News from The Opposite Field

I first met Lance Mossett on a fall afternoon in 2006, a couple of months into reporting a feature about Jordan High School’s academic decathlon team. He was 15 and a sophomore, with a story that was as inspiring as it was heartbreaking: absent father, addicted mother, a childhood of homelessness and foster care, 13 different schools from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay to the Inland Empire, and now Watts, and yet with a grace about him, an inquisitiveness and a self-awareness and a compassion that just seemed insuppressible. The kid’s GPA was 1.8—he was under court supervision, in fact, for having shoplifted a doughnut—and still he wanted to take on the most demanding intellectual contest the Los Angeles Unified School District has to offer. Whatever was to become of the Jordan High squad, I knew, in Lance, I had found my star.

When “The Test of Their Lives“ was published, in the May 2007 Los Angeles magazine, not everyone at Jordan appreciated the effort I had put in to chronicling the obstacles facing Lance and his teammates. I thought it took uncommon courage to duke it out in a brainiac Olympics with students from the LAUSD’s most privileged schools, kids with cars and computers and college-educated parents, but pointing out those disparities was somehow viewed in the community as impolite, even smug. Lance, whose longings and losses were laid the barest of all, got it, though; he knew from his own life what was real, what the odds were, and he saw no need for self-delusion.

When I learned that my story would be receiving the PEN Center USA’s 2008 literary journalism award, I invited Lance to be my guest at the banquet. I picked him up at 89th and Avalon, a corner busy with churchworkers by day and streetwalkers by night, and from there we drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We were seated with Paul Thomas Anderson, at a table paid for by the William Morris Agency, and when I was called on to accept my prize—a $1,000 check—I embarrassed Lance by asking him to stand, too, and pledged him the money upon his acceptance to college. As the applause enveloped him, Lance blushed and bowed, basking in the spontaneous joy, the collective hope. He was still only 17, midway through his senior year, but he owned the Pink Palace that night, a moment documented by the always thoughtful and empathetic Celeste Fremon, for WitnessLA.

Despite room for missteps on either side, I am happy to report that both Lance and I made good to each other. He graduated this summer from Jordan, and a couple of months later, when he registered for class at Santa Monica College—English, math, Japanese, guitar—I met him with ten crisp $100 bills. (What looked paternal last year had also been convenient: Having just come off my book leave, I needed that PEN money at the time.)  I am even prouder to report that my gift was matched by my dad’s wife, Dianne Anderson, who is not in the business of seeking attention but who had heard me speak of Lance, of his remarkable dexterity and spirit, and though she lives up in Portland, wanted to make her own investment in his education. So in his first week of college, Lance got a new laptop in the mail.

The October issue of my former employer, Los Angeles magazine, features a Q&A with me about The Opposite Field. My very first. Thanks to executive editor Matt Segal for being gentle, and for steering me to the broader themes—alienation, assimilation, the hunger to belong— that underlie my Little League tale.

The web version also includes a link to “Out of Left Field,” the 2005 essay that served as the genesis of the book. The Opposite Field is sort of like ”Out of Left Field” after a few shots of tequila: more sex, more duplicity.

For a brief time after its publication, “Out of Left Field” was in development at Touchstone Television, which was drawn to the idea of a single dad in a multicultural setting—a “new kind” of family, the studio called it, in a “new kind” of community. The cocreator of Desperate Housewives, Michael Edelstein, and the executive producer of According to Jim, Warren Bell, even ginned up a script for a half-hour pilot. ABC loved it—until it was time to film. My take went to a 40-inch Sony.

I learned about Marukai from the Japanese moms at my son’s high school, assimilated ladies who work and volunteer and raise kids and yet always find time to make the 20-mile pilgrimage to the South Bay with ice chests stashed in the rear of their minivans. Although my home has been known for some time as “America’s first suburban Chinatown,” the Asian pioneers of Monterey Park, back in the 1950s and ’60s, were actually the Japanese—their children are my generation, their grandchildren are Max’s—and today those thousand or so families remain at the center of Monterey Park’s civic life.

As exiles from Hong Kong and Taipei began reshaping the town in the 1970s and ’80s, elaborate supermarkets sprung up to serve them: The two-story, pagoda-roofed Shun Fat took the place of an old Alpha Beta, the glass-and-neon Hong Kong replaced the defunct Great Skate roller rink. For the sansei and yonsei of Monterey Park, though, there was nothing comparable, at least not on this side of L.A. The migratory patterns of Japanese Americans had begun skewing south and west, to places like Torrance and Gardena, and it was there on S. Vermont Avenue in 1982 that the Marukai empire took root on the U.S. Mainland.  Already a fixture of Hawaii, Marukai cornered the Japanese and Pacific Islander specialty foods market of Southern California, importing everything from dried aku and kalua pork to shiatsu insoles and bamboo ear-wax scrapers. There are now eight Marukais in the greater L.A. area, including the flagship Marukai Forum on Artesia Boulevard—a membership store that is part Trader Joe’s and part Costco, with entire aisles devoted to seaweed and shoyu and tsukemono. It is one of the few places you can find poke or lau lau or four-pound tins of the industrial-strength Filipino-style chorizo known as Marca El Rey. There is furniture and clothing, fountains and orchids, sake, sea urchin, and fizzing Ramune soda candy. I started counting the different types of rice cookers on display but lost track somewhere in the high seventies.

For our Monterey Park friends, the trip to Gardena is a ritual, an excuse not just to stock up on necessities but to reconnect with the rhythms, the protocols, of a culture that seems more distant with each passing year. Marukai is their antidote to Americanization, a delicious way of keeping it real. For me, the store is one of those secret passageways to the parallel universes that unfold at every turn in Los Angeles and yet are forever overlooked. L.A. amazes not merely because of its Marukais. It amazes because you can live here for a quarter-century and not even know that such a thing as Marukai exists.

There is probably some peril in reading too much into the at-bat songs of our favorite ball players.  The tunes they tend to select as their entrance music are often brusque and bombastic—Metallica and AC/DC for the white boys, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne for the bruthas—sort of like a busload of high school kids battling for control of the radio knob. The rise of the Latin baseball star has, of course, added a third genre, one that usually gets classified by sports reporters as “salsa” but is, in fact, almost always something more precise—merengue, soca, bachata. Tropical. The sounds of the Caribbean. According to the “Dodger Player Songs” page on dodgers.com, Manny Ramirez’s theme this season has been “Me Estas Tentando” (“You’re Tempting Me”) by the Puerto Rican duo of Wisin Y Yandel. Their music falls under the banner of reggaeton, the urban Latin take on Jamaican dancehall. So far, no surprises.

Then not long ago—late August? early September?—Manny spins the dial and adopts a rather extraordinary new soundtrack. My son, at Dodger Stadium last Sunday with his girlfriend, announces this to me via text: “Manny’s theme song is ‘El Rey.’ ” My reply: “Smart man.”

Composed by José Alfredo Jiménez and performed most famously by ranchera legend Vicente Fernández, “El Rey” is THE folk anthem of Mexicans on both sides of the border, the kind of mariachi classic that can inspire everyone from working-class nacos to high-society fresas to stop mid-sentence and sing along. It was the first song in Spanish I ever learned the lyrics to, the one song that might be said to define the pride and laments of an entire culture. ”I don’t have a throne/Or a queen/Or anyone who understands me/But I’m still the king,” the chorus concludes. On the surface, perhaps, there was nothing remarkable about Manny’s switch—just another incomprehensible ditty en español to thousands at Chavez Ravine—but to the thousands more who recognized it, including my boy, “El Rey” stirred something nostalgic and profound.

Of the 1,200 Latin American-born ball players to have made it to the bigs, only about 100 have roots in Mexico. By far the greatest number  have come, like Ramirez, from the Dominican Republic, followed by Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Latino, at least in the MLB, usually means Afro-Caribeño, and yet Dodger fans, if they are of Latin descent, are usually products of Mexican America. It could be that Manny just liked the braggadocio of the lyrics, his retort to a steroid-tainted season. My guess, though, is that like any good performer he was playing to his audience, taking note, wisely, of who inhabits Mannywood.

Perhaps it is stating the obvious to report that Spanish is the language of L.A.’s streets. The language of our construction sites and baseball clubhouses, our most popular radio stations and most fabulous kitchens. That said, I was still caught by surprise the other night while being treated to a feast in the VIP room of Nhu Y, a Vietnamese supper club in Fountain Valley. The joint was full-on immigrant chic: mirrors, Christmas lights, faux vines creeping through the lattices that separate the leatherette booths. I was working my way through a piquant menu of baked catfish, curried goat, and stir-fried venison—sea, farm, and woods—when the groovy Vietnamese lounge act, which had been sticking to a diet of 1970s-ish Saigon love songs, announced that it was time for some cha-cha. The next song: ”Bésame Mucho.”

Which brings us to the enchanting Susan Galindo Mullen, who left her native Colombia last year to marry my friend and former Los Angeles magazine colleague Michael Mullen. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I performed the ceremony, an ecumenical, bilingual service that, to the bride’s amazement, proved legally binding.) In Colombia, where Susie earned a degree in international relations and interned at the Foreign Ministry, professional advancement hinged on learning English. Government, business, tourism: The shadow of the United States was inescapable. Once in L.A., she continued on that path, enrolling in a full complement of classes at the LAUSD’s great port of entry, Evans Community Adult School. That should make Lou Dobbs happy.

The reality of this town, its demographics, its economy, its lingering caste system, is that English has so far proved almost irrelevant to Susie’s success. Wherever she has looked for work—from restaurants to law firms—nobody has quizzed her on her fluency. Or rather, it is her fluency in Spanish that employers have inquired about, her ability to communicate with the Latino half of the city, to serve the market that keeps the engines of enterprise here chugging along.  Susie is still studying—I suspect her English will soon surpass Mike’s Spanish—but it is her first language, la lengua del pueblo, that is right now granting her opportunity.

This was originally published in the June 2009 issue of Los Angeles magazine, one of the last pieces I contributed as a senior writer. In the spirit of Labor Day, I thought it called for a dusting off. 

She is parked on the patio like a nineteenth-century locomotive, all soot and rust and ash. The tag bolted to her chassis says Oklahoma Joe’s, a brand since subsumed by a Georgia conglomerate, but in our years together I have also called her Old Smokey and the Midnight Special and, for no good reason, Bessie. When she is up and running, full of wood and meat and carbon, when her chimney is chugging, the plumes belching through our neighborhood like some Industrial Revolution flashback, I have a tendency to pump my elbow and make childish “whoo-hoo” railroad noises. This is how you do barbecue. No propane tanks, no lava rocks, no flame anywhere near my food: That, for the record, is grilling. Fine for hamburgers and hot dogs. But real barbecue, as any pecan or hickory snob can tell you, must be cooked low and slow—low temperature, long time—to soak up all the smoldering, vaporous, environmentally unsound goodness. My smoker is an “offset” job, which means she has two barrel-shaped chambers, a small one on the left for the fire and, on the right, a larger one, topped by a flue, for ribs or salmon or quail. I have been known to spend hours at her side, adding wet chips and cracking cold beers, watching, waiting, playing my Casey Jones whistle.

About a month into the writing of my book, the magnitude of the task all at once seemed to settle into the right side of my neck—stiffness, inflammation, burning—and for the first time in my life I decided to seek the services of a doctor of the chiropractic arts. My insurance (still a luxury these days more than a right) referred me to its network of providers, and from there, I made a choice based purely on my most irrational penchants and perceptions: San Gabriel seemed to have more of an old California-y vibe than, say, Rosemead; Asian names were less intimidating than Arabic or Iranian; female was, needless to say, more appealing than male; and Jennifer Nhan—that silent N was the calling card of the Vietnamese—just sounded like the kind of practitioner I would be willing to entrust my vertebrae to.

When I showed up for my first appointment, I found a boxy, stucco, mustard-colored house with a sign that advertised not just “Chiro-Acu” but also realty, loan, and tax services. Here we go, I thought, a fly-by-night, one-stop, health/business swap meet preying on the San Gabriel Valley’s immigrant masses. I began to wonder if Dr. Nhan was even legit, or if I was about to get the sort of adjustment that would cost me more than my co-pay. Either way I was in need of some healing hands, and so I walked through the doors, into a room of trickling fountains and stewing herbs, and into the lives of the Nhan sisters—Jenny, Tiffany, Katherine—three of the most generous, courageous, inspiring women I have ever known.       

Jenny was a chiropractor. She was also a loan officer, a tax consultant, and a notary. Tiff was an acupuncturist. She was also a real estate broker, a general contractor, and an architect. Kat, who lived up north but visited on weekends, had a chiropractic practice of her own. They were beyond legit. They were archetypes: refugees, entrepreneurs, dreamers, survivors, improvising their way through life in a country that had only half-heartedly welcomed them in. The more I learned about their struggles, the more I fell for them. Like many children of the Vietnamese boat exodus, they had lost everything in their journey to America. As schoolgirls in L.A.’s eastern suburbs, they waded through ESL lessons by day then spent nights doing piecework for the garment industry; their mom, Be Nguyen, had essentially transformed their home into a sweatshop, stashing industrial sewing machines and jimmy-rigged pressers in the bedrooms. Mrs. Nguyen would die too young. So would their father, and so would their eldest sister. There would be bankruptcies and foreclosures to fend off, and still these Nhan ladies persevered, extracting themselves from poverty, channeling their grief, striving to redeem every sacrifice that got them here.

Thanks to Jennifer, my neck has never been better.  My only concern now is that she and Tiffany will be applying to medical school this fall—they want to become M.D.s—and my Friday visits, an hour of regeneration and friendship and usually something delicious to eat, will fall victim to their success.

My baseball life started here, on the curb of Overton Street, Northwest Portland, age 2. Like the Dodgers, Mom and Dad had just moved west from Brooklyn, seeking opportunity and space, the prospect of discovering something new—about the country that had taken them in, about themselves.

I wonder if, left to my own devices, I would have stumbled upon baseball and embraced it anyway, if there was something about boyness or Americanness that would have inevitably steered me to the game. Maybe. But my folks were not taking any chances. Especially Mom, who had fled war and facism as a child, out of Paris, over the Pyrenees, across the Atlantic, who had docked in New York speaking Russian and French, who had found her first hero in Jackie Robinson, who saw in a proud and brilliant black man her own struggle for acceptance. She dressed me in that smartly striped getup, paraded me out to the driveway, and after snapping the photo, peppered me with Wiffle balls.

The message now seems clear: If I played baseball, I would belong.

Vroom. Vroom.