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California Today: A Mayor for a City in Transition
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Good morning.
Our introduction today comes from Thomas Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times.
Just about every visitor to San Francisco knows Alcatraz. Many fewer know Angel Island, the verdant dot in the Bay where around 175,000 immigrants from China were detained, in some cases for years, during the first part of the 1900s.
Angel Island was an immigration station almost exclusively used for immigrants from China. It was a symbol of the many forms of discrimination that the Chinese endured in America during the early waves of migration, a time when they played such a critical role in the development of the American West, the construction of the railroads being the most famous example.
Isolated in the ghetto of Chinatown for decades, it was not until 1994 — almost a century and a half after Chinese people arrived in large numbers for the Gold Rush — that a Chinese-American, Mabel Teng, was directly elected to citywide office in San Francisco, according to David Lee, a political science lecturer at San Francisco State University.
The death of San Francisco mayor, Edwin M. Lee, on Tuesday, was a coda in the belated but successful attainment of Chinese political power in the city. Today both members of the State Assembly representing San Francisco are of Chinese descent, as are members of the board of supervisors and many city officials.
Mr. Lee’s ascension as mayor in 2011 was a landmark achievement for the Chinese community.
“The Chinese were never fully American, never fully part of San Francisco — that is until Ed Lee became mayor,” said Mr. Lee of San Francisco State, who is not related. “It was a symbol of true political acceptance.”
Mr. Lee met the mayor at a holiday party last week and had what in hindsight was a prescient conversation. The mayor voiced his concern that the younger generation of Chinese Americans were not getting involved in politics and that the older generation was leaving the scene, including Rose Pak, the political boss of Chinatown who died last year.
“His concern was the passing of the torch,” Mr. Lee said. “And then he passed away. It was kind of a cosmic message.”
California Online
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
• Who will replace Ed Lee? Mr. Lee’s death complicated an already crowded struggle to determine the next mayor. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• High housing prices, earthquakes and wildfires: Is California worth it? Some people are leaving. The Grapes of Wrath in Reverse. [The New York Times]
• The fire that forced the evacuation of Bel Air in Los Angeles was caused by a cooking fire at a homeless camp. For all the wealth in the area, homeless people have long camped out under the 405 freeway. [The New York Times]
• Fixing California’s dams will cost an estimated $5 billion. The Sacramento Bee editorial board asks: “Can we afford not to spend it?” [Sacramento Bee]
• Senator Kamala Harris, on the Mention List of presidential candidates, calls for net neutrality. “What the Trump administration proposes is a big win for multi-billion-dollar broadband companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.” [Cosmopolitan]
• Are wildfires in the West inevitable? A New York Times review of two books which explore why they happen, and who, or what, is at fault. [The New York Times]
• Some of the best boxers in the nation are teenage girls from the Central Valley. It’s part of a tradition that “stretches back before California was a state.” [The California Sunday Magazine]
• We got the beat. A musical devoted to The Go-Go’s — “Head over Heels” — opens in San Francisco before heading for Broadway. It’s “a seemingly improbable musical mash-up of the group’s 20th-century pop songs with a 16th-century prose romance.” [The New York Times]
• Los Angeles is moving away from using court-ordered injunctions to control gang members. It marks a sharp cutback in a crime fighting tool once hailed as the answer to the city’s violent street gangs. [Los Angeles Times]
• The epic drought that ended last year just keeps taking a toll on California. Nearly 2 million trees died every month over the past 13 months, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The drought left them vulnerable to bark beetle attack. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• Meryl Streep says that if there were more women in power in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein’s behavior would never have been tolerated. “If the boards of the company were half female, there wouldn’t ever have been payoffs to anybody.” [Buzzfeed]
• A co-owner of “The Hearth and Hound” on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a new Los Angeles restaurant, is the latest figure to face sexual harassment allegations. [The New York Times]
And Finally …
You’ve never heard of the California Hall of Fame?
Well it inducted its 11th class of honorees the other night at a ceremony at the California Museum in Sacramento. Truth be told, the event doesn’t quite have the panache of the Academy Awards, but there was a red carpet, a rope-line holding back camera crews and autograph seekers. Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, hung medals around the honorees in the hourlong ceremony in a small auditorium inside.
The California Hall of Fame was established in 2006 by Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor, and Maria Shriver, who was then his wife, to honor Californians of distinction from all walks of life. In other words, not just celebrities.
So yes, Steven Spielberg was there. So was Lucille Ball’s granddaughter, accepting the award for her late grandmother, and Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony. But the crowd and the television correspondents seemed just as excited to spot Mario J. Molina, the atmospheric scientist who helped discover the hole in the ozone, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the oncology physician who helped pioneer development of gene-targeted cancer treatments, and Gary Snyder, the Beat Generation poet and environmental writer.
Mr. Snyder was introduced by Mr. Brown who said he had first met Mr. Snyder at a Zen Center in San Francisco in 1974. “This Zen business goes way back,” Mr. Brown said.
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
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