And then the ranch house on the big land in Rancho Santa Fe. The slightly larger house in Del Mar, where we became best friends with our neighbors’ friendly freckled children, who ran barefoot with dirty feet. The small house with the brick fireplace in the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego. (Watching him eat slices of sticky honeyed yams with a toothpick in the warm glow of the nightmarket stalls at the age of 60, I saw him become a child again.)Īll my brother and I had was what we could see in front of us, every day: the graduate student family apartment at the University of Wisconsin with the red carpet and creaking metal swing set outside where we were each born and took our first steps.
#Gentrification of paletro man cracked#
We lost the cracked land in Pingtung, where my father’s father was an architect, and whose streets my father could traverse without a map even decades later, when he himself was an old man. We lost the daily fish and vegetable and fruit market in Lotung, where my mother’s mother went since she was a child in the 1930s, where everyone knew her and the fishmonger knew exactly which fish she would want where she could walk and speak with ease. We were born, my brother and I, as stunted blank slates, both over- and under-determined by the racial and cultural identities we would never be able to fully grasp, while those were all most other people could see. When our parents-to-be left Taiwan for graduate school in Detroit, Michigan and Madison, Wisconsin – taking the only pathway available to them out of an island under martial law – they severed their future children’s connection to land, to our relatives, to our ancestors to culture, customs, and language. The only thing I remember from when we went to look at the house is the earthy smell of ground beef frying in a pan, a smell that to me was exotic and slightly nauseating in its plainness – devoid of the sweet pungency of sizzling garlic, ginger, and soy sauce that infused most of the meat cooked in our house. The house we bought was modest for the area: a four-bedroom ranch house built in the 1950s decorated with old linoleum faded, pastel-striped wallpaper and mustard-and-brown-colored tiles in the room that would be mine. In 1986, my mother and her business partners (a trio of Taiwanese immigrants) sold their first biotech company, and there was money to move up in the world. Residents were proud of the rural fiction, though, and liked to refer to the town as “The Ranch.” The trails were made for people on horseback, an element in the landscape that might have made it feel rural, except that they led to the nearby, members-only golf course. Dirt trails flanked the two-lane asphalt roads, and there were no sidewalks, mailboxes, or streetlights.
#Gentrification of paletro man full#
In Rancho Santa Fe, houses were full of pastels and light and high, arched entryways they were pristine and cool as tombs. The place where we were aliens, and alienated. The place I spent the better part of my youth the place I first saw a ghost the place my father died. Rancho Santa Fe, California: former land of the Santa Fe Railroad, whose twisted experiments created 100-foot tall stands of rare eucalyptus across the wealthy community. In 1986, when I was nine and my brother was ten, my parents moved us to a place I have never claimed a place that has never claimed me.
For us, literature and language are as much about marking and representing space, as they are about storytelling. With “Postcards,” creative non-fiction stories grounded in place, we aspire to create a new cartography of California.
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