As I read José Vadi’s honest, prismatic essay collection Inter State: Essays from California, my heart, my entire chest, kept clenching with recognition. I worried, for a moment, I can’t write this newsletter—he keeps writing thoughts I work hard to suppress for my children’s sake.
He writes in “A California Inquiry (or California in Flames),” for instance, “The biggest question facing this state isn’t just its survival but its destruction. A high-speed train barrels through the Central Valley, home to one of the world’s key food supplies, a region that fears losing what little water it still has after years of forcing cash crops out of its soil and becoming a ghost town without water instead, and all I can remember when I think of our state dying are Bay Area conversations twenty years ago about how we’ll never need air conditioning.”
Underneath the knowledge of how strained California’s resources are, other potent, more personal fears are drawn. Vadi writes,
I fear we will become sort of modern-day Okies, displaced as alumni of the state to other cities in other states feeling the economic and demographic ripples of the tectonic shifts occurring in San Francisco. And those new Californians, those riding in strollers now, the unfortunate, reluctant mascots of gentrification, will they know about us, these faces their parents first saw when they entered this new land, learning the ropes of a place many fantasize about but few experience, this disjointed mosaic of a state, California?
I’m reading my own experience, a little, into his words. For I share a related fear, though my political specifics are different: the fear that we’ll all be driven out, those of us who are artistic and of a certain generation and are of color, those of us who lived through the naked racism of Governor Pete Wilson’s tenure and then breathed in relief as that generation of politicians gave way to liberal politicians of color, initially even when their stances seemed slightly different from ours, only to have our progressive hopes dashed first by gentrification and then by Trump.
Each of us is afraid in our different ways not only that the California we know will no longer exist in the temporal sense but also that we’ll meet a different, lonelier fate, that we will be here but the people for whom California was a “destination,” a place at which to arrive rather than a “process,” will not remember how it was to move—in Vadi’s case, skateboard—through this space, no shared language to confirm our own reality. As Vadi puts it, “And now the question is whether it was real after all, whether our childhood setting wasn’t just a virtual reality already up in smoke, as if California had already left the building, exited out the back door up the Los Angeles River, and hidden somewhere near Edwards Air Force Base.”
I’ve only recently been able to replace those sorts of fears by reading California-raised authors who know how insiders to that period of time, in the Bay Area especially but also California more broadly, lived. I feel the truthiness of Vadi’s book. A similar, rare, truth-telling sensibility is at work in Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, the July California Book Club selection. Both books recognize the role of music, movement, mobility, and conversation; the nonchalant, just-right blend of high and low references; the details that textured our lives and that emphasized realness and the fluidity of living over calcified destinations. We are delighted to welcome Vadi to the California Book Club this week as a special guest in conversation with Hsu and host John Freeman.
In addition to being the author of Inter State, Vadi is a poet, a playwright, and a film producer. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, Alta Journal, and the Yale Review and on the PBS NewsHour. He received the San Francisco Foundation’s Shenson Performing Arts Award for his debut play. Of Inter State, critic Sophia Stewart wrote that his devotion to California is “rooted in a hope so sincere it is contagious.”
And indeed, with each of the books that emerge about this recent, seemingly vanished time in California, my fear about the ease with which history could be rewritten—among other things, via the increasingly popular book bans sweeping the nation—has been replaced by tiny elations. If books like these exist in the world, surely we won’t be forgotten. Surely we’ll keep finding one another.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with Vadi and Freeman to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
LOST TOO EARLY
Critic Hamilton Cain writes about male relationships in Stay True. —Alta
IN SEARCH OF “M.”
Hsu names the zine Secret Asian Man, by an unknown author, as his favorite book that no one has heard of. —New York Times
INSPIRED INTROVERT
Critic Mark Haskell Smith (Rude Talk in Athens) talks with Portland-based novelist Patrick deWitt about deWitt’s new novel, The Librarianist, and praises his “oddball verve and…imaginative swagger that are singular.” —Alta
PHARMACIST BY DAY
Southern California author Jim Ruland (Corporate Rock Sucks) profiles Ruth Madievsky about her debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, writing that she paints “a realistic portrait of what it’s like to have one’s life go off the rails due to destructive drug use.” —Los Angeles Times
ABSOLUTE CONSTRUCTIONS
California-raised novelist and critic Frank Bergon writes about how to read the Second Amendment’s grammar, explaining that “the want of a correct textual reading of the Second Amendment leads to the disastrous loss of its originalist meaning.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
CALLING EVERYTHING INTO QUESTION
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin writes a tribute to Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who died last week. —Los Angeles Times
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