The Valley and the Sky: Asians in the San Gabriel Valley

I am a child of the San Gabriel Valley, America’s greatest enclave of Asians in the 21st century. I remember well its ease, comfort, and sweetness. This place is unforgettable. Every time I return, the force of life here is impressive, always moving, and beautiful. As quiet and sleepy as suburban life here appears, the reality that these suburbs are not entirely alike to what the mind conjures when one thinks of America’s white picket fence, is animating to the mind, eye, and heart. Something is distinctive here, this is a world within a world. 

Youth here prepared me to live, and to rejoice in the force of life as I grew up; memories here are pristine, and wild in the tamest sense. After SAT prep class, my best friends and I would carpool to Disneyland to ride a rollercoaster or two, grab a turkey leg for dinner. We would drive out to LA for ice cream and museums, or hop on the 57 and have cupcakes by the OC beaches. We were all visiting Rowland Heights, which neighbored Diamond Bar High School — our academy — constantly for the food. We queued at midnight for M&M’s hot blueberry donuts. We shopped and watched movies at Puente Hills and Brea Mall. We hung out playing GameCube and ate with each other’s families, in each other’s homes. My closest friends were Asian, many of us went on to get great educations, then graduated into prestigious, stable jobs. We were young together, and now we’ve grown up. 

When I am here, I am looking for that sea of faces, their familiarity. Those faces — they could be me, they could be my brother; my parents. I love this place, and the people of it for the standards I remember us living by. They are the principles of civilization: generosity, candor, integrity, intelligence. I remember the private life most of all — our patchwork living rooms, the familial warmth of our parents, the perfect shared humor, the soulfulness, and how generously we shared our lives with one another. This is a special region of these United States, suffused and driven by its own code and ideals, its own history, heroic in the way a great drama is, that continues to unfold before us. And this is the freedom we achieve early on in life, having been afforded the chance to live by standards of the non-white world, for Asian civilization to take root in our lives. What does it mean to carry these standards through into maturity, to see this civilization flower? 

In the last decade, the Valley has changed. There are even more Asians here now. My mom introduced me to a specific cookie she bought at Costco, flavored by the tea of Taiwan’s Alishan mountains, and for the first time I saw a young white student casually snacking on Korean bungeoppang at H Mart. What is remarkable is not the growing presence of Asian idioms so much as what it all signals: the growing force of Asian civilization in America, which mirrors the historic rise of Asia in the world.  

This is a very young enclave: the Walnut-Diamond Bar-Rowland Heights-Chino Hills quarter, a new land of milk and honey erected just before the turn of the millennium, and the feeling of growing up here, compounded by the influence of Hollywood’s fantastical inventions, is one of growing up without history, both our strength and weakness. Strength because we must first dream, then forge these new lives we live, weakness because it locks one’s life in attitudes and forces unexamined and unknown. 

It took leaving to learn that only history explained the mysteries and insecurities of my life that had shadowed me for so long, and that my own roots are inextricably involved with America’s, white and black; back to the white inventions which justified the slave trade, and back to the blues. That, because the American identity has not yet been made real, our lives were always bound to lead to the same fork in the road: to believe and become a part of America as the white nation, or a part of it as the last white nation. 

We are the first American generation, the children of our immigrant parents. This is important, because it is an unprecedented and difficult position to find oneself in that demands endless struggle. We are tasked with finding our footing as the first moral inheritors of this new world, within our families whose lineage otherwise stretches millennia back to ancient Asia, and few of us have found what is needed in order to make this journey real. This has then lulled so many into a patient gamble with time and history to pass us over, to draw a truce with the mediocrity and disappointments of living and succeeding in the white world. But the Valley is not an untouched paradise, it is a mirror and prism of our nation; it bends and refracts the light. Which is to say, what is the bridge between the world of our youth, and the world at large? It is made by this nation, and this hour in American and world history, we, its inheritors, our dreams, our children, and the lives we lead are proof of this. It is the inheritance of Asian civilization in America, whose fulfillment is possible only through the Black tradition. 

We were never meant to become white, never meant to achieve full stasis so young: safe and successful, yet privately so meandering, unfulfilled and lost, leading lives suspended in time. In the desert there is water to be found, renewal is possible. Our futures call for the rediscovery of the blues, American soul; Dinah Washington, Marvin Gaye, Sun Ra, the Philadelphia Sound, King’s Christian love ethic, the Nashville students who bent the arc of history, the legacy of Black America. 

This is a time when everything is changing — the old world is dying, a new world is being born. The American identity is a moral struggle, and there is a new American people on the frontier, a common people who have the courage to look at this nation, its myths and its crimes, to demand that it be transformed, and to sacrifice for this transformation. These Americans and their children will not forget the faces of the Gazan people, those children; we will never forgive the criminal hypocrisy of the Biden Administration. Our memories will recall the fall of our beautiful cities and the decadent, soulless attitudes which began to pervade them. 

As the empire splinters, waging twin destructions of war abroad and poverty at home, the American people and their ideals must stand for the future, to achieve the American freedom and democracy which has so long been deferred. It is with these new American people and their aspirations that we belong, and the lifeworld of the Valley is a testament to this. 

Our task is to find our way to this future; our souls and our children depend on it. This year is the centenary of James Arthur Baldwin, born 1924, from Harlem. In Philadelphia, he is being celebrated as God’s revolutionary voice. In five years, it will have been a century since the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., the young and soulful preacher of the South who became the father of our new nation. Our inheritance, now behind us, also waits before us. Ten years from now, as 10 years ago, the next generation will have arrived, and we will do what we must, as Jimmy wrote: to make the kingdom new. 

Cover Illustration: Lisa Wakiyama; Images courtesy of Michelle Lyu