Yeon Lee, with her husband Cheon and daughter Soo — all originally from Korea — partakes of food and services at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego.
Kavitha Mavalankar was on her way to the nearby Hindu temple with her husband, Anil, and children when she saw the bright night light on the mountain behind them. Several hours later, a little after 3 a.m. on Oct. 22, she stepped out on her porch and saw her juniper tree on fire and backyard covered with embers.
Within minutes, the family was collecting whatever they could and heading out the door, driving down Chetenham Lane in Rancho Bernardo, about 20 miles north of San Diego.They spent the next four days at Qualcomm Stadium, along with thousands of evacuees from more than a dozen wildfires throughout San Diego County.
When they returned home four days later, their home was still standing. But their neighbors on Chetenham were not so lucky. Gutted structures and piles of ash were all that remained of a once-thriving upper middle-class area.
The Mavalankars were among the thousands of Asians and Asian Americans affected by the fires that raged for more than a week through Southern California, from Santa Clarita in Los Angeles County to the Mexican border. In all, 1,500 homes were destroyed, 410,000 acres burned, 14 lives lost and dozens injured. Officials have pegged the overall loss at more than $1 billion.
Four of the fires in San Diego County continued out of control late Sunday as residents of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego County, the hardest hit, began picking up their lives.
Most of the Southern California communities with the worst damage are in suburban, semi-rural and rural areas, built out from urban cores. Ironically, they are areas that have attracted many Asian families in search of a better life and better homes in recent decades.
The Witch Creek fire in Northern San Diego County, for example, hit parts of Poway, Rancho Sante Fe, Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos and Escondido, areas where many Chinese and Asian Indians who work in San Diego’s booming biotech and pharmaceutical industries have chosen to live.
The Rice Canyon fire, further north, struck around Fallbrook and Bonsall, home to some 5,000 Thais and an equal number of Filipinos, while the Harris Fire affected the outskirts of Chula Vista in the south of San Diego County, which has seen an influx of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Chinese and Koreans, in the last five years.
Evacuees of the Santiago Fire in South Orange County included many Vietnamese and Koreans, while the Buckweed and Ranch Fires in northern L.A. County left many Chinese, Japanese and Koreans homeless, some for a time, others more permanently.
Of the thousands who chose to evacuate to Qualcomm in the early days of the outbreaks, more than 20 percent, by informal count, were of some Asian background, with the majority being Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese. That is more than the overall proportion of Asians living in all of San Diego County, which is about 14 percent.
According to the Vietnamese newspaper CaliToday, most Vietnamese forced to flee stayed with friends and relatives. In all, more than a half-million people were ordered to evacuate their homes and neighborhoods in San Diego County alone. According to Korean media in San Diego, more than 2,000 Koreans living in areas hit by the fires took refuge in Korean churches, such as Hanbit Church and Korean Hope Church in the Convoy area of San Diego and Calvary Korean Presbyterian in Linda Vista, home to a large Vietnamese and growing Korean community.
Language may have been a determining factor in choosing where to go, according to several community leaders. In Orange County, the Community Action Partnership of Orange County was one of the few organizations providing information in English and other Asian languages. Information in Spanish, on the other hand, was readily available from several agencies and even on local AM radio.
Several Vietnamese and recent immigrants from China, unable to understand English, expressed confusion and frustration during the early evacuations. One evacuee told the Korea Daily: “People feel more comfortable when they band together with the same race, and some decided to come to church because the shelters they had gone to were overcrowded.”
Yet, many in the Asian communities of San Diego and Los Angeles counties did turn to shelters set aside by local officials, including Qualcomm, where some, like Simon Zhang, 13; Eric Sujimoto, 13; Jenny Tsai, 14; and Beverly Yeh, 14, manned an information booth at the entrance. They greeted evacuees as they arrived, while providing children with coloring books to keep them busy. Some like 7-year-old Christopher Ki came with their laptops, while almost everyone had a cell phone.
The teens were grateful they were not home. “We left at 5 a.m. It was scary,” said Jenny.
Simon’s mother, Jinge Jinge Lau, was awakened at 3 a.m. on Oct. 22 by what she called “crazy wind” blowing outside. By 7 a.m., she and the family were escaping in the family car.
Many evacuees felt a sense of shock. “I never expected to come to a place like this, or to be without a place to live,” said evacuee Rajeev Gandhi, who moved to San Diego from India five years ago.
This was the second time Xulong Fu and Yuan Ling were caught up in a dramatic conflagration. While the Cedar Fire in northern San Diego County four years ago did not affect them, “This time, I’m not so lucky,” said Fu.
“My son woke us up. He couldn’t breathe,” she said, so she turned on the television and a sense of panic ensued as a neighbor banged on her door, telling her to leave. The home next door already had burned to the ground.
On Wildwind Drive in Canyon County, near Malibu, a sudden shift in the Santa Ana winds reversed the course of the fire there, sparing the home of Tung Dang.
“I didn’t think that our house and this neighborhood would be spared. We prayed — we prayed a lot,” said Dang.
Along his street, lawns were still decorated with fake headstones, skeletons, gourds and lighted pumpkins.
After all, Halloween, another scary night, was just around the corner.
This story, first published in ASIA: The Journal of Culture & Commerce, was written with contributions from Gloria Tierney, Suja Sukumaran, Ray Wong, Shatto Light, Sonya Alexander, Guia Rognerud, Leonard Novarro and New America Media.