The rumble of shuffling mahjong tiles filled the air in Chinatowns across the United States in the 1920s. Before even seeing the game, you could hear it being played in apartment buildings, association halls, and back rooms of general stores. You might assume that most Chinese Americans were already familiar with mahjong long before the colorful, complex tile game hooked the broader American public, but the opposite is true: Before the early 20th century, mahjong was not a widespread part of Chinese culture, particularly in the regions from which most immigrants to the U.S. hailed.

Many Chinese Americans began playing the game in the 1920s, swept up in an enormous international fad. But the game fast became a fixture in their communities—a versatile pastime that, through the sounds and the language of gameplay, and through its visual presence in public places and in private homes, helped create spaces for a new, shared Chinese American experience.

Courtesans and their clients play mahjong in Shanghai, likely on a river “flower boat” at the turn of the 20th century, when both mahjong and courtesan culture had become increasingly pervasive in the city. Image from R. Barz, Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

Mahjong first evolved as a gambling game in the area around Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1800s. By the turn of the century, it was played mostly by men for both high and low stakes in Shanghai’s courtesan halls, before it swept the Empress Dowager Cixi’s Beijing court in the last years of her reign. After World War I, mahjong became popular in Shanghai’s social clubs thanks to a rising class of Chinese intermediaries and the growing number of Americans who frequented these clubs. The rhythms of the game, its mix of luck and strategy, and the satisfaction of the tiles’ heft and feel propelled its spread. Mahjong tables were settings for forging friendships, building community, or demonstrating power moves of posturing and strategy. A number of these players—most famously a Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock who brought mahjong to California in 1922—marketed the game in the U.S., promoting it as an exciting and “exotic” new pastime. It took off like wildfire. Soon the most elite Americans, from President and First Lady Harding to Hollywood celebrities, were playing mahjong, as were throngs of fans in Europe, Japan, Australia, elsewhere in China, and beyond. It was never only a game for the wealthy, however, as players from across the social spectrum—and across lines of gender, race, and region—embraced the game.

Mahjong came to be known as “the national game of China,” both in China and abroad, in the context of the global fad, which advertised the game as an exclusive pastime of the ancient Chinese court. In Chinatowns, many people knew that wasn’t the case; if Chinese immigrants had heard of mahjong at all, they tended to associate it with women of ill repute. But, as its image changed in China and as American society adopted the game, respectable and relatively well-off merchant families began to welcome mahjong into their homes. As white Americans engaged with the game for its glamorous appeal, Chinese Americans began to consider mahjong as a tie to their heritage, even if it was not yet rooted in family traditions or homeland memories of most players.

When mahjong’s worldwide heyday came to an end at the close of the 1920s, people continued playing in Chinatowns, where communities were undergoing significant change. At the time, Chinese immigrants and second-generation Chinese Americans were finding a tenuous sort of acceptance in the United States as anti-Asian discourse shifted its focus to Japanese Americans and China was seen as an increasingly sympathetic and struggling nation. But Chinese Americans did not achieve equality. Seen as perpetual foreigners, they remained barred from most forms of employment and routes to upward mobility, even after many in the second generation earned high school diplomas and college degrees. Struggling during the Great Depression, Chinese American merchants sought to make money by attracting tourists to their neighborhoods. They erected commercial facades that featured now-iconic curving pagoda rooflines, bright colors, and neon “chop suey” signs—all designed to appeal to outsiders.

A gambling hall in Locke, a historic Chinatown in the Sacramento Delta, featured games of chance for a mostly male clientele. In a more social area in the back of the hall, a square table situated mahjong in a crossover space where mahjong could be played for high or low stakes.
Image courtesy of Annelise Heinz.

But behind their flashy exteriors, Chinatowns functioned as economic and cultural hubs that drew Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans from surrounding regions. And within Chinatowns’ private and civic spaces—homes, shops, gambling halls, and association halls—mahjong helped Chinese Americans further community. For the men, mahjong games provided relaxation, fraternal bonding, or the addictive escapism of gambling. Women and younger people played mahjong too, in different places and different ways. Women played primarily in low-stakes gatherings, where mahjong provided a vital thread of connection. Because many older immigrant women retained traditional standards of respectability by staying indoors much of the time, many played mahjong with relatives or other women in shared home spaces. Women who worked in garment factories sometimes paused to play onsite after the machines stopped at the end of a long day. Meanwhile, Chinese American young people played the game with their friends in university Chinese student associations.

Mahjong became a rare intergenerational activity in Chinese American communities. Chinese American families of the time experienced a great deal of generational conflict, an outgrowth of the broader youth rebellions in America and China, and also the result of a demographic shift shaped by immigration policy. Among Chinese Americans, older Chinese-born residents had long outnumbered American-born young adults, but by 1920 the balance had flipped, because of exclusion laws that prevented most immigration from China (and later other Asian countries as well). Many of this American-born generation, especially 1920s young adults, felt pressured to choose between being Chinese or being American. Mahjong, however, could be both. It was generationally specific (the kind of activity shared with college friends) and at the same time, offered a bridge between generations (a game to play when visiting grandparents). During Chinese New Year, a time of homecoming when gambling is traditionally seen as bringing good luck, mahjong fit right in as a game that could be played among family members for very low stakes.

Mahjong defined cultural space when it crossed outside Chinatown boundaries, too. In her memoir Sweet Bamboo, the path-breaking Chinese American reporter Louise Leung Larson wrote of the time during the 1920s when her father—a successful Los Angeles herbalist—brought a mahjong set to a family outing on the beach. Louise was an avid mahjong player, but she recalled that she didn’t want to play that day because she realized the game highlighted her Chinese American otherness, reinforcing a sense of difference and exclusion. “We got stared at enough, without playing mahjong in public,” she later explained. Indeed, in 1923, the Chicago Tribune featured a story of “real Chinese actually playing Mahjong,” spotted outside of Chinatown.

Inside Chinatowns, though, the click of the tiles created a particularly resonant sense of a Chinese—and a Chinese American—space. When players shuffled the tiles, the clattering rumble could echo down alleyways. Walking along Chinatown’s sidewalks, one observer noted, a visitor could hear “mahjong pieces click crisply and the voluble conversation of the excited players” through open windows.

Chinese American communities have transformed since immigration reform in the mid-1960s ended the categorical exclusion of Asian immigrants. As the game has continued to evolve and change across Asia, fostering unique Filipino, Japanese, and Vietnamese mahjong cultures in addition to regional Chinese variations, Asian American mahjong cultures have deepened and diversified. Lunar New Year remains a time when families play together, and community centers host regular games among retirees. When the 2018 blockbuster film Crazy Rich Asians featured a pivotal mahjong scene, it helped reinvigorate a younger generation’s interest in the game and attached it once again to cosmopolitan glamor. A century after mahjong catapulted to global fame, its status as a game that could be both American and Chinese, and its unusual ability to bridge multiple kinds of social spaces across gender and generational divides, still serves a unique purpose in creating a larger sense of Chinese American—and now Asian American—ethnicity.

The post How Mahjong Laid Tiles for Chinese America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The anti-Asian violence was spurred on by widespread rhetoric projecting blame for the COVID-19 pandemic onto China and people of Asian descent. But the stigmatization of Chinese immigrants as a threat to public health and safety has a long history in the United States. It emerges from an entrenched mode of racism that targets not only Chinese bodies, but Chinese air.

What do I mean by “Chinese air”?

Answering that requires returning to the epidemic of violence that swept the West after Chinese immigrants began settling in the U.S. in the 19th century. White Americans refused to live in proximity with Chinese settlements—literally, they refused to breathe the same air. The consequences were deadly. A mob massacred 19 Chinese men in Los Angeles in 1871, and anti-Chinese race riots erupted in cities such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle. Living on the periphery was no protection. As urban travelers in the West rode railroads built by Chinese migrants to take in the pure air of nature resorts, more than 100 violent purges forced Chinese immigrants out of rural settlements and into overcrowded, poorly ventilated accommodations in urban Chinatowns.

At the time, many scientists didn’t understand that microbes spread disease. Instead, they believed that illness was transmitted through poisonous air or miasma and endorsed changes to urban planning and sanitation in their efforts to sustain public health. Anti-Chinese agitators quickly adapted miasma theory as a tool in their campaign. Even after germ theory gained acceptance in the 1880s, they stigmatized Chinese air and smells, associating overcrowded spaces, laboring bodies, opium smoke, culinary odors, and incense in several urban Chinatowns with disease.

An image published in The Wasp magazine depicting Cubic Air Law arrests—Chinese men being moved out of a crowded apartment into even more crowded jails. Courtesy of public domain.

As the historian Nayan Shah has documented, 19th-century San Francisco public health officials regularly blamed Chinatown for the city’s recurring outbreaks of diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and bubonic plague. In response to the 1868 smallpox epidemic and working-class agitation against the Chinese, the city’s Board of Supervisors passed the Cubic Air Ordinance in 1870, requiring that dwellings contain at least 500 “cubic feet of air” per adult resident. This law was enforced exclusively against Chinese people, and critics noted that the city detained Chinese immigrants in jails that were much more overcrowded than their homes. The Cubic Air Ordinance thus targeted Chinese people not only as foreign bodies, but as deviant assemblages of bodies and air.

Sanitation became a common pretext for disciplining and displacing Chinese residents. In 1903, the physician Woods Hutchinson praised San Francisco’s health officials for adopting aggressive cleaning methods: “The seven and thirty separate smells of Chinatown have all been drowned in one grand olfactory delirium of chloride of lime and carbolic acid. Never was Chinatown so free from vermin.” Nevertheless, Hutchinson went on to declare that Chinatown “can never be cleaned except by fire.” He may have had in mind a fire that burned down 4,000 homes in Honolulu’s Chinatown, permanently displacing many residents—a conflagration that started when Honolulu’s Board of Health burned down buildings to control an outbreak of bubonic plague.

Hutchinson’s fantasy for San Francisco nearly came true in 1906. In the wake of the city’s devastating earthquake and fire, officials proposed relocating its Chinese community from the burned-out but centrally located Chinatown to far-flung Hunter’s Point. This plan, which was eventually stopped after intervention from China’s consul-general, presumed that the Chinese community would not be out of place amid the latter neighborhood’s slaughterhouses and industrial fumes.

On a smaller scale, American nuisance charges have also posited Chinese air as an offense to public well-being. In the 1880s, complaints about the smell of drying squid shut down a thriving Chinese community of squid fishermen in Monterey, California. More recently, similar protests have been lodged against Asian restaurants and food manufacturers, including the Sriracha sauce factory in Irwindale, California. In a 1999 case in Pennsylvania, grease smells from Wok’s Chinese Restaurant were deemed “noxious” even though, the defendant noted, they were comparable to the smell of burning wood from a nearby pizza restaurant.

An 1882 cartoon from The Wasp of disease figures hovering over San Francisco. The LEPROSY figure (right) holds a strand of smoke that says “CHINA TOWN”. Courtesy of public domain.

The notion of Chinese miasmas has had support from respected academics. In the 1890 essay “Mongolianism in America,” the historian and ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft (for whom UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is named) wrote that he found it difficult to breathe when he walked through the crowded alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown. “Faces swarm at every door, inhaling poison, exhaling worse,” he claimed. Bancroft never considered that he might be experiencing anxiety, triggered by his own discomfort with something unfamiliar. Instead, he speculated “whether a Chinaman’s lungs are not formed on a different principle from ours … He certainly seems to thrive in stench where others would suffocate.” Attributing Chinatown’s poor air quality to cultural and biological differences, so-called experts like Bancroft drew attention away from the forces of mob violence, poverty, social marginalization, and housing inequity that had pushed Chinese immigrants into substandard living conditions.

Because culture plays a powerful role in shaping olfactory responses, I have been studying how American narratives spread—and sometimes challenge—these ideas about Chinese air. Stories about Chinese stench date back to the first decades of Chinese immigration. In the 1860s, Mark Twain wrote about a San Francisco detective who could smell a chicken feather from a crime scene and “tell which block in Sacramento street the Chinaman lives in who committed it.”

The Yellow Peril has a smell in Frank Norris’s novel Moran of the Lady Letty, in which a white woman is held captive by a crew of reeking Chinese pirates. In Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Fu Manchu, published in 1913, the first Asiatic supervillain attacks detectives with a mysterious poison gas, which leaves “no clew-remaining—except the smell.” By the time Raymond Chandler wrote that a character “had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman,” “Chinese” had become a metaphor for stench.

Edith Maude Eaton, a mixed-race Canadian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has been called the mother of Asian American literature, fought this pattern of olfactory stereotyping in her stories about domestic life in several urban Chinatowns. Writing under the pen-name Sui Sin Far (“Chinese water flower”) and titling her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance, she associated Chinese immigrants with pleasant smells.

When they could afford to, Eaton suggested, Chinese immigrants preferred a cool and fragrant atmosphere: “After the heat and dust and unsavoriness of the highways and byways of Chinatown, the young reporter who had been sent to find a story, had stepped across the threshold of a cool, deep room, fragrant with the odor of dried lilies and sandalwood, and found Pan.” Where the natural aromas of lilies and sandalwood indicate the careful housekeeping of the Chinese family, the smell of the streets was the result of the city’s failure—or refusal—to fulfill its responsibility of cleaning Chinatown’s streets.

The contemporary artist Anicka Yi took a more direct approach to olfactory racism in her 2017 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, Life is Cheap. The first installation consisted of three gas canisters emitting a blend of odors sourced from both a colony of ants and from Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown. The main gallery featured two dioramas Yi created by using visually captivating bacterial cultures sourced from the same neighborhoods, and the same colony of ants inhabiting an enlarged circuitboard. The piece is a meditation on Asian stereotypes, and Western dependence on inexpensive Asian imports.

Not unlike Fu Manchu’s gas attack, the scents Yi works with—which she describes as vegetal, floral, citrusy, and meaty—insidiously penetrate the bodies of visitors. But the museum setting recasts the smells of Asian neighborhoods as an unusual olfactory experience, something to be sought after rather than avoided. Yi hints that inhaling the scents of Chinatown, Koreatown, and ants might predispose her audience to perceive their connections with the beautiful forms presented in her living dioramas.

Life is Cheap asks how smells usually thought of as foreign are already part of us, whether as bacteria inhabiting our bodies or as fumes emitted in the course of producing our computers and phones. After all, China’s industry and urban development are intimately connected with the U.S. addiction to cheap technology.

And, like the perceived unsavoriness of Chinatown streets, the conditions that promote COVID-19 are part of something much bigger than a wet market in Wuhan. Chinese air is not made in China, it is an exhalation of the global economy.

The post America’s Anti-Chinese Bigotry Has a Very Old Stench appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Her unnecessary death is more than a tragedy, or another instance of bad judgment by the cops. Her shooting has become an all-but-official emblem of California’s most populous city.

That’s because it’s the celebrated final scene of the 1974 film Chinatown.

Every American municipality has suffered from police or state violence, and most cities cope by ignoring or forgetting such sins against their own citizens. But Los Angeles’ relationship with such violence is entirely different. Our city has long embraced, through culture and image, its own history of police corruption and official violence.

While examples of this perverse embrace are legion, from the fictions of films like L.A. Confidential to the reality of the Rodney King video, few documents have maintained so long a hold on Angelenos as Chinatown. In the latest chapter, this month Ben Affleck was tapped to direct a film version of author Sam Wasson’s latest book, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, about the making of Chinatown and especially, the filming of that ending.

That final scene’s famous coda—“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”—warned private detective Jake Gittes, the victim’s lover, not to protest the police execution he’d just witnessed. Ever since, that same phrase has been aimed at Angelenos naïve enough to seek justice in a town so thoroughly unjust.

But after months of protests for social justice and against police misconduct across Southern California and around the world, that cinematic warning needs reconsideration. By constantly reproducing our official horrors as news and entertainment, have we Angelenos shed the light on police abuses, or merely embedded them more deeply in our region’s collective sense of identity? When you cling so long to the most toxic of your local realities, can you ever let them go?

That’s why achieving true justice will be so much harder here. For Los Angeles, ending racism and police abuse demands more than the transformation of governance systems—it requires forging a new sense of identity, free of the cynicism and powerlessness embodied in that Chinatown ending.

That, in turn, requires a new narrative of Los Angeles. And the best attempt at such a narrative comes courtesy of the best L.A. book of the 21st century to date, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging (1771-1965), by the UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández.

Her brutal and revisionist 2017 history reveals L.A. as a pioneer in the caging and incarcerating of people for more than two centuries. (The first act of governance in L.A. when it became part of the U.S. was not a public vote but the hiring of a jailer.) Such a book, with such a title, may not sound like a beacon of hope, but it does show a path to a post-Chinatown Los Angeles.

That path starts with understanding that Los Angeles’s creativity has often been expressed through its cruelty. In the 19th century, the city used public order charges to justify incarcerating native peoples, and auctioning off their labor to employers. Between the 1880s and 1910, the city exploited the concept of vagrancy to incarcerate poor white men labeled “hoboes” and assign them to chain gangs to cut roads, including Sunset Boulevard.

Lytle Hernández recounts how L.A.—with an assist from other Californians, notably Congressman Thomas Geary of Santa Rosa—helped invent the concept of immigration detention, in the service of incarcerating and deporting L.A.’s Chinese laborers. In the early 20th century, L.A. was an innovator in incarcerating Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, and in criminalizing unauthorized border crossings.

In the middle of the 20th century, L.A. used legal tools to confine much of the largest African American population west of the Mississippi to South L.A., and to exploit vice laws to incarcerate Black people, thus creating America’s largest jail system by the early 1950s. Lytle Hernández shows how the 1965 Watts riots were really a rebellion against this systematic caging, and also how they inspired a backlash and the mass incarceration of the late 20th century.

L.A.’s craze for caging is rooted in the fact that we are from other places, and thus a society of settlers, argues Lytle Hernández. Such societies practice “settler colonialism [and] strive to block, erase, or remove racialized outsiders from their claimed territory.” Settler societies, she adds, also create fantasies to justify their needs to exploit or remove these outsiders.

All this may sound very Chinatown. Indeed, Wasson, in his new book on the film, writes that the concluding scene creates a “temporal Sisyphean circle” that implies “the failure to mitigate incomprehensible trauma” and “emotional incarceration.” He then recounts how the director Roman Polanski rejected screenwriter Robert Towne’s original ending, in which the mother, Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway), would kill her abusive father, earning herself a prison sentence but protecting her daughter.

“I felt this was too romantic,” Polanski recounts in Wasson’s book. “Too much of a happy ending.”

Polanski insisted that the ending be a “total tragedy.” The Polish director was an expert on the subject—his pregnant mother had been killed by the Nazis, and his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, had been murdered in Los Angeles in 1969. In real life, the bad guys win, and catastrophe and violence triumph, Polanski told Towne. The ending ultimately represented the director’s fatalism, and his distrust of Los Angeles. (Four years after the film, Polanski would be indicted for raping a 13-year-old girl in L.A., and would flee to Europe, where he remains to this day, a fugitive from the caging-mad city he helped define.)

What makes Lytle Hernández’s work groundbreaking is that she rejects the fatalism of Polanski and so many other L.A. chroniclers. Digging deep, she unearths a “rebel archive” of Angelenos who resisted caging and violence—and even triumphed over it. Among the most compelling is Pedro J. González, host of one of Southern California’s first Spanish radio broadcasts, who advocated for justice and immigrants despite his own unjust incarceration.

Her book suggests that L.A.’s elite reforms of criminal justice have never been enough to counter L.A.’s obsession with controlling people through incarceration. The LAPD was one of the nation’s most racially diverse police forces by the 1930s, she notes, but no less brutal. And L.A. County’s first African American deputy sheriff, Julius Boyd Loving, was also one of its most dedicated practitioners of unjust incarceration.

Instead, Los Angeles needs a deeper change in its culture and mindset, a determination that it can change its identity, and in the process stop police violence and the caging of people.

“In Los Angeles today, many rebels are hard at work dismantling the nation’s penal core,” Lytle Hernández wrote back in 2017. “They are talking about land. They are refusing removal. They are resisting deportation. They are rejecting erasure. They are fighting the beatings and killings. What will come of their fierce and dedicated labors, no one knows.”

Perhaps now, finally, we can escape the cage of Chinatown.

The post Can L.A. Finally Forget the Fatalism of <i>Chinatown</i>? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles has a long history of water deceptions, a point made famously by Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir film. But the massive self-sabotage of the city’s latest scheme is a real doozy. L.A.—from elected officials to environmentalists—has convinced itself of the hokum that it has all the water it needs.

Let me be clear: L.A. needs to produce much more of its own water for its long-term resilience and security. And leading Angelenos are right to ramp up stormwater capture, groundwater clean-up, recycling, and conservation so that more L.A. water is local.

But the idea currently being sold by many elites—that L.A. can become completely self-sufficient on water—is a fantasy. Just meeting more reasonable goals—for L.A. to get half of its water from local sources—may prove exceedingly difficult and costly.

Which makes L.A.’s current deluge of self-deception dangerous. Leading Angelenos are now broadcasting statewide the message that L.A. can handle its own water needs—at a moment when the state is debating a vital plan to shore up a crucial piece of the region’s water supply: the California Delta.

That proposal would construct one or two tunnels to carry Sacramento River water under the Delta (which is faltering environmentally) to the Central Valley and Southern California. The project, estimated to cost anywhere from $10 to $30 billion, wouldn’t add to the water supply, but it would protect the approximately 30 percent of L.A. water that now runs through the Delta.

Those of you in other parts of the state may have different opinions on the tunnels, but the project should be a no-brainer for a Southern California that runs on imported water. So for city officials in Los Angeles to suggest that the tunnels are unnecessary because Southern California doesn’t need imports, as they are now doing, is akin to the city of Paris repudiating the necessity of romance and baguettes. It is an unthinkable attack on the lifeblood of one’s own city.

But no one is thinking clearly in L.A. when it comes to water. Instead, the city, under Mayor Eric Garcetti—a smooth-talking optimist full of plans and presidential ambition—has reached a point where it believes it can make transformational changes without too much trouble.

Such triumphalism is rooted in the city’s current winning streak. In recent years, L.A. has won the 2028 Olympics, rebuilt its once-decaying schools, revived South L.A., transformed its downtown into a major urban center, embarked on the massive expansion of its transit system, and devoted major new resources to housing the homeless.

But water is different, and all that winning seems to have gone to our heads. The best example of over-the-top water triumphalism was a recent L.A. Daily News op-ed by Garcetti. First he framed his drive for water self-sufficiency as the seizing of a “Mulholland moment,” a strange choice given that William Mulholland helped usher in the water imports that Garcetti now rejects.

Then the mayor went completely off the deep end, blasting the Delta tunnels that are proposed to serve L.A. as somehow unnecessary, even detrimental to the dream of L.A. self-sufficiency, writing: “We will never be able to solve our water needs if we have tunnel vision.” Finally, in a bang-your-head-against-the-wall declaration, he wrote of a city that gets more than 70 percent of its water from elsewhere: “I’m often asked if we have enough water in Los Angeles for our future. And I always answer that we have plenty of water.”

That claim, while laughable, shows how the nature of Los Angeles water cons has changed. In Polanski’s film, water was so vital to the city that those who could bring it here could get away with anything. In our contemporary version of Chinatown, our sustainability pretensions are so important that those who uphold them can get away with anything, even taking positions that undermine the water supply.

Garcetti isn’t alone in his hubris. Last week, the L.A. City Council voted 13-0 to oppose a staged plan for the tunnels if it ends up costing too much. That vote reflects fears of local environmental and consumer groups like the Food & Water Coalition and Consumer Watchdog that have used the myth of self-sufficiency to oppose the tunnels. In a show of force, these groups have campaigned for the firing of the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s thoughtful ratepayer advocate, Frederick H. Pickel, for the crime of telling the truth—that L.A. could afford the water that the Delta tunnels would bring.

Of course, interest groups and politicians aren’t the only Angelenos selling fantasies of self-sufficiency. UCLA has issued a Grand Challenge that includes many smart ideas for creating more local water, but also leans into the self-sufficiency myth, setting out the goal of transitioning L.A. County to “100 percent local water” by 2050. The challenge’s leader, the brilliant and usually sober-minded environmentalist Mark Gold, embraced the madness with a Los Angeles Times piece, titled “Let’s Go Local on Water,” that touted “complete water self-sufficiency.”

Gold at least acknowledged that a real transition to local water would be extremely costly. Other Angelenos who oppose the Delta tunnels prefer to talk about the tunnels’ high sticker price and how it would get passed on to ratepayers and property taxpayers. But the truth—a dangerous thing to utter in Los Angeles—is that tunnels would be far cheaper than all the expensive new and upgraded infrastructure needed to make Southern California’s water more local. (And that cost of local water would hurt households, which, for example, would pay an estimated 12 times more for stormwater than for tunnel water).

And the tunnels are a real project. L.A.’s various self-sufficiency water plans never really explain how such a transformation would be paid for. And lately, L.A.’s water has gotten less local. The 2012-2016 drought increased L.A.’s reliance on water imports, and the city’s own data show it using more from both the Delta and the Colorado River.

The combination of that greater dependence on imports—and L.A.’s statement that it doesn’t need them—is dangerous. Why should other parts of the state send water to us if our leaders say we don’t really need it?

So, my fellow Californians, especially those who are water-rich, I would like to apologize here for Angelenos’ lack of gratitude for the water that comes from your communities to ours. I wish I could promise you that we Angelenos are going to come to our senses, and cool the water self-sufficiency rhetoric while the state debates the tunnels.

But c’mon, Jake, you know what town this is.

The post L.A. Is Drowning in Its Own Water Pretensions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fueled by donations from an artist who is a member of the wealthy Annenberg family, a host of California institutions—magazines, newspapers, journals, libraries, museums, studios, schools, and nonprofits—have produced more stories, photos, art, scholarship, exhibits, events, and archival projects on the aqueduct than a single Angeleno could process in, well, a century. And while much of the work is beautifully done, a lot of it also reinforces the nonsense that makes it so hard for Los Angeles to reckon with its problems.

The biggest currents in the flood of commentary are these: that the aqueduct is a singular, only-in-L.A. engineering accomplishment; that it was responsible for the creation of the city; and that it was the city’s original sin, committed by a few powerful people who held L.A. in their sway. All of this new commentary is seasoned with the spice of self-congratulation over finally having a conversation about water after 100 years of supposedly ignoring it.

It’s not just that all of this is wrong. (Has there ever been a time when L.A. wasn’t talking about water?) It’s that it all reeks of the disease that might be called “Los Angeles exceptionalism,” the notion that this is a place different from all the rest, as if skullduggery or deception or imported water makes L.A. unique.

For the record, imported water has been a feature of cities since Roman times. Even places wetter than L.A. take the water of others. New York built its first two aqueducts in the 19th century, decades before the L.A. Aqueduct. San Francisco, for all its environmental self-regard, still relies on water taken from the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, part of a project that began the same year that the L.A. Aqueduct opened.

Even if you think that Los Angeles’ treatment of the communities in the Owens Valley was extraordinarily sinful, it wasn’t our original sin. The city had been growing rapidly for more than 30 years before the aqueduct, and that growth was—and I use this word pointedly—natural. This place, with fine weather and rivers, was always well-suited to people (the Indians prospered here before the missionaries, the real original sinners, showed up). And early-20th-century L.A.—oil-rich with its low land prices and embrace of scientific innovation and higher education—was a good place for ambitious people to be.

It was the pressure and reality of that growth—not some conspiracy of powerful Angelenos—that led L.A. to look for water elsewhere. L.A. didn’t act alone or extra-legally. The federal government approved the project. If L.A. hadn’t built an aqueduct into the Eastern Sierra, we would have gone elsewhere—as we eventually did.

So why do we cling to this narrative of ourselves as sinful water thieves who built a city in a desert (which is in fact not a desert)? Quite simply, we Angelenos love the idea of ourselves as rogues. Living in a place so relentlessly bright and sunny isn’t a sexy narrative, so we make ourselves the anti-heroes of our own story. We even celebrate the gangster Mickey Cohen as a city father.

And we adore the movie Chinatown, in which L.A. (as depicted by screenwriter Robert Towne) is a fallen, corrupt place held in incestuous sway by one powerful figure (spoiler alert: it’s John Huston’s Noah Cross) who fools the public in order to bring water to the San Fernando Valley, where he secretly controls land. The movie’s central narrative is so well known that virtually all of today’s L.A. Aqueduct remembrances reference it.

For years, historians and journalists have put Chinatown in context by saying, lazily, that the historical particulars of the movie are mostly wrong but that it gets at a larger truth about L.A. and its water. But that supposed larger truth—that L.A.’s expansion was a conspiracy of a few powerful people—is misleading at best.

L.A.’s real modern history is distinguished not by conspiracy or corruption—but by a Progressive devotion to anti-corruption and a fear of concentrated power. This is the land of endless commissions, of weak mayors, of nonpartisan elections, and of sidelined political parties. Much of our growth was unplanned, and it was always hard to get big things done. The aqueduct, as a public project successfully completed, should be celebrated—but more as exception than rule.

The self-appointed civic leaders of Los Angeles have always been good at puffing themselves up—and bad at following through on their grand plans. This is a city full of Wizards—of Oz. And our corruption has often been more pathetic than powerful. It’s fitting that this month’s aqueduct centennial coincides with news reports that a state senator from L.A. County, Ron Calderon, took $88,000 in bribes—but was unable to deliver on the legislation he allegedly promised to those giving the bribes.

Of course, it is the banality of L.A. civic life that makes the conspiracy theories and cinematic narratives so powerful. We’d rather believe in shadowy power than reckon with the fact that no one is in charge. The Chinatown narrative—it’s the powerful guy’s fault—absolves us not only of blame for L.A.’s problems but also of responsibility for solving them.

The ostensible reason for all this month’s aqueduct remembrances is that they are supposed to spark a conversation about what we need to do to use water wisely and build a brighter future. But telling the story as if it’s out of Chinatown, with L.A. conceived in sin and built by a few powerful people, doesn’t serve this purpose. You don’t spur people to action by telling them that the fix is always in.

The bigger question is this: Can L.A. ever stop thinking of itself as an exceptionally unnatural or corrupt or fallen place? You can try to debunk the conspiracy theories. You can try to argue that we have the power to write our own history, just as we did in the past. You can try to convince people that we’ll never get our act together as long as we believe that a few powerful people control everything. You can … Ah, forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

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