A Tale of Personal Discovery

...Augustine’s hardly resembles a California that is failing to work for people...

...They were offering local residents major incentives to accept plans that would forever change the neighborhood’s character...

...A Tale of Personal Discovery The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification By Caille Millner Penguin...

...As for the children she met at Bret Harte Middle School there: “They were terrifying...

...The sentences those voices spoke prickled with colloquialisms like tool and wicked and awesome...

...Where does she belong...

...California made it possible for us...

...This is what was at stake in the BoKaap, we are told: “The sight of young couples strolling hand-in-hand at dusk...

...But I found no comfort in the company of outcasts either...

...There she did find the sense of community she had been seeking— in the heavily Muslim Bo-Kaap section of Cape Town...

...I was appalled...

...The altar appeared to have been dipped in gold, and the stained-glass interpretation of the Birth of the Lamb shattered the rainbow...

...Not with her mom’s messed-up kinfolks back in Louisiana...

...Yet when her mother needs help in the States, Caille Millner decides that maybe California deserves another chance...

...She asked for an authentic culture, she was presented with a Latina experience...

...Augustine’s was a brown church, upwardly mobile but still brown, a church that was less than one generation removed from poverty, a church with second mortgages on homes in Echo Park, a church that sent half its wages to Mexico, a church that wore twice-ironed whites...

...But I would say California is indeed working well for plenty of people today...

...By all objective standards,” the author says, “Almaden Valley was better: a hushed, tree-lined neighborhood where the streets were clean and the supermarkets were stocked and the neighbors avoided one another...

...The worshippers pushed through this corps without mercy...

...The walls and floor of the church were coral and sparkling...

...BORNIN 1979, Millner has a wry sense of what it means to live in the new multicultural America, where every group is due a polite but oh-so-careful public nod...

...The residents must protect these things...

...Scant mention of Mexico in school history classes...

...Culturally speaking,” she recalls, “I had what will soon become the American childhood, a m?lange of cheerful American pragmatism and Latin Baroque and African-American skepticism...

...The children, far too many to count, who lord over street traffic all day and night with games of cricket and pickup soccer...

...All those people getting a fresh start somehow or other in the United States of America...

...Eventually the Millners moved from the Chicano neighborhood to tonier Almaden Valley...

...Every Saturday afternoon, a team of oil-stained men surrounding the cars, fortified by a cooler of beer and a beatup radio booming Mexican rock...

...Not with the wary residents of Almaden Valley, whose chief aim seems to be avoidance of one another...

...They lay on hospital cots, attended by an exhausted, flat-footed nurse...

...At every birthday party a pi?ata, the beating of which heralded rips and grass stains on massive white dresses...

...This was a church that knew how close it was to the squalor outside...

...For all her yearning to inject herself into someone else’s world, California, a place that likes hard workers and high achievers, is almost certainly where she belongs...

...The dominant culture was never hers...

...The wooden pews were polished to a high gleam...

...All those people amassing something of value they feel they must protect...

...Upon reflection, however, the author doubts the Golden State can do for others today what it did for her parents...

...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Writer and critic Caille millner’s wonderful mem­ oir is a book of personal discovery...

...Their voices were flat and starched, with blunt edges that popped every possibility of curvature and melody...

...still, a regular festival for Cinco de Mayo(but only those aspects that could be safely dehistoricized and commodified, such as folkl?rico performances and trays of empanadas), which was much more fun than Martin Luther King Jr...

...The scene in St...

...And yet, Millner herself gives us prima facie evidence that it does as she describes a mass she attended with her brother at St...

...It’s just that the parishioners— like immigrants throughout much of America—are engaged at the moment in a great human drama: All those people sending checks back to Mexico...

...This is a history that only now is beginning to come forth from young writers who were the grade school recipients of liberal good intentions...

...We are a successful American family,” Millner declares...

...She sought the warmth of community, she became mixed up with a manipulative computer programmer who harbored racist notions and was capable of acting out violent criminal impulses...

...Maybe it’s best to begin this story,” she tells us, “not when I learned I was black but when I learned I wasn’t brown...

...Sporadic attendance at mass, but baptisms and first communions requiring a rented public space and a mariachi band...

...She tells a friend that she wants to test her powers to achieve and thrive there...

...Her portraits of California, Harvard and South Africa ultimately triumph as haunting little snapshots, full of introspection—but more important for what they say about the world beyond the author than what they say about the world inside her head...

...As we approached I saw—because I was forced to see them, forced to push through them on my way inside—a small delegation of limbless beggars on the church steps...

...In truth, though, the question does not matter much: The deeper one gets into The Golden Road, the more the power of Millner’s writing outweighs her search for authenticity...

...For her mother in particular, it provided a refuge from the sweltering cotton fields and family violence of rural Louisiana in the days before the civil rights revolution...

...It is never totally savory until it is safely enshrined in our national mythology...

...At least three cars to every house: two beached in the driveway or on the curb, one without wheels...

...AFTER GRADUATING from Harvard, moving to Brooklyn, and losing a roommate at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Millner fled to South Africa...

...She moved from an early childhood in one of San Jose’s Chicano sections to an upwardly mobile adolescence in nearby white Almaden Valley to an undergraduate’s enlightened elitist life at Harvard...

...There were no children my age in the neighborhood, not that I would have seen any who might have lived there...

...Above all they must protect the safety they have established through their tightly knit community: The Bo-Kaap is the only neighborhood in Cape Town where young women feel comfortable walking alone at night...

...We get a recurring picture of yearning to belong— somewhere—and never quite managing to do so...

...She was even more appalled when she saw the way they treated the children from east San Jose, “who had been bused in, reeking of poverty and defiance—as a criminal class of aliens...

...It is never very pretty while it is happening...

...She begins with their arriving at the sanctuary: “I peered through the bright hard light to see that the Baroque spirit had triumphed inside...

...Day (always a dreary assembly, with the tonedeaf lower grades crooning ‘We Shall Overcome’ to a piano arrangement that sounded like a dirge...

...Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles...

...Not surprisingly...

...Suddenly, however, it came under intense pressure from outside developers...

...Mainly this is a book about California— in all its manic craziness...

...Because in truth Millner is an authentic Californian on a strong upwardly mobile trajectory...

...Not with the smug techno-utopians of the Silicon Valley...

...People did not venture out of doors...

...All my life I have made demands of California,” Millner recalls...

...Not with the blacks, coloreds and whites of South Africa, whom she met after college as they were struggling to make their new democracy function...

...A church that knew how dangerous it was to linger on the front steps...

...Itwas a church with a fierce anxious expression that had solidified while watching parents and brothers and friends rise at four in the morning for gardening jobs in Orange County...

...She asked for an education, she got Bret Harte...

...A few of them rattled Styrofoam cups with a stump of arm...

...Once the decision was made, Millner says, she felt calm and sure for the first time in her life...

...For each passerby they lifted up their heads and whined out a dreadful concert, in Spanish, for alms...

...All those people paying second mortgages...