California from to the New York island
The lower Manhattan offices of the Daily News could not be further from the “redneck stretch of rural California” where writer Bill Hutchinson grew up. Even though he’s now a big-city journalist, his new book, “Sushi and Black-eyed Peas,” is a record of that childhood, which found him straddling the racial fault lines at the heart of the American experience.
“In my Central California town, where muddy pickup trucks rule the roads, cows outnumber people and the fragrance of fresh manure hangs thick in the evening air, I sometimes wish I were invisible, white like the cops, or just plain black or Mexican like the majority of kids in my school,” writes the man whose colleagues call him “Hutch.”
“Out here in the cotton fields, surrounded by an uneasy number of Republicans and Am-vet Post members, any solid color would be better than the hodgepodge I was born.”
Indeed, the book’s title is a playful reference to his mixed heritage. Hutchinson’s father, William Sr., the cattle-truck-driving son of two Holy Rollers, “insists he is nearly full-blooded Cherokee, [says] there was an Irishman in the woodpile and sometimes masquerades as Mexican.”
His Japanese mother, Sumiko Kinjo, meanwhile, struggles to assimilate into American culture in any way. Hutchinson writes, “My mother could not decipher English from Ethiopian. Even ‘hi’ meant something entirely different from the ‘hai’ she grew up saying.”
It doesn’t help that Hutchinson’s California is thoroughly removed from the “warm-weather utopia of mansions and movie stars” his mother may have imagined moving to. Instead, Tulare, Calif., is rife with hardscrabble poverty that had none of the Golden State’s famous sheen.
Hutchinson describes his youth with evocative sensory detail that approaches Frank Mccourt’s bestselling remembrances of his own tough, Irish-american childhood.
Merely going to school was an ordeal for Hutchinson. “Lincoln school is on East Cedar Avenue where P Street, Tulare’s version of Skid Row, dead-ends,” he writes about his school, situated on a block where most
In his new memoir, Daily News writer Bill Hutchinson recalls journey from rural boyhood to city success
homes have broken-down cars on their lawns. “As I get off the bus ... a handful of winos in a trashstrewn vacant lot across the street are stoking fire in a rusted barrel with yesterday’s Advance-register, waiting for the P Street liquor store to open up.”
Hutchinson’s story is, however, quintessentially American, one in which the hero overcomes his odds.
Some of the credit for this goes to his fraternal “Aunty Bert,” a proud letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service who is dead-set on Hutchinson not being hampered by racism, endlessly making sure that he is getting an education, quizzing him on history and “assuring me I’m destined for college more than a prison cell.” “I hope she is right,” he writes. She was. Hutchinson would work his way through college at San Francisco State University, where he earned a journalism degree. Since then, he has worked at newspapers all over the country, eventually becoming a reporter and rewrite man for The News in time to cover the Columbine High School massacre, the 9/11 attacks and the 2003 Northeast blackout.
Now, the journalist is trying his hand at autobiography.
“I think he is inventing almost a new language, almost like James Joyce with ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’” says Kyra Ryan, his editor at Thewritedeal.org (which is publishing portions of the book with the intention of having it be picked up by an agent or publisher). “This is almost the ‘Portrait’ for our time in the American experience — he had to create his own language to talk about his life.”
But there were deeply personal reasons behind the book, too: “I wrote it for my mother, who’s 84 now and lives in California still,” Hutchinson says. “I was prompted to write the book because so many of my older relatives were dying and they were taking all these great stories to their graves.
“Nobody else in my family is a writer, so I took it upon myself to put down some of these stories. I’m trying to put them in book form so they’ll be preserved.”