The Orange County Register has an article on the defeat of plans in a small OC community to regulate the color of homes after some local residents began painting their homes bright colors that some of their neighbors considered garish. The issue was debated for a year and it got a bit out of hand. There's the freedom of doing what one wants with one's property, but there was also the issue of strange-looking homes bringing down property values.
Oh, and there was a heavy dose of xenophobia.
It seems some, many, or all of these garish homes in moderately upscale La Palma belonged to immigrants. The guy who painted his home gold with maroon trim (above) in a way that evoked McDonald's shops in the 1990s, for example, said the colors brought him nostalgia for the homes in his native Lebanon.
Of course, not all the controversially colored homes were owned by immigrants, but judging by some of the rhetoric, you'd think they all were. And even if they were largely immigrant-owned, it would hardly be statistically surprising in this highly multicultural hamlet, where Whites are outnumbered by Asians.
What prompted me to blog about this, however, was one of the quotes by resident Rex Hand, a proponent of the defeated color-regulation measure:
I think it's kind of a cop-out not to do anything. The issue is not about painting homes but about immigrants who choose to bring their own colors from their countries and put them into effect in our country.Yikes! Apparently Rex Hand is a Korean ajŏshi stereotype (could Rex Hand be 손렉스?). And what is it about Orange County residents with monosyllabic surnames that are words in the English language? Do they have nothing better to do but engage in some variation of yelling, "Hey, you ethnics! Get off my lawn!"?
But maybe Mr Hand is right: In support, I say we all boycott St. Patrick's Day this year! Why should we be forced to wear green or else fall victim to a Irish slugfest? How dare the paddies bring their green from their so-called Emerald Isle and put them into effect in our America!
Okay. Like the post on signage for Little Saigon and Koreatown, this one reveals some of the same xenophobic angst of some White Americans that is out there. In this way, it's not so different from that of the Korean ajŏshi who once was comfortable with all the familiar stuff in his formerly homogeneous neighborhood and is now at a loss as to how to deal with all the changes. (And kudos to the OCR for not sugarcoating this stuff.)
If you think this is a uniquely Korean phenomenon, and especially if you think "this kind of thing doesn't happen where I'm from," get over yourself. You either weren't paying attention back home, you're too highly sensitized to everything in Korea, or you just didn't have the experience of being a minority back in your home country.
UPDATE (following day):
As promised, I have posted some more pictures of the "offensive" houses. This one right below is the turquoise one that reminds me of the homes of Burano Island in Venezia (Venice), pictured above. Ah, I really should post my pictures from that wonderful place.
I also went back and read earlier stories related to this. It seems Mr Hand really likes attending those city council meetings and shooting his mouth of. Back in August 2008, he said:
I don't want my neighborhood to look like another country; I want it to look like the United States. I don't want it to look like Mexico or Asia.Mexico or Asia? Try Italy.
Anyway, Mr Hand's got that Korean ajǒshi shtick down pat. And the thing is, a lot (in fact, I think a majority) of the offending homes are not owned by immigrants. I have friends who have moved to La Palma, not far from a few of these places, and the families that own them are White.
In fact, it reminds me of my aunt's old neighborhood in Las Vegas, full of one-story houses built in the 1950s painted yellow, sky blue, or pink. Just like the John Mellencamp song.
Certainly there is no bit of irony, either. For starters, the City of La Palma government painted their refurbished civic center in aqua and chartreuse. And there is this little tidbit: 37-year La Palma resident Eva Bruning says, "I don't want to live next door to a house that's painted Orange. It offends me."
Offended by an orange house in Orange County. Where's your civic pride?
UPDATE #2:
Fun facts about La Palma: It is the smallest city in Orange County (by area) and its mayor, Gorpat Henry Charoen, is "the first and only US elected official of Thai descent."
Regulations aren't that unreasonable. They exist in my parents' neighborhood, where you need to get home owners' association approval to do anything drastic on your property, like build a deck, put up a fence or a shed.
ReplyDeleteI get what your point is by posting stories from back home, but I just want to point out that---and maybe in all our quote-unquote multicultural glory we forgot this---it's perfectly reasonable to expect immigrants to conform to the standards in place, and not the other way around. Whether it's all or mostly immigrants doing the painting or not, people resent having to change their lifestyles to conform to outsiders under the guise of tolerance, and it ultimately does more harm than good. This is something I've said of foreigners here who talk about the need for Koreans to accept foreign cultures, but their definitions of tolerance usually amount to nothing more than "I want to kiss my boyfriend in public" and "why do they get pissed when I have parties?"
Brian wrote:
ReplyDeleteRegulations aren't that unreasonable. They exist in my parents' neighborhood, where you need to get home owners' association approval to do anything drastic on your property, like build a deck, put up a fence or a shed.
You make a good point, and I agree with much of it. However, it should be pointed out that this community is a city, not a homeowners association. People have been living there for years or decades with the freedom of having their houses the way they want.
Some of the neighborhoods there are full of similar-style homes with earth tones, and that looks nice in those neighborhoods. But other neighborhoods are more eclectic and that's part of their charm.
I recognize some of these homes from certain tracts in La Palma, Cypress, and Cerritos (which is socioeconomically related to OC but is actually just across the border in Los Angeles County), and they are full of homes with a mixture of Spanish colonial, Dutch, Polynesian, Mexican, and even Japanese architecture.
The variety of colors is very much in line with that kind of theme, so I wouldn't fault anyone — immigrant or otherwise — who thought a turquoise house on a street with five or six Mediterranean homes would be out of place.
Brian wrote:
ReplyDeleteI get what your point is by posting stories from back home, but I just want to point out that---and maybe in all our quote-unquote multicultural glory we forgot this---it's perfectly reasonable to expect immigrants to conform to the standards in place, and not the other way around.
In fact, I pretty much agree with that (and I elaborate below).
But from what I've read and from what I've heard from talking to people about this, there's something a little different going on.
In short, it's not so much that immigrants were painting their houses unusual colors, but that it was being assumed that the unusual colors were being painted by immigrants, when in fact they probably weren't doing it any more than the non-immigrant population, including the Whites. Many of the immigrants or non-Whites, in fact, were buying homes that had already been painted or decorated with these unusual looks by their White former owners.
And that's one of the things that bothers me about Rex Hand's statement: it's a knee-jerk response that it's the IMMIGRANTS who are responsible for this thing he doesn't like.
Like I said, it's a variation of yelling, "Hey, ethnics! Get off my lawn!"
It reminds me of something back in college, where certain "eco-friendly" residents in our dorm were not flushing the toilet after every use, in order to save water (only after urination, not defecation). We could say thousands of gallons of water each week in drought-stricken southern California, they thought.
Well, some people didn't take too kindly to seeing a yellowish toilet bowl when they went in to sit down, and this was the source of grumbling. One neighbor, who didn't know who it was, flat out told me (in confidence) that he was pretty sure it was the Mexicans who lived in his unit.
Frankly, I have no idea if the Mexican neighbors were or were not flushing after every use, but his presumption was based on nothing more than them being Mexican and him constantly finding unflushed toilets.
Whether it's all or mostly immigrants doing the painting or not, people resent having to change their lifestyles to conform to outsiders under the guise of tolerance, and it ultimately does more harm than good.
Well, I don't know how much of a lifestyle change goes into having an orange or turquoise house on one's street. What if the color is right but your neighbor buys an ugly car?
In a country where freedom of choice is a dominant theme, we may have to live with the ugly choices of our neighbors. None of the residents of La Palma have chosen to exercise their right to give up their rights to choose (e.g., by making a homeowners association).
And in the end, the city council of La Palma recognized that and voted this down. Read the comments section of the OCR stories and you'll see a lot of people trashing the idea of forcing a color scheme, some even calling it communist (OC residents like to call things they don't like "communist").
And that's another thing where this story is relevant. Just like it's easy to pick out the Korean ajoshi who pissed you off today and go on a screed about it (á la Metropolitician) and make out that he represents some sort of norm, the same caveat applies here. Mr Hand may have been the most vocal, but in the end he represented a derided minority opinion.
In Korea, I know that there would be politicians who would be afraid if the Netizens had made such a stink about some issue like this, and they might be inclined to change the rules based on their fear that the loudest mouths are the most representative voices.
When in fact, they so often are not.
This is something I've said of foreigners here who talk about the need for Koreans to accept foreign cultures, but their definitions of tolerance usually amount to nothing more than "I want to kiss my boyfriend in public" and "why do they get pissed when I have parties?"
You make a very good point here. A lot of Anglophones do some things in Korea (and other places in East Asia) that just aren't done. When told they shouldn't do that, I know some people who are emboldened even more that they are right to do it because it is their right to do it.