Big Dreams (37 page)

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.

A
LTHOUGH FRESNO STILL FELT LIKE A FARMING COMMUNITY
, 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.…

People kept coming to Fresno, anyway, despite the problems. The young people weren’t leaving, either, as they were in so many other places in the state. Construction projects in the county were proceeding at a record pace, and so were requests for building permits and zoning changes. Downtown Fresno made no pretense that it was anything other than a center for banks and government offices. To shop and have fun, everybody went to two big malls.

Preservationist issues were seldom addressed at planning sessions in Fresno. Any hearing to discuss them, I was told, would be so lightly attended that you could fire a shotgun blast into the chambers and not hit a single soul.

I
N THE
FRESNO BEE
, I read that Nisshinbo Corporation was going to open a $59 million textile plant in Fresno.
Japan M & A Reporter
, a trade journal, had recorded 187 Japanese-American business deals in
the previous year, and 59 of them were closed within California.

The Japanese liked to invest in electronics, computers and telecommunications, and banks and services, but they also dabbled in chemicals and food. Kyotaru, a sushi chain, had just bought eighteen Arby’s roast-beef outlets, for example. It was said that the corporate concerns in Japan responded to California’s mild climate, its unique blend of farming and high-tech, and its air of promise. The only state that got anywhere near as much money from them was Texas.

The economic ties between Japan and California were strong. Of all the commodities exported from the state, $8.3 billion worth had gone to Japan in 1989, more than twice as much as went to Canada, our second-largest customer. California cities ran vigorous campaigns to market themselves to investors on the Pacific Rim. Fresno had an Economic Development Corporation that did the prospecting, making cold calls to firms and pitching them on what the city had to offer.

One of Fresno’s major incentives was its Enterprise Zone, a concept that had originated in England. In an Enterprise Zone, the rules could be bent slightly, the red tape could be cut, and the entire process of permits and hearings could be streamlined. The land could be sold at rock-bottom prices. A company located in the zone got tax breaks and preferential treatment.

A California trade office in Tokyo had channeled the Nisshinbo deal to Fresno. After the initial contact, a protracted period of negotiation had followed. Executives with the EDC had come to expect this.

“An American firm plans for one year and takes five years to implement the plan,” one official told me. “The reverse is true of the Japanese.”

Nisshinbo was buying thirty-six of the two thousand acres in the Enterprise Zone and being subsidized by the Japanese government. In its first phase, it would build on only eighteen acres. To induce Nisshinbo to build on the other eighteen, Fresno had agreed to pay the development fees. At the Fresno EDC, the Japanese were regarded
as very clever businessmen, capable of winging it as they went along, applying innovative tools to each new venture, public or private.

So clever were the Japanese, in fact, that they had acquired such California jewels as the golf course at Pebble Beach and the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, not to mention the wineries up north and Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. The transactions had not gone unnoticed. There was a nasty streak of anti-Japanese sentiment fermenting in the state, and it found expression among TV commentators and other media pundits, and in the Letters-to-the-Editor columns in newspapers.

“Twenty years from now most of us will work for Japanese-owned companies,” wrote a San Jose man to the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “We will need to learn Japanese in order to talk to our supervisors. Few of us will be able to afford houses so we will rent tiny apartments from Japanese landlords. Automobiles will be too expensive to buy, but when we need one for a special occasion we will rent a Japanese car from a Japanese rental agency.”

The blame, said our distraught scribe, fell to Ronald Reagan, the Ultimate Californian.

T
HE FIRST THING KAZ FUJISAKI DID
when I visited the Nisshinbo plant was to hand me his business card. After that, he led me to a conference room, paused on the brink, and changed the little sign outside from Vacant to In Use. This seemed to satisfy him.

Fujisaki, a Nisshinbo director of marketing, wore a dark-blue tie, a white short-sleeved shirt, and polyester slacks. I believed that he would never voluntarily waste a second. Up front, he informed me that Nisshinbo was not buying any real estate or golf courses in Fresno. He would mention golf and golfing often during our chat, always dismissively, as if he’d rather run naked down Tulare Street than swing a sand wedge.

Fujisaki was precise in answering questions. He gave multipart responses—Reasons One, Two, and Three. He had lived in California
since 1983, most recently in Los Angeles, so I asked him how Fresno compared.

“It might be a little boring if you were a bachelor,” he said. “Nothing much to do on Saturday night.”

For a family, though, Fresno had lots of advantages, Fujisaki thought. His two sons had made plenty of friends and really enjoyed the town. Mrs. Fujisaki wasn’t adapting quite as easily. In L.A., where there was a big Japanese community, she didn’t need to speak English well, but in Fresno that had put her at a loss. Other Nisshinbo employees were around, but they had dispersed themselves deliberately to a variety of neighborhoods, so that they couldn’t be accused of clumping up.

The Nisshinbo plant was almost completed. Technicians were installing the textile machinery as we spoke. Fujisaki apologized for using only Japanese-made machines. The technology, he said, was too advanced for American parts to be interfaced. Soon thirteen young women from Japan would fly to Fresno and start training California workers. He allowed himself a smile at that, as though the training would meet an unexpressed, unconscious need.

Two other cities, Bakersfield and Riverside, were finalists in Nisshinbo’s search for a plant site, and I wondered how Fresno had won. There were five reasons, Fujisaki told me.

One, the word
Fresno
stood for superior cotton in Japan, although the very best cotton was
Pima
from Arizona. Two, there was easy access to the cotton in the fields of the San Joaquin. Three, the city was a strategic location midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, good for exporting to the Pacific Rim. Four, there were the incentives of the Fresno EDC. And five, there was a readily available work force.

Fujisaki explained further about the work force. If you looked at the unemployment rate in the U.S.A. over the past ten years, he said, you saw that it averaged about 6 percent in most of the country. In Fresno, however, it rarely dipped below 12 percent because of the seasonal workers on farms. Textile manufacturing relied on unskilled
labor, so Nisshinbo was gambling that it could find a core of about two hundred people who wanted to work year-round and could be taught the Japanese way of doing things.

The workers, in all probability, would be Hispanic. That was another clever stroke, it seemed. By virtue of the work that they did cheaply on farms, Hispanics could be seen as the Koreans or the Taiwanese of the San Joaquin, a great source of economic potential.

The only criticism Kaz Fujisaki had about Fresno was that it took forever to push papers through city hall. Nisshinbo staffers were required to grab a number from a rack and wait in line behind guys in Can’t Bust ’Ems who were after a permit to build a chicken coop. That didn’t happen in Louisiana or in Texas, where the authorities greased the wheels.

“Well, something is better than nothing,” Fujisaki said, in the way of someone who has long since given up on the idea that a paradise existed anywhere on earth.

He invited me to come back and visit again when the plant was in operation. We got up and left the conference room, and Fujisaki paused to change the little sign outside from In Use to Vacant.

H
EAT AND DUST, DUST AND HEAT
. A sign along a dirt road: Chile Pickers Wanted, 14 Cents a Pound. Cotton fields dry and brown, the tender green of baby crops. Thick clusters of pink and white oleanders on highway islands, where Mexican illegals sometimes slept. Billowy turkey feathers blowing about on a turkey farm.

Bill’s Bait and Tackle near Mendota. Minnows, crickets, and two cases of handguns. The big stink of sun-warmed cow manure. A man in an onion field, hoeing down the rows. A grocery store advertising peda bread. A variant of pita?

Said the clerk, “I don’t know. I’m not Greek. I’m not even Armenian.”

Deep pockets of shade, full summer coming on.

Somebody on North Valentine Avenue was marketing pit bulls
for twenty-five dollars a pup. Tracts, apartments, a trailer park. A yard sale offering hubcaps, wheel bearings, car seats, chains, and bike pedals, the sum of it swimming in oil.

At the Hmongs’ compound, home of Fresno Cambodian Buddhist Society, a monk in a saffron robe padded out barefoot to get the mail. He had a look of bemusement on his face—the mail ! The compound was neatly fenced. Photos of monks and parishioners were tacked to a bulletin board. Yellow-flowering squash grew in a little garden by the monks’ white house.

Two competing signs: PEACHES; PEACHES.

I stopped at a warehouse where the farmers were Japanese-Americans. An older man in a Panasonic cap fiddled with his hearing aid and said, “They had an earthquake in Los Angeles this morning.”

Cardboard flats of fruit with that rosy, peachy glow and a marvelous smell. One box was marked
RIPE FOR ICE CREAM
. I bought a half-dozen plump freestones from a shy young woman for $1.50. They’d have peaches through August, she said, five different varieties, including Elbertas.

“You don’t find many Elbertas in San Francisco,” I told her, and she lowered her eyes and blushed.

F
RESNO TO KERMAN
, then south to Helm and Five Points and across the California Aqueduct again to Coalinga in the desiccated wastes below the Diablo Range, where the grandest fete of the year was the annual Horned Toad Derby. During Derby week, the citizens hung a banner downtown that was so frayed and sun-bleached it inspired no confidence that the event would actually occur. That was in keeping with the spirit of things, really. Horned toads were scarce, veering toward extinction.