Up close and incredibly personal

If you push your face really close to The Pacific Circuit—if you want to know how it works and what makes it tick—then there is a lot to see.

While most folks are still waiting on their deliveries of our September book of the month (that’s what happens when the 1st of the month falls on a holiday) I thought I’d take a moment to introduce you to this piece of work and see what we can find in there.

The Pacific Circuit is a book stuffed to bursting with characters, from the longshoremen of the Port of Oakland, to the club owners of Seventh Street, to the business magnates who drive the decisions and politics of the place. Margaret Gordon—Ms. Margaret, an almost accidental environmental campaigner—underpins the book, holds it together: Part I of the book zooms in intensely on her experiences as a Bay Area local, as a child, a parent, and on her life as an activist, community organizer, and even (for a short period) as a genuine City-Hall-type official. 

This book is not just character study, though. It also acts as a powerful explainer of the forces that shaped the Bay after the Second World War, the ones that have warped everyone’s world since. Part II is where these interlocking pieces start being laid out for you, from the rise of containerization (Chapter 11) to the Black Panthers (12) and pulling in material from earlier sections on redlining and the way progress works in American cities. If you look at Chapter 13, you’ll discover about as succinct and engaging a summary of the shift driven by technology—that is, the combined, intertwined rise of Silicon Valley and Asian manufacturing—as it’s possible to find. 

Part III, meanwhile, gets up close with the way business and local politics shaped Oakland, and how it put local communities and wider interests at odds with each other. And then Part IV brings us to the more recent past, a series of destructive moments that threaten to rip apart the community fabric that’s been rent one way and another for decades: the destructive, circular conveniences of the on-demand, drive-by-app shut-in economy; the damage and change caused by Covid-19.

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But to show you why I enjoyed this book so much, I wanted to take a moment to focus in on one passage that really summarized what The Pacific Circuit was about, where its heart was. It’s from Chapter 23, in that last part about what’s now and what’s next, and it features Madrigal meeting with a group of sailors arriving in Oakland to hear about their experiences.

These are Filipino shipping workers whose job is to move goods around the world. They arrive in Oakland and have just a few hours on land before turning around to the next job. Madrigal agrees to help them shop in return for a conversation about their lives, the ocean, about being part of the Pacific circuit.

You can find it on page 262–3.

Before the seafarers arrived, I’d been given a short list of items that one of the guys was looking for. Normally, journalistic detachment prevents you from helping anyone you’re covering, but this felt different. They were risking their jobs to talk with me, as they had extremely strict orders never to talk with anyone from the media. Not only were they risking their current jobs but something like this could get them blackballed from future employment, too. Second, the list itself suggested a life, and a sweet one:

1. A pair of youth size 6 green Nikes (Kobes, to be precise).

2. Two singing Elsa dolls from the movie Frozen.

3. 1.7 ounces of Dolce & Gabbana cologne in the light blue variation.

The dolls and shoes were for little siblings. The D&G cologne, that was for the seafarer himself. I bought the stuff from Amazon, and when the appointed time came, I tossed the items in my trunk and headed for the port. I was a little early and the guys weren’t off yet, so I drove down to the small ecumenical chapel that’s located right there in the midst of the trucks and cranes: the International Maritime Center.

Inside there were four clocks on the wall: Oakland, Manila, Hamburg, Mumbai. The IMC contained a little kitchen, some extremely international snack chips (shrimp-flavored corn chips, anyone?), a Ping-Pong table, and—of course—a tiny room for religious worship.

On the surface, perhaps it seems unremarkable. These are certainly not bombastic paragraphs. But it also hit me as a short passage in which the whole book is splayed out if you are looking properly. 

For example: it’s clear from the off that Madrigal is a player in this story, not just an observer, part of the communities he documents—even if only for a brief interlude. And his tone is the one riven through the book: he’s talking to people who live hard, complicated lives in service of the system and yet is a little sentimental and romantic about his choice of words and his phrasing; the sweet life, the kids, the comfort in religion. Romance is there, too, in the choices the sailor makes in his shopping. Cologne for life on board a ship? That’s optimism for you. 

There’s the specificity of the physical details here as well, a tactic that’s spread throughout The Pacific Circuit. In just a few words, he transports us inside the Center, a place that few of us will see but somehow becomes immediately familiar. The cranes, the containers, the clocks all situate us. And the cramped sizes he uses in these descriptions (“small”, “tiny”—even the shoes are small and the cologne just a small amount) echo the inside of a ship, with its tight quarters and limited offerings. It’s clear without even saying so that even when these men are off the ship, they are still on it in spirit. 

And then, perhaps most unspoken but loudest of all to me, was the way that the system that is under the microscope is also part of the situation. Madrigal gets the stuff the sailor wants to buy… from Amazon. In a book about the way that convenience has shaped culture, the best way to get the things the subject wants is to order them from an app. Who knows what the Filipino sailor had just hauled in the long journey from Manila, but it seems entirely plausible that he was bringing exactly the same things that he ends up buying (or having bought for him) at the other end. 

It’s the Pacific Circuit writ large; a behemoth that we’re trapped inside. Sometimes it feels like there’s no way out, but we can at least find each other for a moment.

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I hope you enjoy reading it.

Onwards

Bobbie