A Memoir of Pain and Patriotism

The “Big House” in Sierra Madre, as it was known by its little inmates, was an orphanage, not a penitentiary. But it was surely a place of unhappy confinement for Robert Sanabria, who spent 10 years there. To hear Sanabria recall in “Stewing in the Melting Pot: The Memoir of a Real American” (Capital Books; $26.95, 228 pages), the Plaza Community Center Children’s Home was a scene of Dickensian bleakness and terror, where Latino children were turned into “good Americans” with the aid of a cat-o’-nine-tails.

“With few exceptions, every child placed in the home by a parent went through some variation of the same terrified struggle not to be left behind,” he writes. “The period of fear and anguish was one I would see nearly every new boy go through, and for some it lasted for weeks. In my case it seemed it would never end.”

Sanabria is a former Army intelligence officer who served in Korea and Vietnam and then reinvented himself as a professional sculptor. “Stewing in the Melting Pot,” however, reaches back to the 1930s, when his mother sought refuge from an abusive husband by hopping a bus from El Paso to L.A., and promptly “parked” her four children in the “Big House” for a decade.

As it turns out, the strident title of his book is slightly misleading--the book is a compellingly readable and achingly intimate family memoir that owes something to Dickens and yet speaks in its own distinctive voice.

“A woman of secrets who had a knack for translating other peoples’ problems into her own pain” is how Sanabria describes his mother, and his book can be understood as an unflinching account of his lifelong quest to solve the mysteries that have bedeviled him since early childhood, including the primal question of how many men figured in his mother’s complicated life, and which one of them was actually his father. The question is answered with shattering results in a book that Sanabria describes as a volatile brew of “revelation and catharsis.”

To be sure, the caretakers at the “Big House” sought to erase the Latino heritage of their young charges. On the day of his arrival, Sanabria was informed that he would be called Bobby rather than Roberto. “She says we must have American names,” his older sister explained to her 4-year-old brother. But they never entirely succeeded with Sanabria, and he recalls the sense of deja vu that haunted him after a field trip to Olvera Street.

“The air was filled with the smells of cooking and spices, odors I recognized and liked,” he writes. “Still, I found the place disturbing. The people in the booths were foreign, wore strange clothes, and appeared for all the world like displays in a museum. I felt embarrassed for reasons I couldn’t explain. Was I one of them?”

His strong and insistent identification with his Hispanic origins turns out to be deeply ironic, as Sanabria finds out for himself when the deepest of the family secrets is fully revealed. “Finally, I’m left wondering who the ‘real’ Americans are,” he concedes. Still, he explains his life as one long struggle to recover what was taken from him in early childhood: “The American in my head,” he concludes, “is, and always will be, at odds with the Mexican in my soul.”

“Asian-American girls have attitude,” insists one of the contributors to “YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American,” edited by Vickie Nam (Quill, $13, 298 pages), an engaging but often challenging collection of reminiscences and confessions by young women who are willing to speak about some of their most intimate life experiences.

Most of the voices belong to young women still in their teens or early 20s, all of them articulate, bold and courageous. To the identity crisis that is the common experience of adolescence, they bring the unique perspective that comes from being caught between two cultures, both of which are conflicted about gender and race.

Thus, for example, one contributor describes what it feels like to be “exoticized” in America, to be treated as “the token Asian Girl,” to find oneself the object of attention from white men with a “fetish” for Asian women.

Other contributors allow us to feel the sting of racism at home and the sting of rejection by one’s blood relations in the ancestral homeland. Sometimes we see the same issue of racial identity from two very different points of view: One young woman reveals how some of her high school friends used cosmetic tape to achieve “a more Western look,” and another young woman describes her sense of alienation when she saw an African American supermodel who was given “Oriental eyes” in a fashion magazine spread.

June Kim, for example, is a Korean American from Pacific Palisades who visited Korea for the first time after graduating from high school. The first Korean word she heard was gyo-po , a term that everyone she met seemed to apply to her. She was distressed to find out that it means “foreigner.”

A Chinese American woman named Debra Yoo, by contrast, contributes a poem that recalls the experience of being called “chink” on the first day of second grade. “It came like a tidal wave. Smashed my spirit,” she writes. “My eyes opened to the harsh world around me.”

Some of the confessional moments are charming and unsettling at once. Julia Wong, a 19-year-old from Monterey Park reports on her own difficulty in trying to find a bra sufficiently large to accommodate her New World figure when shopping for lingerie on a visit to Hong Kong.

“[T]he stereotype that Asians were supposed to be thin,” she explains, “made me feel like I was a freak of nature.”

Not every contributor is a resident of the Pacific Rim, but California is invoked far more often than Cleveland, Brooklyn and Toronto. Twenty-one-year-old Gloria Ang, for example, describes how her family re-enacted the old immigrant saga, traveling from China--”I come from Nine Dragons, Fragrant Harbor, in my birth year of the Horse”--to California, and she invokes the memories of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, the place where thousands of Chinese immigrants first landed in America and, tragically, the place where many of them were forcibly separated from their loved ones and sent back to China.

“Many of us may easily conjure images of guardian angels or angel-like characters we’ve seen on TV sitcoms, but for others--especially for Asians who grow up in San Francisco--the word ‘angel’ carries a more significant meaning,” she muses. “What I realized is that my Chinese American elders saw Angel Island from the ‘other’ perspective: It was a reminder to safeguard secrets of actual family relations for fear that they might otherwise be deported.”

Nam makes a place in “YELL-Oh Girls!” for tender and troubled moments in the lives of these young women--the memories of a beloved grandmother, for example, or the loss of a father to illness. Still, she is unabashedly militant, and she characterizes her book as nothing less than a manifesto.

“‘Yellow’ has been used to define skin color (even though Asian skin comes in a wide range of colors and hues), and carries with it other racist assumptions,” she explains. “[T]he hyphenated ‘yell-oh’ does not define or create barriers between Asian Americans. Simply put, the term ‘YELL-Oh’ is a call to action.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.