by Fernando Pérez
My aunt Marta asks, When are you coming back home?
She means Los Angeles: Long Beach, Lynwood, Lakewood, Norwalk, Azusa. L.A. County. She even means Orange County. “Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles” is as widespread as my family, just as populated too. …
by Paige L. Hill
The headlights of my father’s car illuminate the road to Meadows Field Airport like something out of a Hitchcock movie. The fog swirls and eddies about us as we move along at 40 miles per hour. At 5:30 a.m., there is nothing we can do to thin out. When we slow for a red light, the fog dawdles, gliding thickly over the side of our car. It smells vaguely of dirt and alfalfa and almost seems, in its coiling thickness, to be murmuring to us. As a child, I feared the fog. I knew it claimed the cars of those who didn’t understand its hidden dangers. In the near-desert climate of the San Joaquin Valley, the ground fog rises from the warm earth—Tule fog—an indication to the citrus farmers in my family that we won’t lose an orange crop to the December freeze. …
New York has Miracle on 34th Street. London has A Christmas Carol. Chicago has Home Alone. Where does that leave L.A.? Zócalo asked novelist Alix Ohlin, who is spending the year in Los Angeles, for her fictional take on Christmas in Southern California—in 2,300 words or less.
by Alix Ohlin
On Christmas Eve, Juliette shows up at my place in Pasadena with her four-year old daughter, TS, and five shopping bags bursting with unwrapped gifts. It’s dusk when the doorbell rings, and when I look through the window it takes me a second to figure out who it is. I haven’t seen either of them since TS was a baby, and the last I heard they were living in Stockton with a guy Juliette met on the Internet.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I say. It comes out sounding unfriendly, though that’s not how I mean it.
But Juliette waltzes in as if she’s expected. This is one gift I have somehow given her: the belief that any place she goes, she will be welcomed. …
by James A. Reeves
1.
In 1941, my grandfather drove across the country from Detroit to California to deliver a car and see the World’s Fair in San Francisco. There were no highways, the car broke down constantly, he slept in fields, and he said it was the best trip of his life. He hitchhiked home with a bathing suit salesman. Three years later he landed in France in World War II and marched into Germany. “Patton was right,” my grandfather told me. “We should have gone after Stalin when we had the chance.” After the war, he got married in his uniform and took a job at Sears, where he would work for 38 years. When he retired in 1982, he moved into a house in Caseville, Michigan, where our family’s fishery once stood, and he served as township commissioner and knew everybody by name. …
by Carol Muske-Dukes
I live in L.A. and New York, but I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I go “home” often. My daughter, born in L.A., loves Minnesota, especially the cold and snowy winters that I once fled. My late husband was charmed by the fact that everyone in my very large family there lives on a lake. He loved the snowmobiles in winter and the speedboats in summer.
My father and mother “came up” during the Depression. They grew up in North Dakota on the prairie. My mother was from a farming family in Wyndmere. …
ArticlesFeuilletonFriday, December 3, 2010 How One Family Created Chinese America
PoetryThis week in L.A.From the green room
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