Continued reflections on living in California

When I was little, California was for me the promised land of milk and honey. I don't know why exactly: I fashioned dioramas of the 49 gold rush out of painted papier mache and aluminum like a maniac, dreamed of driving through the arches of the great redwoods, wove macrame plant hangings and envied Californians their freedom, their confidence, their sunny dispositions. Not quite understanding that the Chinese-Americans who settled here first and been engaged in various kinds of lowly and forced labor, I seemd to have wanted to relive the history of that immigration, starting with San Francisco.

From 1993-1994, I lived in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, between the Rodney King riots and the Northridge quake. Los Angeles did in fact live up to my dreams: I had just moved from Williamsburg, where my bedroom shook every time an eighteen wheeler rumbled by. Birds sang outside my window. Silver Lake smelled like jasmine and triggered some long dormant memories of Taiwan. My car was totalled, we lived through a serious earthquake. At 4:30 am the morning of the quake, I watched like the cyborg in Blade Runner as green explosions lit up the LA basin: transformers blew out one by one until the whole city was black. And then the sun rose. Some of my friends had negative equity in their homes.