy black pepper, for instance, and they put dry blackberries in with it. Or you buy a 10-pound bag of rice, and they’ve put stones in the rice to make it weigh more.” In Zambia, where she worked before coming to the United States, there were chronic shortages of practically everything. “When salt came, you bought enough for the year. People in this country don’t store anything, which is good, since there is no room in my apartment anyway.”

Leela considers herself socially conscious, which is one reason she feared coming to Los Angeles. As someone from the Third World, she thought that everyone here would be “stinking rich and very class-conscious.” Instead, she discovered, “the chairman of my department said, ‘Call me Judy.’ I wouldn’t dare do that in my home country. At home, my students call me Dr. Leela. Even if I tell them (to address me informally), they won’t do it.”

She was delighted to learn that so many transactions “are based on mutual trust.” The day she arrived, she found that a USC professor had used his credit card to reserve a motel room for her near the campus even though he didn’t know her. In another instance, she lost a dollar in a stamp-vending machine, and the next day--when she ran into a post office employee--she told him and was astounded to receive a refund on the spot. On the RTD, she says, the driver doesn’t even look to see how much you put in the fare box. Most amazing of all, “in this country, people accept personal checks without first checking to see if the money is actually in the account.” In India, she says, you have to pay your rent with a cashier’s check. “And even then the landlord acts as if you’re cheating him.”

Compared to the post-colonial society of Zambia, where people are very conscious of skin color, here, Leela says, “it doesn’t occur to you to think about race, since everyone is a minority of some sort. Before I came here, I thought the United States was an English-speaking country. But actually, I see there are two official languages--English and Spanish. I go shopping and women start speaking to me in Spanish. I say, ‘No Spanish.’ And they say, ‘No English.’ And we grin at each other and pat each other’s backs.”

LILIANE PELZMAN

Liliane Pelzman came to Los Angeles from the Netherlands to make money and to get away from the residual shadow of World War II--”In Europe everyone hates everybody else,” she says. Her first impression of Los Angeles was that everyone was on vacation. “People were so relaxed.”

After getting a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from USC, Pelzman got a job producing, directing and editing industrial films and documentaries. “It’s easy to work your way up here. Americans are very much into work. In four years, I went from (living in) the neighborhood around USC to Los Feliz to West Hollywood to the beach in Santa Monica. I never could have gotten to the position of assistant producer in two years at home. The only thing I had to do to start a business here was to pay $50 for a business license. In Holland you have to go to business school.”

The other problem in Holland, Pelzman says, is that nobody there wants to work; there aren’t any opportunities for advancement, and everyone gets money from the government whether they work or not. “Everyone has at least a four-week vacation. Here you are lucky to get one week. I arrive at the office at 7:30 a.m. Sometimes I don’t leave until 11 p.m.”

What Pelzman likes best about Los Angeles is the beach, the sun, the vitality of the country (“It’s a trip to live in a world power.”) and the telephone service. “If Americans knew how bad the phone service was in other countries, they wouldn’t complain. In Holland, you have to wait one month, sometimes years. Here you can get a phone in two days. And it works.”

She doesn’t like the smog (“I had a headache for four or five months when I first came here.”); bland vegetables (“Everything is getting shots and getting pumped up, but it has no taste.”); all-green money (“In Holland, it is different colors, and there are little dots in the corner for the blind.”), and the “retarded banking system” (“I would assume the banking system in a capitalist country would be 99% efficient. But every time I go to the bank I have to wait half an hour.”)

Pelzman says she does get discouraged by the attitude of her friends and family back in Holland who think she’s “awful to want to be a capitalist. If you are not a socialist and like money too much, you are a traitor.

“In Europe, they make fun of the United States because people are unsophisticated here. My family tells me I live in a country where the President is a movie cowboy. If I had gone to the Soviet Union to live, I wouldn’t be as much criticized.”

KAJIKO MURAKAMI

When Kajiko Murakami moved to the United States, she was struck by the size of her new house. In Tokyo, her family lived in a four-bedroom house with only 1,000 square feet of space. In Glendale, where she lives with her husband, a vice president of Nippon Steel, and three teen-age children, their house has twice the floor space and a swimming pool.

Still, for Murakami there are disadvantages to living in the United States, even if it’s only temporarily (they have been here three years and will probably stay one more). Her son, Tamaki, isn’t getting the education she would prefer. (“In Japan,” Tamaki says, “kids talk about how well they did on tests. Here they talk about girls.”)

Her daughter Shinobu, who attends Occidental College, is concerned about the crime problem. When she attended Glendale High School she once left her purse at school and somebody found it later, empty, on a bus. “In Japan, you could leave your purse in a department-store changing room and get it back. It is hopeless here,” Shinobu says.

Murakami has been pleased to discover that--unlike so many other nationalities--Americans are not class-conscious. But, she says, “I feel that white people feel that they are special--the chosen people.” Once Murakami inadvertently took up two spaces while parking at the supermarket, and as she was leaving another woman driver said, “Why don’t you Orientals go home?”

The prevalence of other nationalities has made an impression on Tamaki. “Before I came, I thought everyone would be American. Instead, 50% of my classmates are from South America or the Middle East.” In spite of that ethnic mix, Shinobu complains, the Glendale High School yearbook looks like “a white people’s yearbook. And yet the school is half minority.”

Like their mother, Shinobu and Tamaki have been disappointed in the American educational system. “I was surprised at the way people talk in high school,” Shinobu says. “They say, ‘she don’t’ and ‘he don’t.’ When I studied English in Japan, that was the first thing that I learned not to do.”

In contrast to Japanese schools, where, in Tamaki’s words, “you are forced to study for your life,” American schools, Murakami says, “have a very relaxed atmosphere. The schools don’t have many regulations.”

Murakami says she has come to admire the ambition and independence of American women: “I wish that I could have come to this country when I was 10 years younger. It would have influenced a lot of things in my life. I never worked outside the home, but that is what you do in Japan.”

At the same time, she says, she feels very sorry for American women. “People here are so lenient about sex. Relationships are acceptable even if they are not based on marriage. The women can’t feel secure in their marriage. They are always competing with other women. In Japan, we stay together till one of us dies. But American women can’t ever rest.”

CURT DAHLGREN

As a visitor from Sweden, Curt Dahlgren is astounded at how little Americans know about other countries. “My daughter fell down and cut her lip and needed a couple of stitches. I took her to the hospital, and later they sent me the bill. I called them up and said, ‘You were supposed to bill my insurance company.’ And she said, ‘We can’t find such a company in Switzerland.’

“I said, ‘Not Switzerland--Sweden.’

“ ‘Where’s that?’

“ ‘Scandinavia.’

“ ‘OK, I’ll send the bill to Scandinavia.’

“ ‘No, you have to write Sweden on the envelope.”

Dahlgren, a professional photographer, made his first trip here in the summer of 1985 on a one-year assignment for a Scandinavian magazine. The pervasiveness of the car culture in Los Angeles strikes him as more than a little odd. “Your driver’s license is your birth certificate.” In order to get automobile insurance, he had to call 25 companies. They told him he needed one year of driving experience in California--rather difficult, since on that trip he was going to be here only one year. “Insurance companies are very powerful,” Dahlgren says. “They can just throw you out if they want to.”

Because Dahlgren had lived near the border of Lapland--which, he says, has “perhaps the best air in Europe”--he found it hard to get used to smog. “My eyes get all red. When you wash your face at night, you are always dirty. I spend a lot of time in the shower.”

Although most Swedes have relatives in this country, Dahlgren says that people in his native country nevertheless have a lot of misconceptions about America. “They think of it as the land of freedom. You go to the supermarket and buy whiskey--’Hey, I can drink and drive.’ It isn’t until later that you realize there are a lot of rules. Most of the Swedes I know (here) have been arrested for drunk driving.”

Dahlgren likes the sense of freedom in Los Angeles, after having experienced Sweden’s high taxes and over-regulation. But to enjoy this freedom, he says, you have to be “young, healthy and good-looking; then America is OK. I see a lot of old people hanging around the dumpsters when I go shopping. And nobody seems to care. Everyone makes fun of the Swedish safety net. After being here I am realizing this safety net isn’t so bad. My friends say, ‘Ah, you Swedes. You don’t have to work.’ And it’s true. A lot of people in Sweden give up very easily. There’s a lot of unemployment among young people, especially in the country--a lot of mental depression and suicide. But at least you don’t see people wearing rags--dirty, smelly, mentally disturbed people going through trash.”

For recreation, Dahlgren and his wife spend a lot of time driving around Los Angeles. “I understand why Americans don’t travel very much. You go three blocks and you’re in a completely different country.” Once they drove to Bel-Air. “We said to ourselves, ‘Who are these people? What have they done to be so rich?’ We couldn’t even pay their electric bill. People here are very money-minded--always out to make the big killer buck.”

ARTURO GRUNSTEIN

“I hate to stereotype people, but one thing that bothers me about Los Angeles is the extreme trendiness,” says Mexican-born Arturo Grunstein. “If there is any place in the world where people act a certain way, drive a certain car and wear the same (kind of) clothes, it is here. You only have to walk around Westwood to see everyone wearing the same kind of white cotton clothes, the punky sunglasses, the short hair and driving the little European convertibles. People here have been molded to be very accommodating when these trends come out. They are guinea pigs for new trends.”

Grunstein, who grew up in Mexico City, teaches Latin American history at UCLA. When he came to Los Angeles four years ago, he was amazed to discover that the importance of automobiles in Southern California had not been exaggerated. “I had seen ‘Annie Hall’ and had heard Woody Allen joke about how nobody walks in L.A. But I didn’t believe it was really true. In certain parts of town, all you see are luxury cars and people talking about them. You have to go to San Francisco to see people walking in the streets.”

In comparison to the nationalism and xenophobia he has found in Mexico and other countries, Grunstein says, Americans are very open and tolerant--most of the time. Once, says Grunstein, he was pulling into a parking space at Pico and Overland in his 1979 Ford Fiesta and a woman in a new BMW tried to cut him off. “I took the parking space,” says Grunstein, “and she called me a dirty, swarthy foreigner and said I ought to go back to where I came from. She felt she had the prerogative to that space because she had a better car. And the sad part,” says Grunstein, who is Jewish, “is I think the woman was Jewish.”

In general, he says, Americans “are the most informal and least snobby (people) that can be found. And also the most open-minded.” Sometimes, however, he finds that the touted California friendliness doesn’t run deep. When somebody invites you to a party in Mexico City, he says, “that means the person is truly interested in developing a friendship.” Here an invitation to a party may mean nothing, he says. They give you a drink, exchange a few pleasantries and that’s all there is.

Grunstein admires the American tendency not to “pay homage to formal authority.” The first time he saw someone send back food in a restaurant, he was shocked. But now he feels that “standing up to bureaucracy or authority, even in little ways, is important, because it gives you a feeling of power as a people and a strong sense of what your rights and duties are. I can see it with my students. When they think I have graded them unfairly, they are not hesitant about telling me why they think their grade is wrong.” In Mexico, on the other hand, he says, people deal with authorities with a “bizarre and unnecessary form of obsequiousness.”

To Grunstein, the most appalling trait of Southern Californians is their “obsessive concern with health and physical fitness.” Walking around Venice, he says, “you can see both men and women in really tiny bikinis with oil all over their bodies.” When “exhibitionism” gets that extreme, he says, “it borders on being grotesque.”

Still, says Grunstein, “regardless of all the negative things I’ve said about Los Angeles, it is one of the most exciting places in the world. It is going to be the first international city.”