My friend J. is a Tibetan man, via Dharamsala, now living in Oakland, where he runs a small neighborhood business. He has written a lengthy biography of the President of Tibet, in Tibetan, alas, so I cannot read it. But J. arranged to have it translated into English by a professor friend of his, also Tibetan, and he now has the translation in manuscript. He has asked me to read it because, he says, he wants to make sure it makes sense to Americans, or “tells a story,” as J. puts it. He hopes to market the book in this country. I of course agreed to his request.
Of the many things I like about Oakland is our ethnodiversity. My longtime cleaning ladies are from Mexico and despite their limited English and my non-existent Spanish we manage to communicate. They are tiny, magical ladies. When I mentioned them to my old friend, Miss Araceli (herself Mexican-American), she speculated they might be brujas, a word I remembered from my reading, long ago, of Carlos Castaneda. He was extraordinarily popular in my days as a college student for his vivid portrayals of mysticism among the indigenous Mexicans—portrayals that, what they may have lacked in factuality, they more than compensated for in imaginative storytelling. I have never seen crows in quite the same way as after reading Castaneda.
Oakland also is a small world. Forty years ago I used frequently to see in my neighborhood a parked car whose license plate read TIBET-1. Every time I saw it I had the distinct certainty I would one day meet its owner, and so it was when, one day, I was introduced to Thepo Tulku. He was a slender, polite Tibetan man, then perhaps 35 years old, who lived a few blocks from me. I was doing a lot of writing for the old East Bay Express, mainly cover stories about people on the fringe who did not normally then get any media attention: drag queens, transgendered folks, born-again Christians, neo-nazis, gangbangers, even meteorologists and cosmologists. I have always been attracted to unconventional people who, like myself, didn’t fit in to our one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter world. Thepo was certainly such a man.
Our meeting culminated in a long story I wrote about him for the EBX. He allowed me to hang out with him for many weeks, during which I met a number of his Tibetan-refugee friends and their local supporters. Thepo, it turned out, was the seventh reincarnation of a revered lama; he, Thepo, had been recognized by the Dalai Lama himself and now held the respected title of Rinpoche.
Lo and behold, we fast forward to today, and as things turned out, Thepo, still alive and well though now living in Los Angeles, is the Facebook friend of my new friend, J. I can never explain these coincidences—if that’s what they are—but they no longer surprise me. Everything, and all of us, seem connected in some inexplicable way. I suppose it could be through the karmic device of reincarnation; I’m not a believer in that, but the universe is strange and vast, so who knows? Maybe I really was Frédéric Chopin, as a psychic friend from long ago once informed me. That would explain the predilection I had for the piano even at the age of three--but that’s another story.
And—sort of an interesting side note: J. wrote his book in the last 8 or 10 years, in other words, fairly recently. I was struck by how political Tibet has become. I know next to nothing of its history, but I had always thought of it as non-political: there was the Dalai Lama at the top, in that mountain-clad snowland so cut off from the outer world. Under that, a layer of lesser lamas, and at the base, Tibet’s people, who number today only about 3.6 million. In my thinking, Buddhism was the only “political” party: it consolidated the spiritual realm with the worldly one. But now, with Western influences flooding in, including social media, television, movies and rock and roll, every group wants a voice in Tibet’s governance—and we know where that leads. (Red and Blue states, anyone?) As Tibet advances towards democracy, is this new political metastructure good or bad? Not to answer a question with a question, but who can say?
Anyway, I like Oakland’s diversity. In the late 1970s, I lived in Pleasant Hill, and with all due respect for that tranquil little city it was rather too vanilla for me, with its tract houses and endless, dreary boulevards, all punctuated by six-way stoplights and mini-malls of Chinese restaurants and beauty shops. My first glimpse of Oakland—Adams Point, where I still live—echoed something of hilly San Francisco and even of certain neighborhoods in The Bronx, my beloved birthplace.
Adams Point was a very different place in 1987, when I moved here. The buildings were more or less the same as today, an uneasy mixture of old Maybecks and Morgans, gloriously arts-and-craftsy, with ugly 1960s-era toss-up slab apartments. Over the years the neighborhood gentrified. Lesbians led the charge, as they had in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. Then came the gay boys followed by nuclear families and their attendant baby carriages, and then came droves of singles who worked in some offshoot of technology’s tangled web. Adams Point spruced up and became a better place to live, but, as it borders Broadway and thus is only blocks from San Pablo and MLK Jr. Way, crime and encampments threaten constantly to creep in, which is one reason why I take the political positions I do, in this, our unsafe city.
Most of my doctors at Kaiser are Asian-American, and they’re good doctors, although other aspects of Kaiser’s managed care system, whose rules are driven by accountants and attorneys, are far less satisfying to me. Of the restaurants I frequent, most are Middle Eastern, if you include in that category Afghani and Ethiopian. I know no Somalis personally, but they’re plentiful in the neighborhoods along Grand Avenue, and seem like pleasant, peaceful people, just trying to get along during a perilous time for them, if not for all of us. I almost dare not even say that I have always had close Black friends in Oakland: why give bait to the haters who will use that statement against me? But then, some people are always hankering for a fight, and they are best avoided.
So, such a wonderful place, Oakland. If only we could rid ourselves of the racial politics, we might actually be able to all get along (to paraphrase Rodney King), and witness our city, mirabile dictu, become the majestic urban, and human, work of art it used to be, and can be again.
Steve Heimoff