"Did anyone water them?"
"No."
Giang laughed with deep satisfaction. The fact that it rained hard during two of my five-day stay further proved, in his mind, that this drought brouhaha is nothing but a Jerry Brown con game.
"I should have taken a photo of you all dripping wet from walking in the rain!" Giang added, still laughing. In his defense, I can only speculate that my friend's not all there thanks to a recent, drawn out divorce, loss of home, suicide attempt and a three year spell of unemployment that, mercifully, has just ended.
It is all too easy to be upbeat in the Bay Area, however, especially if you're in the Silicon Valley. Trekking through Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont and San Jose, I saw mostly neat, beautiful homes with well-kept landscaping. Cheery Cupertino High School contrasted so sharply with the grate windowed, prison-like complexes common to Philly, I had to stop and stare. With an average SAT score of 1832, it's not even the best public high school in town. By comparison, the average score for South Philadelphia High, the one closest to me, is 1045. Cupertino is 63.3% Asian, and the star of Cupertino High's basketball team is 6'4" junior Ajaypal Singh. He's averaging 17.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and 1.7 blocks per game.
At the East West Bookshop in Mountain View, there are notices for lectures with names like "I'm Not Dead, I'm Different" and "My View From Heaven: Life After Death." Like California itself, some Californians are smirking at physical limits. We're not dying of thirst, we're different. With its posh restaurants and cafes, downtown Mountain View exudes wealth. At Scratch, which advertises "comfort food," a "Midwestern meatloaf" goes for a mere $19. Outside Xanh, an upscale Vietnamese joint, I spotted a notice in Spanish offering a kitchen job.
Help wanted signs are all over the South Bay, in fact, especially at fast food outlets. At Ike's Love and Sandwiches in Santa Clara, the large "NOW HIRING" poster features a vaguely Asiatic Uncle Sam, with "WE WORK FOR TIPS, AND PHONE NUMBERS!" Plus "Medical/Dental Benefits." The California minimum wage is $9 an hour, and since most of these jobs only start out at that or a tad more, they have a hard time attracting workers. With competition for diners so fierce, however, bosses can't offer better. Immigrants tend to open restaurants, and the South Bay is carpeted with reasonably priced Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and Mexican eateries.
Coming from a city that's 44% black, I also noticed the scarcity of blacks in the Silicon Valley. The largest ethnic group in Santa Clara County is Asian, at 34.1%, to be followed by white at 33.9% and Hispanic at 26.8%. Blacks make up only 2.9%. As in every other place across this entire country, Hispanics claim the more physical jobs that once went to blacks, just as Chinese used to bump out the lowlier whites. As for the tech jobs, they are dominated by Asians and whites, which makes perfect sense, since these are also the best engineering students anywhere. At super competitive Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in suburban Washington, 70% of the class of 2019 are Asians. In a mixed-race society, the vocational aptitudes of each ethnic group become sharply contested, then delineated against each other. Of course, individuals should always be judged singly, and these larger patterns are not etched in stone. In San Francisco, Tibetans and Central Americans are said to make the best nannies.
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