a love letter to los angeles
nobody puts baby in a corner...
I write this no more than 10 miles from the epicenter of the devastating Eaton Fire, one of several wildfires that have ravaged Greater Los Angeles over the past several days.
The air is thick with ash, but it’s the palpable grief and sense of loss that weigh heaviest. My social media feed is flooded with GoFundMe pleas. Each post—every sweet family photo paired with the heartbreaking words, “Help X, who has lost everything…”—feels like a gut punch. I wish I could print money and help everyone. The omnipresent pit in my stomach is a grim reminder that, had the wind shifted, one of those pleas could have been for me and my family.
I have been in a love affair with L.A. for as long as I can remember. As the child of immigrants, “home” was always a fraught concept. I inherited my parents’ feelings of displacement, growing up homesick for a country I’d never lived in. I belonged neither there nor here. Yet Los Angeles embraced me. It’s the only home I’ve truly known. Perhaps it’s the city’s open fault lines—both literal and figurative—that make it a haven for millions. If you can navigate the cracks, you can find your place.
The city is rightly known as a collection of suburbs and is just one of the reasons my beloved Los Angeles has long been a magnet for haters. I cringed but somewhat understood when out-of-town visitors professed their preference for “Frisco.” L.A. can be an arrogant mistress, making herself impalpable, hard to know, with no city center, hardline perimeters or antiquity. Yet in this sprawl, I watched my parents build their lives and their business—Southern California real estate, ironically—brick by literal brick. I’m convinced that their extraordinary life path could not have been replicated in any other city in the world but the City of Angels.
Just weeks before the fires, I had been contemplating a piece titled Do You Feel Settled Where You Live? It’s an interesting question because, even after 25 years in my particular community, my answer is complicated. The suburb where I’ve spent my adult life feels like the land that time forgot—strangely fuddy-duddy. When my husband and I moved here, we thought its sleepy charm and distance from Hollywood’s materialism made it the perfect place to raise a family.
Yet, along with that came an ancient and rigid topography of wealth, hierarchy and privilege with firm lines around who belongs and who is a guest and tribal rituals that are difficult to comprehend. Here, the energy devoted to preserving the status quo can make dissent feel like “conversational phlegm”, as the writer Maria Semple so aptly put it.
But every community has its quirks. And what is that old adage, it’s when you almost lose something that you realize how precious it is. Our cup runneth over and over when it comes to compassion and giving in my community. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
In the wake of the fires, there are loads of people worldwide sharing their hot takes on the city, on how it is an improbable oasis sitting on a time bomb of disaster. But you can’t really know this place unless you know it from the inside out. How could an outsider possibly know that the anthem of Los Angeles is the buzz of a gardener’s leaf blower in a heady duet with the PISH PISH PISH of an automated sprinkler? It’s how we know it’s daytime and, sometimes, how we know we are alive. To be an Angeleno is to be able to straddle the whimsical and the absurd as well as the culture of unabashed hustle.
I expect that questions and consternation will linger for some time: how are we are on the cusp of an AI-fueled, sci-fi future and yet we cannot protect the very earth we stand on? How can we mobilize advanced weaponry to fight wars on foreign shores in a matter of moments but not have water in our fire hydrants? How do we square celebrities and people whose homes have appeared in Architectural Digest launching GoFundMes alongside domestic workers, janitors and gardeners? How will we protect the mental health of our young people, still barely recovered from Covid? Who are the clever minds behind the app Watch Duty and when can we stop looking at it every five seconds?
I was raised in an extremely superstitious household. The concept of the Evil Eye loomed (and looms) large. Don’t talk too much about yourself, don’t make a big deal, don’t share your dreams/plans/ideas/successes—or the Evil Eye will spank you back to humility. As strange as it sounds, there are days in this city that are so remarkably beautiful where it screams at the tops of its lungs—I AM A DREAM FACTORY! It alarms me. Stop showing off! I want to say. But nobody puts baby in a corner. And beauty and disaster don’t have a cause and effect relationship. At least, I want to believe they don’t.
Stay hopeful, fellow citizens, we’ll be back…
If you are able to help, here are a few worthy causes among many:
Xo -P
Instagram: @priyaadesai1
Always enjoy reading. Beautifully said. My heart aches for my home of 20 years. More than a thousand miles away, I feel the heaviness. I have no doubt it will be "back" and better than ever.