about this book

From the introduction

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

California Uncovered arises out of two premises that set it apart from other California anthologies. The first is that all Californians have their own uniquely flavored stories about how they fit into this beautiful and complex state of ours, which is as much a mythic space as a geographical location. The second premise is that sharing these stories is of great importance, especially at this fraught and fractured time in post–9/11 America. For it is the nature of good stories to reach into the heart and foster understanding and compassion on a level that is deeper than that of other kinds of discourse. It is with the intention of introducing the multiplicity of Californian experiences to readers across the state, and hopefully beyond its borders, that the editors — William E. Justice, James Quay, and I — have carefully gathered the works that form this book.

Putting together this anthology was a challenging task, especially because we were confronted by an embarrassment of riches. Lack of space forced us to leave out many fine pieces we wanted to include. I am sure some of our readers will regret these omissions. But then, as Dana Gioia astutely states in his introduction to California Poetry, “Almost by definition, an anthology is a book that omits one’s favorite [writer]… and canonizes [pieces] one abhors.” It is my hope, though, that our selections will meet with favor — not only because of their literary excellence, but also because they help to make California Uncovered a special and unusual collection. One of our aims was to mix well–known voices — such as those of Maxine Hong Kingston and John Steinbeck (whose classic Travels with Charley we have excerpted here) — with many brave new ones that have rarely, if ever, been anthologized. I believe the result gives our collection a special freshness while preserving a sense of literary history.

As its subtitle indicates, California Uncovered looks into the future, into the California that is to come. But any meaningful vision of the future depends on an understanding of the past and the present, and so the book presents many different experiences from different times. From white settlers coming over the Sierra Nevada in the 1840s to the building of the first suburb with a mall, outside of Los Angeles, in the 1940s, to Afghanis trying vainly to feel at home in Fremont in the 2000s, California Uncovered traces an ongoing California experience.

An early editorial decision was that we would focus on prose — mainly because there are several excellent poetry anthologies covering this region. We have, however, included five poems — by Rubén Martínez, Gary Soto, Robert Hass, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, and Robinson Jeffers — that articulate the California story eloquently. Central to the book is a group of interviews by James Quay with people of various backgrounds — a Hmong refugee, a Jesuit priest, a justice of the California Supreme Court, a farmworker. They discuss, among other things, what being Californian means to them, to what degree they feel a sense of belonging, and how they envision the future of California. The unstudied spontaneity of their responses, juxtaposed with the more structured literary pieces, adds texture to the book.

While aiming to present a totality of Californian experience that is larger than the sum of its parts, the editors wanted also to ensure that different regions of the state were included in the dialogue presented in this anthology. Thus, we have chosen stories from north and south, coast, inland, and elsewhere, taking care to preserve the authenticity of neighborhoods and towns. Luis J. Rodriguez’s “My Ride, My Revolution” invites us into the life of a limousine driver who doubles as a singer in a rock band in inner–city Los Angeles. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” documents the travails of Chinese railroad workers in the rugged northern landscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Greg Sarris’s “The Magic Pony” takes us into the Native American community of Santa Rosa, where young people must navigate carefully between tradition and the lure of modernity. And my story, “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,”focuses on the difficulties faced by an old Indian woman who has exchanged the world she knows and loves for her son’s house in suburban San Jose.

To further capture the multiplicity of voices that tell the California story, we made it a point to include the unique inflections of urban, small–town, suburban, and rural voices, as well as voices from different ethnic backgrounds. For example, in the excerpt from The Gangster We Are All Looking For, lê thi diem thúy follows a Vietnamese child’s journey through San Diego in search of a place she can call home. In “Pruning Generations,” David Mas Masumoto reflects on ancestral figures, Japanese traditions, and the care of grapevines on his family’s farm in the Central Valley. In “The Light Takes Its Color from the Sea,” James D. Houston generously shares with readers his intimate musings on what it means to make a home in Santa Cruz. In “Melvin in the Sixth Grade,” a story with a very different tone, Dana Johnson’s African American protagonist suddenly finds herself in a cruel white suburban school. And Paul Beatty, detailing with irreverent humor one family’s move into the ’hood, demonstrates in an excerpt from The White Boy Shuffle that cruelty need not come from outside one’s own community.

While we have presented the harsh reality of what life means for many Californians, we have also made an attempt to break stereotypes. The protagonist of Yxta Maya Murray’s The Conquest is a Latina book restorer who works in the Getty Museum, while Khaled Hosseini’s young hero is an aspiring fiction writer.

The Californian adventure is a marvelous one — with manifold outcomes. In this collection we have tried to balance the hope and the disappointment of this complex experience. On one hand there are great and unexpected victories, as in Laila Halaby’s “The American Dream,” where an impoverished nursing aide beats the system — at least for the moment. On the other hand lurks violence, as in the excerpt from Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof, in which a part–Danish, part–Vietnamese family transplanted into the bewilderingly beautiful northern California countryside is threatened by a hostile neighbor who wants no part of them. Sometimes what happens is hilarious and sad and ironic all at once, as when Brian Ascalon Roley’s protagonists in American Son abandon their Filipino identity for a Latino one. Sometimes pain and joy are mixed into the same experience. As Shirley Geok–Lin Lim writes in her poem “Riding into California”:

The good thing about being Chinese on Amtrak
is no one sits next to you. The bad thing is
you sit alone all the way to Irvine.

Apart from providing pleasure to the discerning reader who enjoys the book in the privacy of his or her home, we hope this collection will, as part of the California Council for the Humanities’ statewide California Stories Uncovered campaign, become part of many group reading and discussion experiences. We hope it will inspire Californians to realize the value and validity of their own stories. We hope it will lead them to reflect on these stories and share them with others — in homes, in communities, and in classrooms — and through such sharing, begin weaving the stories of the future.

In presenting, through this collection, the many ways of being Californian, we have attempted to get at the reality of lives, the reality that is often buried beneath statistics and stereotypes. We hope this anthology will change, for the better, the way we look at friends, neighbors, and strangers. How can we not, once their stories have enchanted us? The result, we hope, will engender trust, understanding, and fellowship — and create a stronger community of Californians. Such a community is essential for our survival—for, as Rubén Martínez writes in “Manifesto,”

everyone is everywhere now
so careful how you shoot.