Shattering perceptions

Some of the usual suspects -- Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Maxine Hong Kingston -- show up in “California Uncovered,” an anthology of fiction, memoir and poetry. But, more often, the selections remind us of both the delicacy and the diversity of what we like to call, sometimes rather too reflexively and too buoyantly, the California experience.

Perhaps the single best example of the treasures to be found in this remarkable collection is an excerpt from “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” an autobiographical novel by le thi diem thuy, who was born in South Vietnam in 1972 and raised in the San Diego area. The young girl who is the narrator of the novel cannot quite grasp the vocabulary of American place names: “We live in the country of California, the province of San Diego, the village of Linda Vista.” Her family lives in a neighborhood of shabby bungalows built in the 1940s for Navy personnel and now occupied by refugees from Southeast Asia, which is the setting for a certain kind of culture clash.

“When we moved in, we had to sign a form promising not to put fish bones in the garbage disposal,” she recalls. Later she adds, “[O]ne year, a bunch of Laotian kids with the last name Yang came to our school. The Navy Housing kids started calling all the refugee kids ‘Yang.’ ”

The excerpt ends with a scene so shattering and yet so sublime that it literally caused my skin to tingle. The family is evicted to make way for a condominium development, an emblematic California moment, but the girl allows us to understand that it has the sting of a second exile. She stands at a chain-link face and watches a wrecking ball knock down the bungalow where her afflicted family struggled to reinvent itself, and we see how the ball is shattering not only walls but memories. “There is not a trace of blood anywhere,” she says, “except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this.”

“California Uncovered” is often celebratory but never resorts to cheerleading. Thus, for example, as Ruben Martinez expresses in “Manifesto”: “And what time is it in L.A. when / a guatemalteco wears an Africa Now T-shirt / and a black kid munches carnitas and all / together now dance to Easy-E. and B.D.P., / crossing every border ever held sacred?” In the same poem, however, he acknowledges that the collision of cultures can strike sparks: “But it’s live ammunition on the streets of Southcentral L.A. / and in Westwood and San Salvador / and East L.A.; / as real as video.”

Indeed, the editors plainly prefer courage and candor to pretty scenes and sentiments. In a story titled “My Ride, My Revolution,” Luis J. Rodriguez allows us to see the streets of L.A. through the eyes of a Purepecha -- a Mexican of pre-Columbian descent -- who is both a rock musician and a limo driver: “Hollywood to me is more about lost middle-class teens hooked on smack; about bikers sitting around their hogs at tattoo shops with their pierced girlfriends; or Saturday-night cruising with hydraulic-hopping lowriders and sporadic gunfire.”

The editors of “California Uncovered” clearly aspire to capture the state’s diversity, but they also seek to shatter the stereotypes that govern our perceptions of color and culture. In an excerpt from “The White Boy Shuffle,” for example, novelist Paul Beatty conjures up “an ashy-legged black beach bum” named Gunnar: “I was the funny, cool black guy,” explains Gunnar, who also points out: “I learned timing, Zen and the art of self-deprecation from the glut of Jewish standup comics on cable TV, who served as living Chinese acupuncture charts of comedic pressure points.”

And Khaled Hosseini, son of a diplomat from Afghanistan who sought political asylum in the United States, plays a surprising variation on the immigrant saga in a selection from his novel, “The Kite Runner” -- a weekend flea market in San Jose is turned into a kind of Little Kabul. “Afghan music played in the aisles of the Used Goods section,” he recalls. “ ... The only thing that flowed more than tea in those aisles was Afghan gossip.”

These stories are timeless, but the book itself is designed as the centerpiece of an event that will take place in April under the sponsorship of the California Council for the Humanities: “Thousands of Californians will gather in libraries, schools, community centers and living rooms to talk about the stories presented here and to share their own California stories,” explains James Quay, executive director of the council and one of the co-editors. And, in fact, there is much to ponder and talk about in these pages.

“California is never more recognizable than when it supports a completely incongruous construction,” observes Richard Rodriguez in “Where the Poppies Grow,” one of the essays in “California Uncovered.” He is thinking of artistic and architectural incongruities that can be seen at street level -- “a giant orange or a giant donut or a statue of John Wayne” -- but the same is true of the interior contradictions that abound in these tales of aspiration and defeat, longing and loss, comedy and tragedy. *