A Resident in LA

City Folk

I stayed 5 years in Los Angeles … during my service at the Consulate. It was an apartment … in a condominium at First and Hope … in the downtown area … that was called the Promenade. It was a  stone  throw from the Consulate … in the World Trade Center building. It had started out as simply a job … but the cultural relations … the world view … and the foreign perception of my home and country … had a strong impact to me. It was an experience … that outgrew the bounds of a job … and raised itself … as an issue that became a part of my personality ... and the world.

 

At first impression … I didn't like LA. It was so entirely different from the green lush surroundings of Kuala Lumpur and Malacca. There were cover crops … everywhere … covering the barren earth outside the skyscrapers … that reminded me of the way we use cover crops in rubber estates … between the trees. And then the sprinkler systems … that were mandatory … gave the city … the appearance of something temporary … like a camping trip in the desert.

 

But 6 months later … with the walking trips I made around the city … the weekly trips to Ralph's on 3^rd street … the shopping at Broadway … and the meals at the restaurants in the area … I was starting to fit in. The weather was absolutely fantastic … dry … and almost Mediterranean in its atmosphere … that raised a crisp view of sky and the mountains in the distance … that made everything appear more real than … what I'm accustomed to in the bright … humid … and rainy tropics.

 

It wasn't New York City … and this part of LA is simply known as the downtown area … but the moods it goes through during the year … came to share in my breath … and sights of its personality. It was an adventurer … daring to try new things … and seldom staying long enough … to identify with any one experience. It simply flowed along … and took me out to Griffith Park … the beach at Santa Monica … the Anaheim Disneyland …  and a distance away to Las Vegas. And with visitors dropping by from Malaysia … I did quite a tour guide to others.

 

I thought I had a glimpse of the American experiment with the dream … especially in the friendship … I came to share with the owner of the apartment … who was a senior partner in the 5^th largest law firm in the country. He lived out at Beverly Hills … with his lovely wife … and we did Thanksgiving … the Hollywood Bowl … Huntington Park … exchanged gifts and souvenirs … and he came for the wedding reception … I had given in a hotel in Hollywood.

 

He was always somewhat formal … speaking at a distance on issues … but giving every indication that … he would like to be involved in the experience more. After I returned to Malaysia … I looked him up on the internet … and found that he had set up a desert community foundation … in Palm Springs … California ... and had quite a following of membership. I had surmised then that … his visionary impetus … had simply grown … and he had brought himself to philanthropic work.  It would have given him a great link to the possibilities ... of the way things work.

 

In contrast … the chauffeur at the Consulate … a former LAPD officer … was a younger man with both feet firmly on the ground. We did Vegas … the gunshops … and the weekly trips for the diplomatic bag at the airport. And we exchanged stories. He was an avid reader … and recollected true accounts of frontier reports … battles … landmarks in LA … the delights of travelling to Bear Mountain … Solvang … Yellowstone Park … and when his mood was right … his experiences in the police force.

 

He spoke easily … like an old friend … would joke … and was entirely free of anything self conscious. He was also in a chauffeur service he had set up … and when a buddy wrote to say he was visiting LA … he had suggested using the chauffeur service … to pick him at the airport … in a Bentley with champagne … cigar and TV … and a leisurely drive through Beverly Hills … on the way to the apartment. When I met my buddy at the door … he had to sit for a while to collect his breath.

 

My Director General came by for a visit one time … and my Consul and I took him on a walking tour of the downtown area. He had jokingly commented that … from all he heard of LA … he expected to have witnessed police car chases and shoot out in the streets. Just at that instant … a man dashed out of the bar … across the road from us on 5^th street … chased by two detectives … who football tackled him right in front of us … put the cuffs on the man … and led him away. We simply looked at the Director General … and didn't say a word.

 

LA certainly fulfilled my D-G's fancy … and perhaps my buddy's dreams of life in the movies … but it did much more for me. In the university village where I live today … there's the daily wail of paramedic sirens … that reminds me of LA … and then some more. Its also a relation I feel with the friends I've made since then … including those at Writer's Cafe. Its the common spirit of man … at home in other parts of the world … and in the way we communicate … in the Jivan of our lives.

 

Five years is a long time … especially in comparison to the one week in Chelsea … London and one month in Shinjuku … Tokyo. It feels a little like a younger friend in London and a sister in Tokyo. I left the government service when I returned to Malaysia … and went into lecturing at a college. They were using American texts … and it was simply fun … to represent a culture and people … I had come to be familiar with. In expressing these … at this time … it feels like a homecoming … from the physical natures of my career experiences. It makes me wonder if I ever left at all.