Fashion Island

Nearly two years ago, an eighth grade Breakthrough student of mine, who was Latino, told me about how his dad once took him to Valley Fair mall, a high-end shopping mall in Saratoga. Saratoga is a prominently white city that neighbors San Jose on its west side. His dad cautioned him on going there, but my student insisted. Once he walked inside, he felt so nervous and uncomfortable around “all the white people” that he had to ask his dad to take him somewhere else, to Eastridge Mall. Eastridge lies in east side San Jose, where Latinos make up a larger percentage of the population than any other races.

All the times going to Valley Fair during my high school years, I never noticed the race of the different shoppers—I considered myself “colorblind”—and I wondered that if I ever did notice race, if I could ever see race the way a thirteen-year-old saw it, what would that say about me?

2011 just began, as did winter quarter at UCI, and during the second week of January, my literary journalism class, “Literature of Inequity,” held class at Fashion Island Mall for an “in-class” assignment. The assignment was, as expected by the title of the class, to report on some form of inequity at the mall. I immediately knew what I wanted to report on: race.

Fashion Island Mall is a high-end mall in Newport Beach, a small beachside city (as the name suggests) of around 86,000 people, a number that is relatively small to Irvine’s population of around 218,000. With three different Bloomingdale’s stores, an abundance of French cafés that try to outsell each other on overpriced crème brulées, or designer stores that sell you hundred-dollar polos, it’s more high-end than Valley Fair. Even Valley Fair has American Eagle, PacSun, Aéropostale, and all those stores for preppy teens or skater kids, but Fashion Island—nope, none of that. It’s too classy. It’s too white.

More than ninety percent of Newport Beach’s population is white, and the shoppers at Fashion Island reflect this percentage. On any given day, the busiest time is lunch hour, where you can find mostly white men in dress shirts and ties conducting business over pastas, sandwiches and salads. The mall closes at 9 PM on weekdays, and strangely, 7 PM on Saturdays, and 6 PM on Sundays. Maybe it’s no surprise; Newport Beach is a quiet town. If you walk around neighborhoods at night you’ll realize that you can’t see because you can’t find any streetlamps. Residents sleep early in Newport Beach.

Fashion Island stands at the top of a hill that rises about 160 feet above sea level, but the roads from there all slope downhill to the beach, which lies south a mile away. On a clear day, if you walk from the center of the mall toward the southwest parking lot, past the British boutique store, past the world-class jewelry store, and past the Macy’s and its bakery, you’re faced with a view of the ocean. Go at sunset, and you’ll wish that you had a camera on you. The ocean peaks over the dark silhouette of houses and palm trees, and it disappears into a haze of purple and pink at the horizon. The sky retains its blue color, but the horizon’s pink glow gradually overtakes it.

While wandering through the mall and jotting down my observations in my spiral-bound notebook, I realized that this view was the only thing I could appreciate about Fashion Island. Everything else that I didn’t appreciate I wrote in my notebook. My final story was probably going to piss off the white students in my literary journalism class.