Tropic of Orange Read online

  Also by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Anime Wong

  Brazil-Maru

  Circle K Cycles

  I Hotel

  Letters to Memory

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

  Copyright © 1997, 2017 by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Introduction © 2017 by Sesshu Foster

  Cover design by Carlos Esparza

  Cover photograph © Joakim Lloyd Raboff/Shutterstock.com

  Book design by Bookmobile

  First edition published by Coffee House Press in 1997

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 2833572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951– author.

  Title: Tropic of orange / Karen Tei Yamashita.

  Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057048 | ISBN 9781566895026 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. | Magic realism (Literature) | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3575.A44 T76 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057048

  242322212019181712345678

  For my immigrant family.

  For Ronaldo, Jane Tei, and Jon.

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY SESSHU FOSTER

  MONDAY: Summer Solstice

  CHAPTER 1:MiddayNot Too Far from Mazatlán

  CHAPTER 2:BenefitsKoreatown

  CHAPTER 3:Weather ReportWestside

  CHAPTER 4:Station IDJefferson & Normandie

  CHAPTER 5:Traffic WindowHarbor Freeway

  CHAPTER 6:Coffee BreakDowntown

  CHAPTER 7:To WakeThe Marketplace

  TUESDAY: Diamond Lane

  CHAPTER 8:RideshareDowntown Interchange

  CHAPTER 9:NewsNowHollywood South

  CHAPTER 10:MorningEn México

  CHAPTER 11:To WashOn the Tropic

  CHAPTER 12:Car Payment DueTijuana via Singapore

  CHAPTER 13:OldiesThis Old Hood

  CHAPTER 14:BudgetsSkirting Downtown

  WEDNESDAY: Cultural Diversity

  CHAPTER 15:Second MortgageChinatown

  CHAPTER 16:LA XMargarita’s Corner

  CHAPTER 17:The InterviewManzanar

  CHAPTER 18:DaylightThe Cornfield

  CHAPTER 19:Hour of the TrucksThe Freeway Canyon

  CHAPTER 20:Disaster Movie WeekHiro’s Sushi

  CHAPTER 21:To EatLa Cantina de Miseria y Hambre

  THURSDAY: The Eternal Buzz

  CHAPTER 22:You Give Us 22 MinutesThe World

  CHAPTER 23:To LaborEast & West Forever

  CHAPTER 24:DuskTo the Border

  CHAPTER 25:Time & a HalfLimousine Way

  CHAPTER 26:Life InsuranceL.A./T.J.

  CHAPTER 27:Live on AirEl A

  CHAPTER 28:Lane ChangeAvoiding the Harbor

  FRIDAY: Artificial Intelligence

  CHAPTER 29:PromosWorld Wide Web

  CHAPTER 30:DawnThe Other Side

  CHAPTER 31:AM/FMFreeZone

  CHAPTER 32:OvertimeEl Zócalo

  CHAPTER 33:To DreamAmerica

  CHAPTER 34:Visa CardFinal Destination

  CHAPTER 35:JamGreater L.A.

  SATURDAY: Queen of Angels

  CHAPTER 36:To PerformAngel’s Flight

  CHAPTER 37:The Car ShowFront Line

  CHAPTER 38:NightfallAztlán

  CHAPTER 39:Working WeekendDirt Shoulder

  CHAPTER 40:Social SecurityI–5

  CHAPTER 41:Prime TimeLast Stop

  CHAPTER 42:Drive-ByVirtually Everywhere

  SUNDAY: Pacific Rim

  CHAPTER 43:DeadlineOver the Net

  CHAPTER 44:Commercial BreakThe Big Sleep

  CHAPTER 45:MidnightThe Line

  CHAPTER 46:SigAlertThe Rim

  CHAPTER 47:To DiePacific Rim Auditorium

  CHAPTER 48:Hour 25Into the Boxes

  CHAPTER 49:American ExpressMi Casa/Su Casa

  HyperContexts

  Acknowledgments

  In large and small ways, the following people have supported and given sustenance to the writing of this book:

  Vicki AbeBetsy Amster

  Jane Tomi & Pat BoltzSusan Brenneman

  Kerry BurkeBill Burroughs

  Chris FischbachCraig & Ruthie Gilmore

  Ted HopesBen Huang

  Ryuta ImafukuMarialice Jacob

  Jimmie KhuuSally Kim

  Seokjin KimAllan Kornblum

  Casey KracheRussell Leong

  Audrey LimonSteven Maier

  Linda MathewsKaren Mayeda

  Michael MurashigeBonnie Nadell

  Jeff NygaardSue Ostfield

  Olivia Regalado & Family

  John RetsekAlma Rodriguez

  Reyes RodriguezHisaji Sakai

  Beth SistanovichGarth Sorensen

  Emi StevensMiyo Stevens

  Tim UyekiRosa Velasquez & Family

  Chip WilliamsDavid Welna

  Asako YamashitaOnna Young

  KCET Channel 28

  With gratitude to all and to those who have written and continue to write about L.A., but especially to Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira, who brought the original orange from São Paulo and that other Tropic.

  Introduction

  BY SESSHU FOSTER

  This is the ultimate book about Los Angeles because there’s no ultimate book about Los Angeles. There’s no last stop on the L.A. railway whose yellow trolleys went out of service in 1958; there’s no end to Oaxacans, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Central Americans, and Bengalis inventing new lives in Koreatown; no one’s heading to the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire to disrupt the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; there’s no end to white hipsters and “creative types” coming to Los Angeles from NYC and points East to make it big—just like there’s no last off-ramp on the 10 freeway heading across the desert to Texas and Florida. Which is to say, as the last city of the American civilization before the Pacific Plate subducts under North America and uplifts the ranges of the West, L.A. never stops, it never stops—L.A. never stops. Tropic of Orange dares to go there.

  L.A.’s the city at the end of the continent that grinds out industrial day-dreams and nightmares for the rest of the planet. “Hollywood will not rot on the windmills of Eternity / Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God,” Allen Ginsberg wrote. “Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion!” This city industrialized the imagination of the species. This city unspooled reels of Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields, killed Sam Cooke and Janis Joplin, buried Marilyn Monroe and the shadows of ten thousand Indians, Japanese, and Vietnamese who dared to attack John Wayne and his cohort of innocents. Driving Route 66 to the edge of the continent, L.A. arrived at the end of the world first. Giant ants, earthquakes, aliens from outer space. The city limits, The Outer Limits. Time and again, even as it was wiped out by Martians in 1953 in The War of the Worlds or in 1971 while Charlton Heston drove the empty avenues of downtown in The Omega Man looking for vampires to machine-gun, the city plowed the civilization’s subconscious and planted alien pod plants.

  Roman Polanski’s 1974 noir classic, Chinatown, ostensibly set in 1937, makes no mention, of course, that in 193
6 most of Chinatown was razed and buried under the newly built Union Station. Dodger Stadium commemorates in no way the Chicano neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, whose residents were forcibly evicted, whose properties were buried under landfill for baseball parking lots. Entire Japanese American neighborhoods were emptied of residents for concentration camps during World War 2; East San Pedro Japanese American residents were given forty-eight hours to pack and leave—their fishing village then razed, their boats sold or burned. Entire Mexican American neighborhoods were razed and buried under famous freeways. Displacement, dispossession, and dislocation continues these days under the guise of gentrification. These are stories that Hollywood can’t seem to imagine, because they’re actually happening. Look in vain for them in Chinatown, Blade Runner, Short Cuts, L.A. Confidential. The ostensibly intergalactic imagination of the movies doesn’t begin to approach hard-bitten realities reflected in the lives of the seven characters central to Tropic of Orange.

  Tropic of Orange refracts the city’s passion like skyscrapers against the setting sun. This book holds in solar heat like a piece of granite. Even as the desert east of the San Gabriel Mountains refracts the city’s energy like dream lightning in murky dreams of ex–L.A. hipsters gentrified out to Joshua Tree, in sun-bleached dreams of old rock guitarists and rock climbers, as wind scours trinkets of aluminum and plastic across the sand and gravel. Out there, across the sand and gravel of his artist’s compound, Noah Purifoy’s human-scale monuments broadcast South Central passion to the cholla, the creosote, and the stars. Out there, young black and Latino families from the Marine base shop at the Yucca Valley Walmart. Out there, errant music recorded in L.A. wafts like lost heat waves. Those lyrics, those phrases and rhythms reemerge inscribed in these sentences, in these chapters. The revolution will not be televised, recalls Tropic of Orange on page 187, even as a romantically entangled Chicano and Japanese American couple, journalists, tragically try to prove it wrong.

  If L.A. is that recombinant hybrid of the culture’s imagination and the civilization’s final history, of its weird and frequently terrible desires taken to their ultimate logical ends (freeways and car culture, cults and crazies, a police state hidden behind sunglasses and suntans), few novels live to tell actual Los Angeles stories and effectively take anything like its full measure. Tropic of Orange takes that apocalyptic tale on with surrealist nerve and futurist verve. Karen Yamashita looks on what the civilization wrought on this place, unafraid—she doesn’t turn away; five years after the 1992 riots (“the largest civil disturbance in modern times . . . Sixty dead, one billion dollars damage . . .”), columns of smoke still rise from those conflicts of race and class. Seven voices, each distinguished by a distinct voice and POV, tell stories that sojourn the Pacific, traverse the Sonoran Desert, cross mean streets and ethnic divides to meet, folding into one another in a wild (and wildly imagined) seven days in Los Angeles.

  In 2011, as visiting professor of creative writing at UC Santa Cruz, I wandered into the lunch counter at a cafe that Karen liked and found her hosting a party of out-of-town visitors. She invited me to join them, and as I pulled up a chair, one of the visitors, Robert Allen, was talking about the Port Chicago Mutiny, the largest mass mutiny in U.S. naval history, when fifty black sailors were court-martialed in 1944 after seven hundred men were blown apart (320 died) loading munitions aboard ships heading for the war in the Pacific. “Robert!” I said, jumping up. “You’re the only person I’ve ever heard talking about Port Chicago!” I ran over and gave him a hug. “The last time I saw you was in Nicaragua! How long has it been? Twenty years?” He’d written a book about Port Chicago and edited the Black Scholar journal for decades. I’d learned about Port Chicago more than twenty years earlier and more than three thousand miles away, in Managua, in 1987, when Robert told me about it as we sat at a table with Alice Walker. I’ve only heard the story of Port Chicago twice in my life, both times by luck, the kind of luck and the kind of stories you get when Karen Yamashita invites you to sit at her table. Tropic of Orange invites you; try your luck—pull up a chair or just open this book—you’re in for seven kinds of L.A. stories that fold into an origami flower of razor-sharp titanium.

  A city named after sacred but imaginary beings, in a state named after a paradise that was the figment of a woman’s dream; a city that came to fame by filming such figments; a city existing now on sufferance from the ever-hotter desert and the ever-rising sea, and that feels every day, to so many of us, like a mirage as it waits for its great quake. Its suffering is real enough, God knows. But its beauty is the beauty of letting things go; letting go of where you came from; letting go of old lessons; letting go of what you want for what you are, or what you are for what you want; letting go of so much—and that is a hard beauty to love.

  —Michael Ventura, “Grand Illusion” Letters at 3 am: Reports on Endarkenment

  It’s against the law in California to walk on the freeways, but the law is archaic. Everyone who walks walks on the freeways sooner or later. Freeways provide the most direct routes between cities and parts of cities . . . Some prostitutes and peddlers of food, water, and other necessities live along the freeways in sheds or shacks or in the open air. Beggars, thieves, and murderers live here, too.

  . . . the freeway crowd is a heterogeneous mass—black and white, Asian and Latin, whole families are on the move with babies on backs or perched atop loads in carts, wagons, or bicycle baskets, sometimes along with an old or handicapped person. . . . Many were armed with sheathed knives, rifles, and, of course, visible holstered handguns. The occasional passing cop paid no attention.

  . . . People get killed on freeways all the time.

  —Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

  standing on the map of my political desires

  I toast to a borderless future

  (I raise my glass of wine toward the moon)

  with . . .

  our Alaskan hair

  our Canadian head

  our u.s. torso

  our Mexican genitalia

  our Central American cojones

  our Caribbean sperm

  our South American legs

  our Patagonian feet

  our Antarctic nails

  jumping borders at ease

  jumping borders with pleasure

  amen, hey man

  —Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future” The New World Border

  Gentle reader, what follows may not be about the future, but is perhaps about the recent past; a past that, even as you imagine it, happens. Pundits admit it’s impossible to predict, to chase such absurdities into the future, but c’est L.A. vie. No single imagination is wild or crass or cheesy enough to compete with the collective mindlessness that propels our fascination forward. We were all there; we all saw it on TV, screen, and monitor, larger than life.

  MONDAY

  Summer Solstice

  CHAPTER 1:

  MiddayNot Too Far from Mazatlán

  Rafaela Cortes spent the morning barefoot, sweeping both dead and living things from over and under beds, from behind doors and shutters, through archways, along the veranda—sweeping them all across the deep shadows and luminous sunlight carpeting the cool tile floors. Her slender arms worked the broom industriously through the air—already thickening with tepid heat—and along the floor, her feet following, printing their moisture in dark footprints over baked clay. Every morning, a small pile of assorted insects and tiny animals—moths and spiders, lizards and beetles—collected, their brittle bodies tossed in waves along the floor, a cloudy hush of sandy soil, cobwebs, and human hair. An iguana, a crab, and a mouse. And there was the scorpion, always dead—its fragile back broken in the middle. And the snake that slithered away at the urging of her broom—probably not poisonous, but one never knew. Every morning it was the same. Every morning, she swept this mound of dead and wiggling things to the door and off the side of the veranda and into the dark green undergrowth with the same flouri
sh. Occasionally, there was more of one species or the other, but each somehow always made its way back into the house. The iguana, the crab, and the mouse, for example, were always there. Sometimes they were dead; sometimes they were alive. As for the scorpion, it was always dead, but the snake was always alive. On some days, it seemed to twirl before her broom communicating a kind of dance that seemed to send a visceral message up the broom to her fingertips. There was no explanation for any of it. It made no difference if she closed the doors and shutters at the first sign of dusk or if she left the house unoccupied and tightly shut for several days. Every morning when the house was thrown open to the sunlight, she knew that she and the boy had not slept alone that night. Hummingbirds and parakeets fluttered across the rooms, stirring the languid humidity settled by the night, frantically searching for escape through the open lace curtains, while crawling lives hid beneath furniture or presented itself lifeless at her feet.

  When she first came to the house, she couldn’t find a broom to accomplish this daily ritual, not to mention for sweeping the clouds of cobwebs from the dark, rough-hewn rafters. Gabriel had left an American vacuum cleaner in a closet—an old steel Electrolux purchased at the Rose Bowl swap meet for thirty dollars. When the electricity wasn’t shut off, Rafaela dragged the vacuum—the hard Bakelite wheels bumping over the clay tiles and the woven throw rugs—from one room to the next but soon depleted Gabriel’s supply of vacuum bags. Recycling these bags was nearly impossible, and she did not have the heart to dump them without releasing the trapped animals inside. One day, attempting to use the vacuum cleaner without the bags resulted in jamming the gears with pieces of the crab, not to mention everything else, and that was the end of the Electrolux.

  When Rafaela told Gabriel that the Electrolux had died, there was an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line, probably because Gabriel had had some idea that a stainless steel vacuum cleaner was something incredibly wise to have in the salty humidity of Mazatlán and also because he had lugged it one thousand miles on one particularly sacrificial trip made in a borrowed Volkswagen van. The story about the crab seemed unlikely. His land was much too far from the sea. Yes, it sounded impossible, but why would Rafaela make such a thing up?