Office Workers Miss Their Little Woman of the Bushes

They knew her, and yet they didn’t. They saw her, and yet they didn’t. They might have wanted to get to know her, yet couldn’t.

She lived in their midst but not in their world. For years, she had set up housekeeping in the shrubs between impressive twin bank buildings along Dove Street in Newport Beach. It was a neighborhood you could brag about. All around her were white-collar professionals with futures; she was a woman with a past. But what was it?

Everyone in this neighborhood had their jobs. Theirs was to help keep the commerce afloat. Hers was to exist.

All stories about homeless street people have beginnings; it’s just that the rest of us seldom know when they are. When did the spool begin unraveling? When did the threads that once bound their lives become hopelessly entangled and lead them to the streets? Or into the bushes?

So it was with the little Asian woman who lived until recently in the shrubs between CommerceBank and Mitsui Manufacturers Bank. Although the banks’ employees and others in the upscale commercial neighborhood saw her all the time--indeed, every morning as they came to work--they didn’t really know her.

It wasn’t really their fault. They knew she was there and wanted to be kind, but she couldn’t come into their world, any more than they could come into hers.

And because they didn’t know her but, in a sense, wanted to, they created a story for her.

They are the first to say that the stories about her are rumors, but in some strange way, the rumors at least made her a person, gave her an identity.

People who have worked at the two banks for the last few years say she had been there as long as they could remember. She was smallish in size and seemed more than 50 years old. Much of the time she was out of view, living under the cover of the bushes. But you could also see her standing under a tree, usually with her umbrella and sometimes fanning herself with a newspaper.

Don, a parking lot attendant across the street, had a direct view of her every day for the 1 1/2 years he’s worked there. “One rumor was that she was wealthy,” he said this week. The most prevalent one was that she had been married and that her husband had been killed in a construction accident somewhere nearby, and that was why she set up home there. “Someone told me she’s actually waiting for her husband to come back,” Don said.

Deep down, people probably knew those stories weren’t true, but they hung to the woman like her clothing. Don said the police would stop from time to time, never giving her any trouble. When they did, he said, it appeared that she would reach into her purse, produce a piece of paper, and they would drive off. It was as if she were producing the deed to the ranch.

One time, Don said, he went over to her and asked whether he could help her find a shelter. She shooed him away. She wasn’t angry, he said, but seemed “protective about her space.”

A few weeks ago, she walked across the street to his parking lot booth and said, “Do you know who took my bag?” Don said he didn’t and, angry this time, she stormed back to her hideaway.

It was the people in the two banks who saw her the most, in that they shared property lines with her. Jennifer Pamplin, who works at Mitsui, said she and her friends often saw the woman while getting to work just before 8 a.m.

They wondered how she kept herself clean because although she wore street garb, she didn’t appear especially unkempt or dirty. She didn’t give off body odors or harass or yell at anyone who passed her, Pamplin said. They assumed that some business in the neighborhood must have let her in at nights and given her access to a lavatory.

Conversation with the woman was minimal, although one of the bank employees once gave her some clothes, which the woman accepted. They also gave her food from time to time.

Over the years, the woman just became accepted as part of the neighborhood, Pamplin said. She bothered no one, and no one bothered her.

“It seemed like she was just waiting for time to go by,” Don said.

Then, in recent weeks, she was discovered by the news media.

Don remembers looking from his parking lot booth and seeing a two-person TV crew trying to talk to her. “Sure enough, after that day, I didn’t see her at all,” Don said.

It wasn’t the crew that scared her off. A Times reporter also had learned of the woman’s existence and had contacted Newport Beach police to innocently inquire about her. Police notified the county’s Adult Protective Services, and the woman was taken in an ambulance to a local hospital for a diagnosis of her needs.

She hasn’t returned to her home in the bushes since then.

I suppose we can assume she’s better off now, although she apparently was quite content for the longest time in her Newport Beach digs.

And although her neighbors never got to know her well, no doubt it would please her to know that they genuinely care about her and hope she’s doing well.