_One day, while appraising a new home for one of the area's largest and most prestigious builders, I stopped into the Milpitas sales office to review blueprints. On one of the tables were lined sheets of paper with the 250 or so names of all who had put their names there, waiting for a chance to buy one of the new homes. The subdivision would take more than two years to build out. I asked the agent why "they" did it? (The "they" being perhaps 90% Vietnamese.) "Two hundred fifty hopes divided amongst the 30 or 40 homes going up, what chance did they think they had?"
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_"With little to nothing in their pockets, these are folks who crammed aboard rickety old, leaking boats, and shoved off. Hundreds, maybe thousands drowned before some fishing boat or a US Navy vessel could rescue them. They had no specific destination other than America. All they had was hope and a willingness to work hard."
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_The city of Milpitas is today heavily populated by Vietnamese. Ethnically, San Jose's population is about 25% Caucasian, 25% Vietnamese, 25% Hispanic, 10% African-American, and a smorgasbord of everything else. With more than 100 mother-tongues non-English, English is a second language to most of those in Silicon Valley. (It's also been my anecdotal experience, by the way, that, sadly, English is also a foreign language to an extraordinarily large proportion of all the Americans who were born in this country, if speaking it correctly is any kind of test. For example, "is" goes with singular nouns and pronouns, "are" attaches to plural nouns and pronouns, and "don't" never gets anywhere near "got" or "none.")
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_I lived in that rather highly educated, very upscale area for three decades, and loved it. Without editing, the following was the ethnic composition of my immediate neighborhood. Next-door west were the Arroyo's, a Puerto Rican family. After a few years, they sold their home to the Nguyen's, who were Vietnamese. Across from the Nguyen's were Filipinos. Immediately east of them was a single Hispanic (Mexican) mother. Next to her was Avery and his wife and daughter, a black family. An Egyptian family lived in the house next to Avery. Across from them lived an Arabic family. To my right, directly east of me, was Jayne Hoyt. My family and Jayne were the only Caucasians in our immediate "neighborhood."
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_For 31 years I was a minority, and I loved it. It is both naïve and inaccurate to suggest that prejudice/bigotry is absent from the San Jose area, or that there does not exist a serious crime problem. (For a time, and perhaps it's still so, the most dominant drug-related axis was out of Los Gatos High. Los Gatos, for those who do not know, and few likely do, is one of the most well-to-do communities in an overall high-priced region. It is not unusual to find Beemers, Mercedes, Vettes and other luxury vehicles disproportionately populating the STUDENT parking lot.) That detour taken, back to the commentary on the theme. Both prejudice/bigotry and crime are present. But the overriding social attitude, and the point I'm trying to stress, is, including all San Francisco Bay, the wide embrace, indeed, celebration, of all the erstwhile irrelevant demographic differences.
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_Really! Very few care what your ethnic or racial background may be, or what your religious (if any at all) or gender orientation is, or whether you speak English as a first or second language. In a region that depends absolutely for its very survival on honest use of intellect, on the ability to handle a high-tech job, what counts more than anything else is whether someone actually can do the job. And I've gotta tell ya: that is so damn liberating! Regardless that San Jose is not heaven on earth, compared to everywhere else I've lived, for a take-your-phony-regimentation-and-shove-it curmudgeon like me, it is heaven on earth. There is nothing whatsoever to fear, being a Caucasian minority.
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_So, just what the hell are so many in America so damned frightened of? The only answer I can concoct is, it's a tragic ignorance and an absence of skills necessary for competing in today's world. The only answer I can summon is, they looked in the mirror and found that, vis-à-vis today's economic requirements, they do not have what it takes; they're inferior to the task at hand, and putting down others based on race, ethnicity or whatever is the only means available to them, to not feel the inferior that they truly are. The terrible irony is, of course, that while they so busy themselves with impertinent diversions, the more inferior they actually become.
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- Ed Tubbs
Palm Springs, CA
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