Strangers in a Strange Land

In ways that affect everything, this has become a metropolis of people born elsewhere, though it is only during global crises that that fact of life tends to sink in. The day-to-dayness of having your heart in two places isn’t a reality most Southern Californians bother to take note of. You go to work, you raise your children; barring the occasional far-flung plane crash or earthquake, you don’t dwell on the long-distance phone bill, the hours on the Internet.

I am from elsewhere. So is the woman who baby-sits my children, and every year around this time, though she has spent more than half of her life here, she figuratively loads her heart into a pile of cartons bound for Central America. “Time,” she’ll say, “for the boxes to Guatemala.” By Thanksgiving, her suburban dining room will be heaped with gifts for people in a jungle hometown she has visited maybe twice in two decades: clock radios, NutraSweet, blood-pressure monitors, spike-heeled pumps, baby dresses, business suits, shower curtains, shampoo, Hershey Kisses, frying pans.

It is as common a custom as there is now in Southern California, but it always moves me, partly because other people’s roots always seem more exotic than one’s own. I look at those boxes and think of high-heeled girls on dirt roads and abuelitas stirring artificial sweetener into their coffee. She sees the mom she so misses maybe moving north to live with her.

Anyway, in the midst of a day-to-day conversation about boxes to Guatemala and faraway mothers, an invitation came last month, one that would end up bearing a kind of unintentional bulletin. A community college teacher in Van Nuys wanted a guest lecturer for his class in introductory composition, but the class would engender a different sort of awakening.

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Though it now seems behind the times--yesterday’s stereotype overpowering today’s palpable landscape--I for some reason imagined a roomful of American-born suburban kids. As it turned out, there were about 40 students of varying national origins and ages, of whom maybe six had been born here. “Tell me about yourselves,” I said.

There was a dark-haired Iranian feminist who, paradoxically, expressed terrible homesickness for the country that veils its females. There was a brave Korean boy with a round face who had come here alone. “Much opportunity,” he said, “but very lonely.” There was a tiny Vietnamese woman who had spent her first 10 years in Southeast Asia and her second 10 years in California. Her sole memory of Vietnam, she said, was “playing in the rain, once, as a little girl.”

There was a broad-shouldered teenager who had come here as a small child with his Armenian parents. “I feel more Armenian than American,” he said, setting his jaw. He was wearing a Polo shirt, as I recall, and khaki pants and had not even a whiff of an accent, and I both believed him and did not. There was a young woman from Maine whose Eastern childhood was almost as foreign to California as the childhoods of the people with green cards. There was a young man who’d spent his childhood as an actor, in the terra incognita of a hit TV sitcom. There was a Filipina who had become a day-care worker because she had no children, and a homeboy who had fled East L.A. in a wheelchair.

As disparate as they were, though, there was a commonality about them. Each seemed left to his or her own devices, like pioneers who’d been forced to recreate civilization with nothing to go on but instinct and memory. They were not of their old place, but neither were they entirely of this new one. They talked passionately about doing better, but knew the betrayal in doing better than those who love you. They were utterly on their own, and in such numbers that it suddenly became clear that, as they created themselves, a new city was being created in their image. In ways that affected everything, their day-to-day story was already the new L.A.

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That awakening came to mind this week as the metropolis stood on its own, reeling under the loss of a planeload of travelers en route to Egypt and a death-stained parliament in Armenia and a bar full of Koreans in a port city half a world away. A tipping point has been reached, made from ties that bind so many Southern Californians to so many far-flung homelands that the very identity of this metropolis has been changed.

Some say we’re America, only more so. Some say we’re the City of Suburbs. Or the mecca for Golden Dreamers. Or the New Ellis Island or La-La Land. But the landscape that has evolved is something else now, comprised of none and all of those visions. We are a new thing, of hope and grief and precious offerings bound for places we can’t forget and can’t go home to, marked “From California With Love.”

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.