Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  To William Brewer’s eye, the “city” had consisted in 1863 of “one large house, very dilapidated, one small ditto, one barn, one small dilapidated and empty warehouse, and a corral.” Brewer had visited before the Southern Pacific spur went through, however, and before well-to-do Armenians from Boston, Worcester, and Providence, merchants and sellers of rugs, moved into Fresno and bought the best vineyard land to cultivate Thompson seedless grapes for raisins.

  The first to come were Hagop Seropian and his brother, Garabed, who arrived in 1881. In their letters home, the Seropians likened Fresno to the Armenian heartland, with the San Joaquin and the Kings rivers cast as the Tigris and the Euphrates. There were also Japanese farmers around Fresno, and Danes, Germans, and Russians, and by the 1890s they were producing more raisins than all of Spain. Chinese immigrants did the stoop labor, bent in the blistering sun.

  Only about half the land in Fresno County was planted to farms now, I found, but the taste and scent of farms were everywhere. The life of the town was farm life. It dawdled along at an unhurried clip, minding its own affairs. Although the population topped three hundred thousand, most streets were rolled up after dark. There were lots of churches. Religion was in the city’s blood. Newsboys rode by on bicycles delivering papers, as hells tolled at dusk. On porches and verandas, old people sat in chairs drinking iced tea and fanning themselves against the evening heat.

  There was no denying that Fresno was a regular inferno. In May, the daily maximum temperature was 82.5. It hit 91.2 in June and 98.7 in July. August brought scant relief with its daily maximum of 96.7.

  Here was a city of short-sleeved shirts, of shorts and sandals and long-billed caps, a city where everything seemed to be in a constant process of ripening, where the splash of swimmers in pools and in lakes could be heard from early spring until the late fall.

  Fresno still harbored many races. It was about 25 percent Hispanic and 10 percent black. Its Asian community was rapidly expanding. One lunch hour, I saw two Nigerians turned out in regal, tribal robes and little embroidered hats. They were standing by a Mexican restaurant, getting into an orange Pinto.

  “And did you enjoy your burrito, my friend?” asked the first Nigerian.

  “Ewo!” the other one exclaimed, snapping his fingers. “It was wonderful.”

  I liked the early morning in Fresno, that hazy cocoon of warmth before the heat got really intense. I came awake in stages, gingerly, taking my time—nothing to push against, no obstacles, nowhere to rush to or from. Outside my motel, there was always a smell of lawns being mowed, a chore best done while the sun was still gathering its energy. Teenage kids scooted past on skateboards, doing spins and pirouettes, tap dancing, screeching up the sidewalk ramps for the handicapped and celebrating their summer vacation.

  Almost everybody in Fresno owned a house. The motel clerk, the fireman, the mailman—almost everybody. I stopped at Trend Homes one morning, a three-year-old subdivision that was nearly sold out. There were six Trend models available, all for under a hundred thousand dollars. The models were called Boca Raton, Charleston, Providence, Santa Fe, Coronado, Crestwood, and Manhattan.

  Tracts such as Trend were a prominent reason why so many businesses were relocating from urban areas to the San Joaquin. An employee could shoehorn his way into a house for just five thousand dollars, plus closing costs, and Trend would handle the financing. A realtor told me that as he polished the fender of his new Mercedes with a rag, luxuriating in the glow.

  In Fresno, I ate well. At George’s Shishkabob, an Armenian place where the chef was “fully credentialed,” the local lamb was excellent. I found a Chinese place with “authentic Chinese Chefs” that served a good chow mein. Sometimes I got take-out food at a Von’s supermarket that had a tortilla factory inside. The aisles were laden with the flavors of Mexico, sacks of masa harina, big sacks of pinto beans, sacks of chicharrones, and ovals of jalapeño peppers curing in a ceramic bowl.

  I ate Basque food at the Iturri Hotel, where some shepherds in transit still lived upstairs, and after a meal, feeling sleepy, I rested for a while by the lovely old Sante Fe train station, reclining like a hobo in the shade of its two carob trees.

  THE ROADS OUT OF FRESNO ran swiftly into farmland. There were tiny towns like Biola, Rolinda, Raisin, and Tranquillity that had a gas pump or a country store. Roosters pecked at the dirt, hens squawked and scattered, and goats were tethered to sheds. Somebody was always operating a roadside stand of one kind or another, selling produce or nuts from a front yard or the back of a pickup truck.

  In Kerwin one hot afternoon, I saw a handwritten sign that said, Oranges Sweet and Juicy, and it conjured such a powerful image of fragrant, refrigerated oranges being squeezed that I had to buy some.

  On the porch of an old, wood-frame store stood the orange salesman, Gerry Karabian, who had the fidgetiness of somebody needing to talk. He was lean and hard-muscled and had a thick shock of black hair going gray and glasses resting on the bridge of a strong nose. In his face, there was an intense, hawklike aspect.

  Karabian was agitated because his father, at the age of ninety-one, was dying. He told me that right away, before I could even ask about the oranges. His father was among the last surviving Fresno-born Armenians of the first generation, he said. The old man was comatose and had been moved from a hospital to a hospice to pass his final hours.

  The store in Kerwin had been a family business for a long time, Karabian said, but it was almost empty now, except for a few archaic items on shelves and a black-and-white TV that was playing to an audience of flies. Karabian’s mother, who was eighty, lived in a house behind it on a twenty-acre farm. She was in good health, but he worried about her being alone and was anxious about what might come next.

  The Armenian era in the San Joaquin—the one that had started a century ago with the Seropian brothers—was drawing to a close. Raisin grapes had been the cornerstone of the Armenians’ wealth, but they had also worked in shoe repair and as barbers and tailors. They had opened grocery stores. Their rugs were in demand, riding the crest of a vogue for anything Moorish or Byzantine.

  In William Saroyan, the Armenians had found their laureate. His autobiographical novel, My Name Is Aram, published in 1940, was a sentimental but accurate account of growing up among Armenian families. Fresno had always been their city, but now they were established, and new immigrants were beginning to repeat their experience.

  Gerry Karabian was familiar with the new immigrants. He worked as a teamster and drove through their neighborhoods delivering cases of beer and soda. He had heard that there were 38,000 Southeast Asians in Fresno County, many of them Hmongs. They were moving into subdivisions that used to be Hispanic. Karabian had a home in the Blackstone area and sometimes considered selling it and trading up, but he didn’t want to go into debt.

  “Those new houses with the fancy cabinets and all that,” he said, shaking his head. “No way are they built as well as mine is.”

  Almost every type of crop had grown on the Karabians’ twenty acres, even alfalfa. In the fields across the road, there were some zucchini squash and some Thompson seedless grapes. Farther down the road, there were some almond trees, but citrus trees were unusual around Kerwin, Karabian told me. Most citrus orchards were planted on the east side of Fresno, toward Visalia and Tulare, where the climate was more accommodating.

  After a while, Karabian took me over to his orange grove. He wanted to check on the pickers that he’d hired. The trees in the grove were thick-trunked and very leafy and gave off a wonderful citrus perfume.

  A flatbed parked nearby was filled with crated Valencia oranges that were good for juicing. Karabian got about fifty boxes from five or six trees, a yield that pleased him. His problem was that the trees were too tall and needed to be topped. The machine that sprayed for scales, an ugly but harmless blotch on the fruit, couldn’t reach to a height of fifteen feet.

  As he was explaining this to me, a young Mexican picker came down a ladder from the ha
lo of a tree and smiled amiably. He had a burlap sack slung around his neck. It practically covered his entire chest, and in it were many oranges. The picker would be paid ten cents a pound.

  Back at the store, there were still no customers. Karabian sighed and said, “People prefer navels.”

  I felt for him there on his old wooden porch, nervous, grief-stricken, and alone. He was doing his best to hold himself together through another of the furious passages that we all must endure on earth. He had sold sixteen sacks of oranges the day before, he said, and he believed that he would sell that many again on another day. Things were just slow right now. He’d had fifty-sack days in the past.

  Like most people who work at a solitary task, Karabian seemed to be keeping private records. A day would come when he’d sell every sack on hand, I thought, maybe a hundred sacks in all, and then he would rejoice.

  IN THE FRESNO BEE, I read an article about Derrel Ridenour, Jr., who yearned to be the king of mini-storage facilities in California. He wanted his name, Derrel, to become synonymous with “mini-storage,” so that customers would say, for instance, “After the wife threw me out, I stored my stuff at a Derrel’s” instead of just saying, “After the wife threw me out, I put my stuff in storage.”

  Derrel Ridenour, Jr., had a question of his own for the Bee reporter.

  “If I go into a small town, am I going to eat at Joe’s or at a McDonald’s?” he asked. “I’m going to McDonald’s because I know what to expect.”

  It made me feel foolish. I always ate at Joe’s.

  Already Derrel Ridenour, Jr., had fifteen Derrel’s in the San Joaquin and planned on having more. He was looking at small towns where the land costs and the development fees were low, and the permit process was fast. By his photo in the Bee, he appeared to be a tall, genial, intelligent fellow, and I thought that he might understand things about California that I didn’t, so I phoned him and asked if we could meet.

  “There wouldn’t be any use in it,” he said, and though he was probably right from his standpoint, I kept the clipping in my glove compartment and referred to it on many occasions.

  IN THE FRESNO BEE, I read that some Hmong Buddhists wanted to build a fifty-seven-foot-tall pagoda at their compound on North Valentine Avenue. They were scheduled to go before the County Planning Commission for a hearing at the Hall of Records, an Art Deco marvel in the city center.

  On the morning of the hearing, I found about sixty Hmongs waiting in a second-floor hallway to be called before the commission. Only two women were among them, a toothless crone and a very young wife, maybe fifteen, with her little son. The Hmong men were a nut-brown color and rather small and compact. They didn’t seem to be put out by the wait. It was as if they’d had considerable training, as if waiting were a skill that they had mastered over the centuries and then had inbred.

  They were perfect at it, really. Some men stood patiently without moving a muscle, while others slid down to a squatting position, elbows resting on their knees and the small of their backs pressed against a wall. When they tired of squatting, they sat on the floor and crossed their legs. They were comfortable touching one other. They grinned and grabbed at each other’s arms and tapped each other on the shoulders. There was even a little friendly Hmong goosing going on. They might not have behaved any differently in the fields at home.

  I watched the Hmongs and realized that some of them were watching me, staring directly and intently, making no bones about it. I knew what they must be thinking: He’s about the right age; he could have been there.

  From doorways and office windows, the clerks and typists of Fresno were watching the Hmongs, too. In the diversity of faces, I saw again the new face of California being formed.

  Although the Hmong people were usually from either Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, or China, this group claimed to be from Cambodia. Of the eighty different ethnic groups in Fresno County, they were the latest to arrive and the lowest on the totem pole. Some farmers resented them for working so hard and relying solely on their families and relatives for labor. Already they’d cornered the cherry-tomato market in the San Joaquin and were moving in on other crops.

  Some people in Fresno complained about how the Hmongs lived, with as many as five families sharing a single tract house. They complained that the Hmongs grew backyard poppies for personal-use opium and dealt in child brides. They complained about how the Hmongs drove. Every Hmong neighborhood had a designated driver who’d managed to get a car and a license, and these drivers were supposed to be a menace. I had seen some evidence of this—a Hmong behind the wheel in white-knuckled terror over the horsepower at his command.

  A story was going around about a Hmong who got a speeding ticket and killed himself, both from shame and because he was afraid of the punishment. The Hmongs were frequently accused of eating dogs, a bogus charge that had been levied at every Asian immigrant group in California since the Chinese.

  When the doors to a hearing room opened, the Hmongs rose as a body to go inside. For the first time, I noticed their clothes. It looked as though they’d been set free on a shopping spree at K mart. As newcomers to the state, they had no mastery over the language of apparel, so they had gone wild and crazy, mixing and matching whatever clothes appealed to them. A curious element of Hmong cool was on display. One flashy dude was got up in a wrinkled trench coat and a pair of expensive cowboy boots, like a private eye who worked part time on a ranch.

  Once the Hmongs were seated, the Planning Commission members came in. They were all white and middle-aged or older. A couple of them appeared to be perplexed, not out of any negative feelings toward the Hmongs but from a general disbelief at what was happening, Buddhists from maybe Cambodia wanting to build a pagoda on ag-land in Fresno County. It just didn’t compute.

  The hearing went smoothly. The Hmongs’ attorney, a white Fresno man, presented an impressive array of documents and architectural drawings. He lectured the panel about Angkor Wat and explained that the height of the pagoda was an homage to Buddha. In response to an obvious question, he said, “We would appreciate the nonrepeating of things over and over again.”

  The opposition to the pagoda was minimal—two calls, one letter, and one petition. Only one person showed up to protest in the flesh. He was mean-faced and uncompromising and seemed to see himself as the last sane man in the San Joaquin fighting for the flag, God, and country.

  The Hmongs made noise during their celebrations, he said, and they used loudspeakers. Their drivers might run down children. The pagoda would have an adverse effect on property values. And what about the impact of the Hmongs’ “lifestyle”? He wondered why they couldn’t scale down the project.

  “They should Americanize their ideas a little bit,” he suggested.

  He was no match for the Hmong, who responded through an interpreter.

  “When the government of Cambodia fell down to Communist regimes,” the Hmong speaker began, “thousands were killed or tortured. We lost lives, children, family, everything. The Communists took over and banned all religions. Nobody can have a religion except for Communism. All pagodas, even Christian churches, were demolished.

  “This country give us freedom. Our temple will be both for worship and education. We want our children born in Fresno to be Americans—but to preserve our own culture, too. We want to live in peace in this community.

  “All kind of volunteers will work on the pagoda,” he continued, his voice rising. “Thank you to government of U.S.A. for letting us have this freedom! We want to help you, to share all kind of responsibility and lifestyle with you. We want to calm and educate our people. Many thank you!”

  Wherever these Hmongs were really from, they knew their way around. We listened to some further discussion about such fine points as sewage disposal and the groundwater situation on North Valentine, but everybody in the hearing room knew that Fresno would soon have the only Buddhist temple between Stockton and Bakersfield.

  ALTHOUGH FRESNO STILL FELT LIKE A FARMING COMMUN
ITY, its rural character was in jeopardy. Among California cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand, it was the fastest-growing, and that had caused some problems.

  For one thing, there wasn’t enough water around to fuel the growth. For another, the water that was around had often been contaminated by industrial chemicals or pesticide residues. Four city wells were shut down during the week of my visit. Three were polluted with ethylene dibromide, a soil fumigant, and the fourth was polluted with a degreasing solvent used in dry cleaning.

  In all, Fresno had 234 domestic wells. Thirty-three of them were currently shut down on account of being polluted.

  The air in Fresno County had also created some concern. The farm machinery, the heat and the dust, the merciless traffic on I-5 and on Highway 99 all contributed to the leaden skies. Even the distant oil refineries near Hercules played a role. The prevailing winds swept down from the upper Central Valley and were tugged south by a sort of whirlpool effect. Fresno hadn’t met the goals that the Air Quality Board had set for it. The city was a “nonattainer” and had the wherewithal to become the worst air-quality region in the United States.

  The unemployment rate around Fresno was high, shooting to 13 or 14 percent at times. Farm laborers worked through a growing season and then collected unemployment. The crime rate was very high, too, especially for burglary, auto theft, murder, and rape. Gang-related crimes were mounting. I asked an officer at the Police Department about the crime, and he blamed it on “poor procedures.” I thought he meant that the cops weren’t performing, but he went on to list some of the poor procedures—it was a poor procedure to buy dope at two in the morning, a poor procedure to drive your car while you were drunk.…