𝐀𝐧 𝐎𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐦 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐭

𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐀𝐥𝐭𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐚 𝐍𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐝’𝐬 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐠𝐞𝐞𝐬 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐞

By: Wei Xiong

We have this saying: close neighbors are better than distant relatives.

It’s never felt truer than now.

This has been one of the most traumatic periods of our lives. On that day the big wind carried the fire sparked at Eaton Canyon and swept through Altadena, with West Altadena most severely impacted. Overnight, the Jane’s Village community on Palm Street disappeared. We had suddenly become homeless.

I moved away from Palm Street a couple of months before the fire. Thousands of miles away, helpless, as my parents fled the fire alongside our good neighbors. Over the months, as we faced the aftermath, our community kept us up.

Facing this alongside the people in this story has softened the blow. They made home feel like home, and America feel like America. Ever since we left our motherland, we have been searching for a neighborhood to call home. With them, we found another family.

We often spoke around the dining table about how lucky we were to have this neighborhood, with these neighbors. In this little neighborhood with little houses lived a microcosm of southwest American life.

Lily and Steve felt like they walked out of some feel-good indie film. The kind of neighbors you see in movies. Except they’re real. And coincidentally, both actors, playing their best roles as themselves. Steve’s other talent as a “Master Gardener meant we’d often wake up to a porch full of woven baskets of fruits curated by Steve and packaged by Lily. My parents were especially moved by the gifts on Lunar New Year. Their orchard served as the central meeting ground for the neighborhood and surrounding communities.

They’d just restarted their popular Sunday Porch Market after the pandemic, a ritual we looked forward to on the weekends.  We’d wake up early to knead dough and prepare fillings. Most recently, our fried Baozi with homemade chili paste debuted to rave reviews. The inquiries into her recipes made Mother especially proud. We like sharing our food with the neighbors.

During harvest season, we’d schedule regular orders for the fruits and I would often have to mediate pricing. Not to lower it, but because my parents felt overwhelmed by the abundance of fruit for $20 and Steve and Lily refusing to charge any more. I would then be instructed by my mother to bring over a variety of her flour-based breakfast items. Then shortly after they would reciprocate with another kind gesture. We keep going back and forth doing really nice things for each other. It’s pretty adorable.

If you’ve been following my timeline, you’d know that my #1 social media fan and neighbor, Moses, and I became good friends while nursing our bodies together after surgeries. Mo’s daughter and granddaughters moved in with him a couple of years ago. We were happy to see him once again surrounded by loved ones after his wife passed away years ago. His mobility has kept him indoors more recently. It was nice to see him hanging outside again with his granddaughters during their morning volleyball practice. The towering 90-year-old man often said he couldn’t wait to recover from his newest joint replacement so he could race me down the block again. His family gave him life.

Across the street in a blue Jane’s cottage cloaked by dense foliage and drips of water fountain lived Monica and her son Eben. They then found Peter and his daughters and formed a family in Altadena after deciding on this neighborhood for its authenticity.

Humberto and his family grew faster than everyone else. He and his wife have two sons and the grandkids just kept popping out one by one as my mother watched enviously through the living room windows. From her rose garden. While watering her vegetables. While potting her succulents.

Robert is a retired music teacher and sat at the entrance to the Porch Market every Sunday morning performing his new homemade instrument, welcoming us to a sharing of local produce.

Then the winds came, followed by the fire, and everything disappeared.

I will never forget the eeriness of standing amongst a deserted burnt-down neighborhood in pitch darkness. On these grounds, once a frantic evacuation escaping the roaring 100-mile wind carrying the all-consuming fire through the land, and now only silent ashes remain. I didn’t think the last time I saw our home would be the last time I saw our home.

We were physically homeless but we stayed together digitally and spiritually. Our houses burned, but our community grew stronger. After the initial shock, we still had a disaster recovery problem to solve.

My parents locked steps with Steve and Lily starting evacuation night, and we kept in constant contact in our family chat room ever since. What started as a family text thread grew into a group of 18 contacts and their families. This thread became the official Palm St fire recovery group where people leaned on the collective to help navigate the overwhelming disaster recovery process.

Special thanks to our neighbor, Anthony, who works for the Department of Social Services and brought everyone together with Steve Lopez. Before the fire, our interactions were limited to brief greetings during morning hikes. Now he’s part of our family. Each new member and message added another thread to the fabric of our climate-disaster refugee family.

We never felt alone throughout this process. Our larger social umbrella literally sheltered us, thanks to my parents’ Baozi karma accumulated over the years. Friends from everywhere lent helping hands in the form of housing and material goods. Even my friends joined in—thanks MiKo for your weirdly professional yet heartfelt letter and donated clothes for the refugees, and Daryl, for letting me crash when I suddenly returned to LA without a home.

We also felt the importance of public services. We received our first fire disaster assistance from FEMA, who also added a second layer of protection beyond insurance. Social Services organized community recovery events for the victims. The EPA is working with local agencies to remove and restore the poisonous charred remains where our homes once stood. The National Guard protected the neighborhood from looters. The lack of local firefighting resources due to its unincorporated and lower incomed status contributed to the destruction of Altadena.

Thanks to modern technology, I was able to remotely manage my parents’ disaster recovery process. Fire recovery has become a second job. Some of the other neighborhood elders would benefit greatly if the local government offered individualized public services to help navigate post-disaster housing, insurance, aid, etc.

After two months of advanced Porch Dogging, my parents finally moved into my condo with a yard too small for all my mother’s plants and a much farther commute. But at least it’s ours. We breathed a collective sigh when we closed the door to the new fridge filled with fresh produce for the night’s dinner. We were finally home again.

Outside of Palm Street, America is turning into a place I don’t recognize anymore. A country once the beacon of diversity is now consumed by division. Everyone’s understandably scared and we’re not ourselves when we’re scared. We just lived through a global pandemic, a mass trauma event that will affect us for generations. A climate change-induced natural disaster just burnt down half of LA. All the theoretical existential crises are here. Ideally, now would be a good time to come together.

Instead of preventing and preparing for the next disaster, we are defunding FEMA. Instead of strengthening our defenses against global health threats, we are withdrawing from the WHO and weakening the CDC. There are now calls to leave the United Nations. Where are we going?

Climate change disaster is no longer a future problem. It’s here, tearing through our homes, our communities, and our lives. Instead of helping the people, our so-called leaders are tearing apart the raft people so desperately need to ride out this storm.

Gutting the social safety net, stuffing their own pockets, bullying our neighbors, racing towards artificial intelligence that they won’t be able to control, and running the show like the rest of us are just NPCs in their cruel grand strategy game. A few socially retarded, morally corrupt but disproportionately powerful people are hurting the rest of us during our hardest times because their parents didn’t love them.

The rest of the world catches a cold when America sneezes.

We are fucking sick.

Have we forgotten how this plays out every time in history? Civilizations collapse when power disparity becomes too extreme.

They must know because they’re digging bunkers and building rockets to get away from us animals. Why not make this place more habitable while we’re still here?

We all have real lives. We’re not pawns in their twisted game for validation they’ll never find. Stop playing games with our future. It’s our planet too.

I’m sitting here making a Facebook post at 3:05 AM for the 5 people who’ll read this thing and maybe give it a thumbs up while the stalker kid Mark Zuckerberg suddenly reinvents himself into this douchey bro character while actively destabilizing the globe with the other tech oligarchs. Can you just learn to be human?

Life on Palm Street shouldn’t be exceptional. It should be the norm. If a handful of neighbors can rebuild after a disaster, imagine what we could do if we chose to act together rather than apart.

Because home is not just a place. It is the people who hold you up when everything else crumbles. And together, we are still standing.