Cultural
collage AUTHORS
SURVEY LIFE IN THE BAY AREA AND DISCOVER THE WORLD By
Sandip Roy 12/02/2007
06:24:01 AM PST The
Chinese lion dancer bucks up against the impossibly blue California sky framed
by downtown San Francisco. But emerging from under the elaborate mask is a black
teenager. Even more curious, the occasion is not the Chinese New Year Parade but
the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Over
a century ago, immigrant Irish men were among those trying to drive the Chinese
out of California, chopping off their queues, burning down Chinatowns. Today no
one blinks an eye at Chinese lion dancers at an Irish parade. This is, after
all, the Bay Area. Lonny
Shavelson and Fred Setterberg, longtime residents of the Bay Area, probably
could have found no better picture to sum up California's new culture in their
book "Under the Dragon." Yet the temptation would have been to just
capture the boundary-dissolving, kumbaya spirit of that photograph and stop
there. But
as Shavelson and Setterberg's book demonstrates, the Bay Area is very much a
conversation in progress. In a state where no ethnic group is a majority
anymore, where 112 languages are spoken in the Bay Area alone, we can see our
future in the sign at the Sun Hop Fat #1 Supermarket in Oakland:
American-Mexican-Chinese-Vietnamese-Thailand-Cambodia-Laos-Filipino-Oriental
food. Add Afghan-Indian-Ethiopian-Irish, and the conversation moves well beyond
melting pots and mixed salads. This glossy book, which emphasizes vibrant
photographs accompanied by short stories, eavesdrops on this conversation. It
tells the story of Eduardo Americano, a teenage Mexican-American accused of
beating up Saeed Zarakani, a gas station attendant in Hayward, calling him a
"rag head." Judge Peggy Hora sentenced Americano to 180 days in jail
and told the district attorney to find a way to educate him about Afghans. It
turned out at the end of the trial, Zarakani was actually an Iranian. As
California grows more diverse, sometimes we know each other even less. As an Indian
immigrant, I remember countless parties in Silicon Valley where the guests were
not only Indian, but also Bengali. As I watched the kids play soccer with the
dads shouting the names of old hometown teams, the mothers and grandmothers
ladling out rice and chicken curry, the American twang in the preschoolers'
accents seemed the only sign that we were not in Calcutta. As Andrew Lam writes
in his foreword, "tightly knit tribes - Little Saigons, Chinatowns, Little
Kabul - with their own in-language media and temples and churches, exist
alongside Latino Muslims, black Buddhists, Mien teenagers speaking
Ebonics." Sometimes it's
tempting to marvel at these curious hyphenations and ignore the expanding
cultural islands, even ethnic ghettos. Yet the changing demographics of the Bay
Area mean both realities co-exist. At one level,
immigrants preserve in America a homeland that might only exist in the diaspora,
a homeland full of nostalgia (and hurt). Setterberg and Shavelson describe the
Little Kabuls and Little Saigons that most of us regard as celebrations of
culture and food, as also reminders of loss. So unsmiling Vietnamese march in
the carefully preserved uniforms of the old South Vietnam, a country that ceased
to exist in 1975, but which lives again in cities like San Jose. Others modulate home
rituals to American realities. Four Indian-American teenagers dance at Indian
Independence Day in Fremont. Their red and white silks gleam fiercely in the hot
sun, though the white socks and sneakers under the wraparound lungis hint
at suburban American lives, rather than the mustard fields of Punjab. A little
girl with stars in her eyes jumps over a bonfire for the Persian celebration of
the vernal equinox. The ancient verse she chants in Farsi dates back to 600
B.C., but the bonfire is actually a Duraflame log - Berkeley city regulations! America doesn't just
transform immigrant culture with its fire regulations and squished-into-weekends
festivals. Sometimes it creates new rituals altogether. A graceful photo-essay
shows Mien teenagers getting ready for a traditional dance, wrapping 20-foot
turbans around their heads. In Laos, such public performances of Mien dance do
not really exist. But in America, all immigrant communities are expected to make
a show-and-tell of their private cultures. So the Mien dance steps learned in
Thai refugee camps, to a Thai pop tune, are recorded in the United States and
sung in Mien. While many of the
photographs look for the new California in the obvious colorful places - ethnic
celebrations and cultural festivals - Shavelson and Setterberg find a deeper
vein of change inside places of worship. Here you meet Diane
Cheatum, black and Buddhist, mourning the untimely death of her son by chanting
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, much to the bewilderment of her Aunt Melba from New
Orleans. Jesse Graham is white but preaches to a black Baptist congregation
about the prodigal son. And Daniel Denton is planning to move his family to a
real Muslim country like Sudan. Denton is Mexican and Muslim. After services at
a Hayward mosque he grills pollo asado. What does it all mean?
Is this really a new California or just anxious rootlessness looking for new
homes? Perhaps it's best that the book dances around a neat answer, saying
instead "the Bay Area has leapt out of the melting pot and into the fire -
here the new America is being forged." It's a clever answer but what will
come out of the fire - steel, clay, a phoenix or tandoori? In California under
the dragon's skin, where the Mien teenagers speak Ebonics, where the cultural
connections are more to Chinatown than China, the possibilities are limitless. UNDER THE DRAGON:
California's New Culture By Lonny Shavelson and
Fred Setterberg Heyday Books, 159 pp.,
$24.95
for the Mercury News