A Creation of Outsiders

California’s native-born children, whatever our color or tongue, realize very early that California takes every impression. Our parents, on the other hand, are often surprised by how many Californias they find when they get here. Nothing at all like they expected. Nothing like the movie.

My early intuition as a native son was that California was dreamed into being elsewhere. I noticed that paradigmatic Californians weren’t so by birth. Richard Diebenkorn came from Oregon. Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma. Willie Mays, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Kerouac, Richard Neutra, Lucy and Desi, Edward Teller--all of them from far away. All of them living forever in California on the same street.

Mickey Mouse was conceived aboard the Santa Fe, westward bound. Minnie was drawn from hisrib, born here. As was John Steinbeck, born in Salinas; his house still stands. Steinbeck’s generosity was to invent the Joad family’s first view of orange groves, to believe that Oklahoma Joads were more important to the myth of California than their native-born grandchildren who live in suburban Bakersfield and complain about “the changes.”

When I was a kid, the nationally advertised version of California was the GI version. Early in the 1940s, thousands of young men had seen California light from train windows--light receding as they shipped out toward tragedy. And in the midst of tragedy, they remembered, perhaps, some bong in the air that promised to redeem them.

After the war, the survivors returned with narrowed eyes, with the GI Bill, with FHA loans, to build a pacific ever-after. They buried the shudder of death beneath hard sentimental weight; beneath green lawns, all-electric kitchens, three bedrooms, two kids, a boy and a girl, and an orderly succession of Christmas lights, tacked up with much goddammit.

Many of these veterans were middle-aged by the time I was their newspaper boy. Many had jobs in the defense industry, because they would forbid tragedy. Each afternoon, I folded and lobbed the world onto their porches. But I was otherwise complicitous in their cover-up. I willingly played the innocent--the native--as did their two towheaded children, a boy and a girl, whooping through the bushes with pheasant feathers tied onto our heads.

I played another role. I played son of the Old Country, the tragedian. For I lived in “el norte,” a memory of dread, which I took from my parents’ eyes. I also put on Bombay eyes--my uncle came from India. My Mexican parents and my Indian uncle saw California as a refuge from chaos, but they understood that tragedy was preeminently natural.

My California was also imagined in the Azores, the wraith of some Atlantic storm. I grew up among Portuguese, Irish. My Catholic nuns came from Ireland and brought with them--as if it were ground into the glass of the spectacles they wore--a tragic vision. This despite the luxurious light of California opening over all. Can it have been a coincidence that my first allegiance to a writer was to William Saroyan, who had grown up in Fresno, under a cloudless sky, listening to Armenian grandmothers’ tales of genocide?

Eureka! (I have found it.) California’s official motto should be mistranslated: I have brought it. I folded California into my portmanteau and carried it over the sea, then across the Sierra. Or I invented California in my Kwangtung village, from the gaunt letters Hong-on-Sam sent his long-dead wife. I sketched California on the steps of my parents’ brownstone in Brooklyn, listening to my grandfather’s stories of castles in Poland.

A native son, I grew up in Sacramento, in a prairie house decorated with Mexican statues with imprecisely painted sclera and stigmata. Outside my window were camellias, every winter, red and white globes.

Any sense I have of California is beholden to the importations of Iowa and Spain and New England and Oklahoma and the Philippines. Without the prompting of Midwestern artisans, I would never have noticed the austerity, the utility, the beauty of California Indian baskets. Without the cues of newcomers, I would not have noticed the austerity, the beauty of California: Nancy, describing in letters from Ohio--this was years after she had left Stanford--her yearning for the scent of eucalyptus, and the smell of salt; her longing for brown hills and the chemical distance of the Santa Clara Valley, an ostensible autumn haze.

Gertrude Stein’s famous skepticism concerning Oakland sounds native to me, though she wasn’t. No “there” there. Why not extend that koan to the entire state? If you list California’s famous exports to the world, you come up with a volley of blanks. I mean spiceless tacos, accentless newscasters, birth control pills, strip malls, hula hoops, cyberspace, Marilyn Monroe.

Louis Kahn, the Philadelphia architect, gave California one of our best modernist buildings, the Salk Institute (named for Jonas Salk, a native New Yorker). Kahn’s method, before starting any construction, was to brood over the landscape in several lights, several weathers. What does this space want to become? One imagines the soil of Bangladesh or Fort Worth responding more forthrightly to Kahn’s question than the cloudless idiot, California.

California is never more recognizable than when it supports a completely incongruous construction. A giant orange or a giant donut or a statue of John Wayne. The landscape otherwise seems without an idea of itself.

The boldness of the ‘50s was that Californians came up with ideas of the state larger than their differences. By mid-century, when California became the most populous state in the union, our parents felt themselves resistant enough to tragedy to celebrate. California constructed eight-lane freeways to join city and country; built a suburban architecture with two-car garages and sliding glass walls to allow each Californian simultaneity--inside and outside at once.

California’s most flamboyant reconciliation was the horizontal city, in distinction to the verticality of the East Coast. Separate freeway exits, even separate climates, distinct neighborhoods, faiths, languages--all were annexed to one another, stood united beneath a catholic abstraction called “San Jose” or “Sacramento” or--the greatest horizontal abstraction in the world--”L.A.”

The horizontal city not only tolerated incoherence and disharmony, it found its meaning in the juxtaposition of a chic restaurant, a Jesus Saves storefront, a taco stand.

Didn’t Walt Disney tantalize California with the idea of floating over street-level congestion on a monorail? In the ‘50s, Disney purchased some flower farms from Japanese families in Orange County and plowed them under. Disney had come from Chicago, so immediately he got the point of California. He constructed very different magic kingdoms, side by side.

Only in one respect did Disney seem at odds with his adopted state. Prudishly, he insisted upon a discretion among the several kingdoms. Main Street must never betray a knowledge of Tomorrowland. Costumed employees were required to travel through underground tunnels, before and after their shifts. Cinderella will never meet Davy Crockett in the Magic Kingdom.

Whereas within the horizontal city, California’s children grew up accustomed to disjunction. In the light of day, and at street level, all over California, Fantasyland is right next door to Frontierland. And the adolescents of alternate fantasies began to blend and marry one another. Which is why California is famous today for the highest rate of miscegenation in the mainland U.S. and the tofu burrito. *