Vernon on the Water

My father, a former truck driver, didn’t rely on the wirebound Thomas Guide map books that Angelenos kept in their cars with their spare tires and emergency flares. He knew Los Angeles by its hills, gorges, streams, oilfields, lowlands, and valleys. He knew it as it once was, before concrete had been poured and shaped into a grid of roads, highways, and structures that formed a vast, heat basin. He showed me how to navigate the city–its sprawl and massiveness–in the palm of my hand.

“You’ll want to know how to do this without any help,” he told me. That was not a question or an assumption, it was a look into the future that my father was preparing for me, one in which I would change my own tires, maintain my own appliances, and fix the 50 cc motorcycle he had just given me, a ten-year old girl. “Your brothers got one, and so should you,” he said. I roared around the orchards, burning my leg against the hot exhaust pipe. It was the 70s and safety seemed largely unattainable, or something that was for other people, like chia pets or electric carving knives.

He turned my left hand over and cupped it in his calloused hand. I noticed how his palms were covered in a slab of thick rosy pink skin, compared to the thin brown skin on the back of his hand.  “Your fingertips are the high peaks. This tall one,” he said, pulling my middle finger straight, “…is Old Baldy and your thumb is the Conejo Grade.” He wiggled my thumb, pointing it down toward the center of my palm, “Downtown” and up and out, “Oxnard,” gesturing to the agricultural plain where we lived and worked. My fingers were tender root shoots covered in dirt and grease, from climbing the avocado trees that ran alongside our rented farmhouse, while my father’s fingers were like dull piano hammers which he used to tap his message of self-reliance into my palm. He was 56, the age when people who do manual labor often lose the use of their hands because of arthritis, joint pain, stiffness and worse, the inexplicable loss of strength, which forces them to find new work–selling flowers, planting seedlings in a nursery.

He was not born with hands like this, it took decades for his muscles and sinews to be shaped into this tool of economy—dextrous enough to replace engine parts, solid enough to pound loose boards into place with his palms.

When I look at my cupped hand today, I see other geographic markers that I have added over time. The pads of my fingers are the lower mountain ranges, the Santa Monica Mountains or the Simi Hills. The little mounds and folds of skin are the foothills and valleys, and all the creases and fine lines are rivers and creeks. The pocket of my palm holds a dome of warm air held by a crescent of fault block mountains.

Before it was paved over, thousands of water sources trickled, seeped, flooded and coursed across the Los Angeles Basin on the way to the ocean where they pooled into lagoons, wetlands, and marshes. As water flowed across the alluvial plain, it spread organic material, clay, silt, seeds across an ever wider, ever flatter, area. That was the Los Angeles that my father was born into in 1922, a greenhouse, 50 miles long and 20 miles wide.

Whether it was my father’s paw of a hand, a woman pulling me down a grocery aisle by the elbow, a strange child reaching for my sweater, or a gentle shove when I was slow to board the bus, there are endless familiar ways that Asians and Asian-Americans communicate through touch, and not just because of the occasional language barrier.  Touch is more precise than words, more urgent, more loving, more real.  How many parents can, with the grasp of a hand, communicate the conditional, “If you X, I will Y”?  How many relationships took a downward direction after a kiss that was empty of content, that no longer had meaning?

I used to visit my 103-year old great-aunt in Keiro, a senior care facility in Japantown. We were eating in the dining hall at one end of a long table. Across from us, a thin Issei woman was crying over her plate. It wasn’t a decorous cry, it was sharp and she even shrieked every once in a while. My great-aunt raised one of her eyebrows at me, “every day,” she said and bit into the burger I brought her. When I stood up to leave, the woman placed a single twiggy fingertip on the back of my hand. I sat back down and waited until she was ready for me to go. I don’t know why she wanted me to stay, but I knew I had to stay and she knew that I would. Touch is inarguable. If she had asked me to stay, I could have made an excuse but I couldn’t dismiss that intimate, familiar touch telling me, “you’re mine for this moment.”

No one has touched my hand in over a year, except for the man I bound to me at the start of the pandemic. We had gone on one video date and one in-person date, just as the restaurants were closing down. We walked the empty streets of San Mateo, California, where I lived.

“So,” he asked me, “Do you want to go on a second date?”

“I think we’re stuck with each other until this is over,” I said.

“Yes!” he said and did that grabbing fist motion that men sometimes do, when they’ve scored a prize. We didn’t know it would be more than a year. We have a simple cadence for our dates: a glass of whisky, a meal, some talk, and then we hold each other. I have no idea if there’s love. Like couples from a few generations ago, we are bound together by need. We have food and shelter. What we need is human connection.

As a child, I knew that the soil beneath my feet was special, that if I started digging, I would never find rock or hard pan, just soft, porous topsoil.  When farmers and nursery people go to other farms, they will kick the soil, draw a circle in the dust with the tip of their boots, or break apart a clump of soil with their hands. Without really thinking about it, they are testing the soil, feeling its texture and structure, its ability to hold water and support life.

People used to say that there was a mile of topsoil in the Oxnard Plain. Like Los Angeles, this area is hemmed in on three sides by mountains that make it one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. Across the river from us, large farming operations used giant tractors to abrade the earth, revealing the dark soil, the wealth that had been deposited every year for millions of years.  We watched fawn-colored dust devils rise into the sky behind wide plows, as the fields dropped lower and lower.  Turns out, there was only six feet of alluvial soil.

What little I knew of the world outside our farming community came through the curved screen of a cathode ray tube, which was usually set to a UHF station that played the Three Stooges, Kimba, Speed Racer, Godzilla, all the variations of Godzilla, and Johnny Socko. I begged my next-door neighbor Marco to watch television with me. He was two years younger than me and carried a deadly slingshot in his pocket, which he used to pop little birds that gathered in the honeysuckle bushes. I had set up a clubhouse for myself inside those bushes, just a bench where I could pluck the white flowers and drink the nectar, but I found little corpses on the ground around me. How was Marco able to kill so many birds? Did he hit them in just the right spot, maybe in the throat?  Or was it the surprise that made their hearts stop?

I made Marco watch television with me so he wouldn’t kill any more birds. We would lie on our stomachs, close enough that we could crawl forward to change the channels if we wanted. We landed on an interesting sitcom about a large white family. Unlike my family of six, which caught lots of glares and snide comments from people at the restaurant or the theater, nobody seemed to mind them. The audience laughed at everything they did, even when two sisters yelled into each other’s faces and tugged on a new dress until they ripped the sleeves off. Disgusted, one of them threw it on the ground and grabbed an overflowing cream pie that happened to be near at hand. With a squeal, she pitched it as hard as she could, right into the face of an elderly woman who had just entered the scene. The audience applauded. Marco and I winced. I was startled by these images–first, the destruction of a new dress, then the waste of pie, and finally, the humiliation of an elder.

I called to my father who was working on his books at his desk in the corner of the living room. “That girl threw a pie in her grandmother’s face! Why did she DO that?”

He didn’t even lean back, “That’s what they do,” he said.

Marco and I just stared at each other. That moment would stay with me for years and years.

At the time, I didn’t know why my father spent so many hours at his desk, calculating and recalculating his expenses and revenue, when there was so much work to be done outside. It was because, every year, someone would call the IRS and report, falsely, that he was cheating on his taxes. Even then, the IRS went after easy targets, not rich people with lawyers and complicated personal finances. Around that time, people started to complain about “welfare queens.”  I’m not sure what we called people who weaponized government departments, maybe it was “movers and shakers” or “go-getters,” the people who knew how to get things done.

At the start of the pandemic, I was walking my dog at night, when a car swerved toward me and two assholes leaned out the window to shout “Trump 2020!”

“ASSHOLES,” I screamed back, “This is your fucking fault!”

Times like that, I missed being on a farm, where I would have had a weapon or a projectile nearby at all times.

Our little town of Saticoy had no more than 1,500 people, mostly agricultural workers. In this northeast corner of the Oxnard plain, the granite Topatopa mountains were our fingertip peaks soaring behind us, the last sanctuary of the California condors. My family lived in a farmhouse built in the 50s. It used to be the landlord’s home. Next door was Marco’s house, a compact two-bedroom, which was built for the foreman. Around us were five farmworker homes. Three had collapsed under the bay and black walnut trees. The other two were occupied, one by Jesús Calderón and his family, and the other by a retired carpenter named Tex. We all shared the same plot of land, the same well, the same clapboard siding, and bubbling lead paint. Those homes were organized as an economic unit from an earlier time–the family farm.  On three sides, we were surrounded by lemon trees, which filled the air with the sweet, clean scent of their blossoms. Our two double-decker bee hives buzzed most of the year.

Marco’s dad worked for the trash company and had a route that took him through the foothills where all the people with money lived–agribusiness executives, real estate developers, and old families, the people who still owned oil wells that were placed throughout the county–behind office parks, near the river or an abandoned train stop, in a broccoli field. Their homes were clustered around a mountaintop country club just outside of town. Even though my mother had gone to Oxnard High School and we had plenty of extended family nearby, we didn’t know a single person who went to that club. All we knew of it were the slopes of glittering green grass on a distant hilltop. I learned later that the initiation fee to the Saticoy Country Club was $55,000, nine times what a minimum-wage earning Saticoyan made per year back then.

Because of his dad’s work, Marco had an endless supply of toys–often new or like-new roller skates, skateboards, sleds, carts, board games, bows, balls, hoops, bats, and more. There were rows and rows of bicycles along the side of their house. We would drag parts into my father’s shop and come out with two-wheeled creations that looked more like alligators or giraffes than bicycles. We put bent wheels on a BMX bike and bobbled around the yard. His mother was the only woman I knew who didn’t work outside of the home or do any kind of piecework. She too, had a wondrous array of appliances, toaster ovens, mixers, radios, clothing and mirrors. On top of all that, Marco was an only child. As my two older brothers often said, he was the “luckiest little fucker” in Saticoy. Maybe that’s how he managed to kill all my birds.

In May 1984, the week I turned 16, I applied for my driver’s license. I might have even driven myself to the DMV. I had been driving for years–moving flatbed trucks around the packing shed that my father rented, transporting the harvest between our house and the fields, or driving up and down the dirt roads in the lemon orchards. I was an excellent parallel parker. When I got the license, a friend and I drove to Tijuana for the day and came right back. I started delivering my parents’ produce and working the farmers’ market circuit the next week.

My brothers were being raised to be farmers. They got to operate waxers, set up conveyor belts, and drive tractors, but, because I had a scholarship to a private high school, I was not expected to be a farmer, which left me with the gruntwork. I picked vegetables, washed them, weighed them, packed them, and then delivered them all over the Southland. I also picked up deliveries–mulch from the mushroom farm and chicken fertilizer from Egg City, the world’s largest egg ranch in Moorpark. I loved the smell of the mushroom farm, the dank warm earthy smell, the way the backhoe would carve into a mountain of mulch, revealing even darker, richer soil. I could squeeze it into spongy balls, like a snowball. It had structure. I hated going to Egg City where the air was bitter with powdery chicken shit, but it was cheap, so I went twice a year, waiting in the truck while a load was dumped into the bed with a thud. One time, they got my order mixed up with someone else’s and buried my entire truck in chicken shit. I had to rock it back and forth to free it and then I drove home with the windows shut tight as I scattered chicken shit to the winds. The people who lived in the new developments always honked at all the old slow trucks on the windy backroads, urging us to pull over so they could pass. I’m sure they cursed me that day.

During the lockdown, Apollo, my pandemic boyfriend, and I were obsessed with the numbers–the counts in our state, our nation, the Bay Area. The first large industrial outbreak of coronavirus in Southern California was at the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Vernon, with 116 cases out of 1,800 employees.  By November it was 300 and by January 2021, half their staff had tested positive. I followed these numbers closely, not just because of the scandal, but because I knew that particular slaughterhouse.

When I was 17, my mother and I took two trucks to pick up blood and bone meal in Vernon. On our way there, we were passed by Italian sports cars in the San Fernando Valley, Bentleys in Hollywood, and police cruisers Downtown. Just five miles south of Los Angeles City Hall, the skies were a reddish-brown in Vernon, filled with dust and reeking of exhaust, factory fumes and shit. Instead of cars, the roads were clogged with transport trucks full of pigs pressed against their cages and buses that carried workers to and from Mexico and the Central Valley. There were no homes, just warehouses, factories, processing plants, train tracks, loading bays, paper companies, tanning plants, mysterious aeronautical facilities, a battery factory, and other industrial uses on this bend in the Los Angeles River, but the city was most famous for its meat processing plants.

The 900,000-square foot Farmer John slaughterhouse was decorated with chipped utopian murals–pigs on green hillsides enjoying a picnic with a white family, flying an airplane, and standing next to an open can of pork rinds. This place did not smell of bacon, ham, chorizo, “Dodger dogs,” sweat, feces or grime. It was the overwhelming smell of rot, of death, just death, with an occasional whiff of bacon emerging from underground. When the tall gates opened for us, I saw enormous pens with pigs pressed tightly together, with no space between them. They pitched themselves against each other and the pen walls for a breath. Their hooves slid in mud pots of shit and blood, if they fell, they could not get back up. I sat in the cab of the truck with my windows rolled up and a bandana on my face, but it didn’t stop the smell or the burning fumaroles of methane. And even if it did, there was still the sound of thousands of screaming pigs and the sight of endless crammed pens in a massive cavern. People would likely describe it as a “sea” and it was like a sea in that there were currents and flows, which were created by the touch of a whip or an electric prod, and eddies that swirled around dead bodies.

Among the enormous pigs were a few enormous men. Everyone I saw was a tall, Black man, wearing rubber coveralls that went up to his armpits and boots up to his thighs. Armed with whips and metal hooks on long handles, they fought the pigs to back them into their crowded pens or to force them down a long ramp that led underground. I worried that they would slip, that the animals would shift direction, push a man down, tear him apart. It seemed inevitable. Elsewhere in the facility, there were more workers from nearby neighborhoods such as East Los Angeles and South Los Angeles, the ones who would attach chains to the pigs’ ankles, ram their skulls with bolts, slice them open, shovel entrails all day long, and breathe methane and carbon dioxide all day long. This vast complex of above- and below-ground structures rattled with the threat of imminent danger. Fear pumped through my body and my every thought. I tried to make eye contact with one of the men, but he couldn’t see me. Every cell in his body was tuned to the danger and nothing else.

An injured pig lay seizing on the breezeway. He slammed a hook into its shoulder and dragged it down the wet chute. Was that merciful? Is it better to go quickly or slowly? Even then, it screamed and kicked at him with the legs that were still working.

It took about an hour to process and load our order of ground bone and dried blood, the same amount of time it would take for 600 pigs to be rendered. As we left the slaughterhouse, we passed a storefront where people were lined up outside, to send money home or buy tickets for the charter buses that would take them to Tijuana or Fresno, where they would get other buses that would take them either closer to home or to more work. On the other side of the river was my great-aunt’s old home in Boyle Heights, one of the few neighborhoods in Los Angeles where people of color were allowed to live before the 60s.

At the start of the pandemic, I rode the elevator to my office in San Francisco. The other passengers pressed themselves against the walls. They were afraid of me.  That fear never abated. Two months later, I would be yelled at on the street. Over the summer, I bought a taser, my own personal electric prod. In the fall, Apollo, who is Black, bought a shotgun. Even in the Bay Area, we could feel the white rage that was taking over the country.

My mother and I never returned to Vernon. I don’t think that the slaughterhouse was how she remembered it. She and I unloaded the trucks, hefting the 50-pound sacks over our shoulders and placing them carefully on a pallet in the shed. Once they were stacked, we covered them with tarps to keep them safe from water. They were precious to us.

In Saticoy, there was a beef slaughterhouse on the main road that ran through town. The stockyards were located on a short bluff above the Santa Clara river. When it was the season for slaughter we could hear the cattle lowing and see them being forced up a ramp and sometimes we saw sides of beef being loaded onto trucks. We didn’t see eyes swollen and soupy with infection, abscesses, lesions, open wounds, or limping animals.  And, of course, we also killed chickens at home. None of this involved torturing an animal for the entire duration of its life or treating human beings like disposable machine parts.

Over the next several months, we amended the soil. I would drive, while my mother sat on the tailgate with a knife, ripping the bags open and spreading the brown and white powders over the earth. We could have, like our corporate neighbors across the river, kicked off the soil, but that never would have occurred to us, just as it wouldn’t have occurred to us to call the IRS on a neighbor who was having a good year, or to throw a pie in an old woman’s face. It’s not that we were better than anyone else, it’s that we needed dignity, that immeasurable currency, and if it did not flow freely in our direction, we would produce a quantity of it ourselves.

As the pandemic continued on, the violence against Asian Americans and, in particular, against seniors increased. We had been dehumanized for so long in this country, the laughline to every joke, that it was only a half-step to violence. Many of the high-profile cases that we heard about in the Bay Area involved Black men. I waited for Apollo, who regularly gave speeches on diversity to say something on social media or to me, but he didn’t.

For years, protestors had come to the Farmer John slaughterhouse with bottles of water for the pigs trapped on hot transport trucks. In their last hours, the pigs would experience a single moment of tenderness and they received it with gratitude. Pigs know all. They know what justice is, how social power functions, and the craving for the love of family. This month, something looked different about the protest, the helicopter news camera captured six or seven people who were also protesting for worker rights.

The OSHA meatpacking safety fact sheet reads like an old-fashioned children’s song–with the rhythm and lyrics of a nightmare: MRSA, swine flu, brucellosis, Q-fever, lung cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, band saws, blades, bolts, pneumatics, hooks, hazardous waste, carbon dioxide, chlorine, ammonia and other disinfectants, cubing and grinding machines, knives, conveyors...leading to skin infections, flu, pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis, fever, headaches, rash, muscle aches, diarrhea, gastrointestinal distress, asphyxiation, shock, crushed hands and fingers, amputations, blindness, fatalities, burnings and electrocutions.

The list of hazards is longer than the list of remedies.

It was not an accident that people of color were allowed to live around a polluted city designed specifically for industry. Nor was it an accident that the grandson of the man who incorporated that city would be its mayor for more than 50 years. Like the family farm, this is just another economic unit, though of a wholly different scale.

It was not an accident that slaughterhouse safety was deregulated in 2019 or that, by presidential order, slaughterhouses were forced to stay open in 2020. Just as the pandemic itself wasn’t an accident or that so many women and people of color were hurt by it.

I told Apollo about the taboo that I felt when I saw an elder being hurt, “It is not just that it is forbidden, it is that the old person is also somehow sacred to me.” He held my hand. I didn’t know what else to say. We knew how to relate to each other as a woman and a man, but not as an Asian and a Black person.

A few days later, he posted about the violence.

According to my father’s first map, the line at the top of my palm is the San Gabriel River and the one below it is the Los Angeles River. For mystics, those are the “heart” and “head” lines. Between these two lines is a watershed that was designed, over millions of years, to capture, clean, and carry water. It’s still there.

My father’s hand map was more than a navigation tool or a protective metaphor. It was a memory of a world as it once was or still could be.

______

Amanda Mei Kim is a Japanese- and Korean-American, who grew up on a family farm in California. Her writing centers around rural communities of color. Amanda completed residencies at Yefe Nof, Hedgebrook, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has appeared in print in Brick and online in LitHub and Tayo Magazine.