Fremont, My Hometown

KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective.

M

y pride in hailing from a sprawling suburb has always left people puzzled.

Fremont isn’t exactly a Bay Area centerpiece. Still, I eagerly defend it by mentioning that it’s the fourth-most populous city in the Bay Area, and that yes, indeed it is the Bay (it’s Alameda County! We’ve always had a BART station! We have our own stinky marsh bridge!). Our food is multicultural and peerless, and our dusty hills can be transcendent when their summer brown molts to green after a few healthy rainstorms.

My exuberance has been matched only by a 52-year-old man I once met at a West Berkeley homeless shelter. I noted his “Flying A’s Niles” T-shirt while I interviewed residents prior to the shelter’s closing, and he shared stories about the car club in Fremont’s historic Niles district, made famous a century ago as a studio town for dozens of Charlie Chaplin films.

Though the man grew up in a very different Fremont than I did, we giddily swapped tales about shared haunts, and he told me — with only a hint of pride — that Lake Elizabeth is about the same size as Lake Merritt. This trivia is most interesting to someone who has enjoyed innumerable sunset walks while dodging geese droppings at both parks.

We regarded the city of his youth — and of mine — as something of a sanctuary. A safe and comfortable place, frozen in time, with ducks and vintage cars and bountiful food and quality family moments.

Fremont’s reputation seems to be manufactured this way, under the generous umbrella of “boring.” It benefits both immigrant families who hope to create bubbles of safety by raising children in familiar environments, and the many forces that reap the rewards of inflated real estate prices — pinned to shiny signifiers like top schools, safe neighborhoods and the entirely inexplicable (repeat!) ranking of “Happiest City in America” as dubiously graded by WalletHub, a personal finance company.

But this notion of Fremont’s exceptionalism is insidious. It harms all of us to silo suburbs away from the greater context of the Bay Area, especially when sweetness and safety should be easy to come by for everyone. It’s a microcosm of how Silicon Valley — of which Fremont is a part, culturally, industrially and economically — often isolates itself from the Bay, as if impervious to any ills or faults of its own.

I remember my childhood as cozy and simple. My main preoccupation was what my older sister was doing at any given moment, then my parents, then our cat, in that order. I liked going to school, watching Bollywood films at Naz 8 (a famed local theater formerly run by a Pakistani immigrant who cameoed in Bollywood B-films, since replaced by another Desi-centric moviehouse) and taking weekend BART trips to San Francisco to ogle sea lions with visiting cousins. I practiced riding a Ripstik around the park with my dad, who followed patiently on foot and didn’t think to tell me that skateboarding would make me a cooler teen.

My parents moved to Fremont in the late ’90s because the homes were still cheaper than South Bay cities like Sunnyvale and Cupertino, which had already established themselves in Silicon Valley’s tech empire extending just beyond San Jose’s outskirts.

In contrast, Fremont was on the east side of the Bay’s marshy waters, reachable only by crossing the Dumbarton Bridge or curving around the Bay’s southern shoreline past the stretches of garbage landfill in Milpitas. Geographically, it rested in slightly undefined territory — neither claimed by the East Bay nor Silicon Valley.

It’s hard to imagine Fremont in this up-and-coming era, when my parents bought a three-bedroom home for $275,000. Sadly, they lost that home in the recession, struggling to pay the mortgage, and thereafter remained renters in the city. Being a studious Zillow-scroller (I blame the housing beat, but it’s really just nosiness), I’m never thrilled to see that it last sold in 2018 for $1.3 million.

I credit journalism with helping me understand Fremont and its relationship to the fractured region I grew up in. In 2011, during a high school newspaper trip, I interviewed protesters at the Occupy San Francisco camp and passersby in the Financial District.

I stopped a platinum-haired, older woman on the street, who was wearing what my 15-year-old mind imagined to be a Chanel suit. I asked what she thought of the movement, and she told me frankly, “Well, I am the 1%.”

Years later, as I covered anti-homeless actions by neighbors in San Jose, San Francisco and Berkeley, I took note of Fremont neighbors in the midst of their own attempts to block a homeless navigation center in that neighborhood made so famous by silent films, where subsidized housing (as in the rest of the city) constitutes a tiny fraction of available homes.

Occupying the same county as Berkeley and Oakland, where the highest percentage of our homeless neighbors live, Fremont was doing its best to replicate the behaviors of so many Silicon Valley cities that have made it clear that their doors are closed to those who are not affluent, not tech-aligned, not worthy of sharing space.

They didn’t have the brash self-awareness of my interviewee in San Francisco, whose generationally wealthy peers have historically driven efforts of exclusion in the Bay. But it seemed Fremont residents had adopted this playbook for their own efforts to distance themselves from anything uncomfortable, or unfamiliar, while allowing the immigrant narrative of struggle to obscure the way we wield power in very similar ways after obtaining a home, income and stability.

During a 10-hour Fremont Unified School District Board meeting in 2018, I listened as parent after parent, almost exclusively immigrants, insisted that education on sexual assault, affirmative consent, gender, puberty, abortion and intercourse would irreparably corrupt fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders. One Asian American alum of Fremont schools countered at that meeting: without education, how was a young girl supposed to cope if she got her period before middle school? The district would go without a sexual education curriculum for all elementary schoolers that year.

It comes at a cost to cling to comfort and familiarity for only our communities, pretending that everything that exists outside of them — a housing crisis, a drug crisis, overlapping homelessness and mental health crises, all exacerbated by a pandemic — are not part of our lives too. That the comforts we have are due to perseverance alone, and not a system of privilege that is tenuous at best, and could easily turn on us like it has in the past.

This particular form of clinging in Fremont, and many of our most affluent suburbs sprinkled throughout Silicon Valley’s zip codes, makes the Bay Area worse for everyone. It keeps the Bay from functioning as a cohesive unit, where people can move and live in different types of neighborhoods as their lives change and families grow. Where people can access resources away from the city, and easily find a nice big patch of green space to dodge geese droppings with a kid still finding their feet on a pair of quad skates (amid the Great Ripstik Abandonment of 2009).

My mom lives in Milpitas now, and I only stop by Fremont to get treats at India Cash & Carry; make a biannual, masochistic trudge up Mission Peak; or ride the train to the (still new-to-me) Warm Springs BART station to grimly observe the rash of new condos and apartments just barely blocking my precious dusty hill view (as is my right).

A promise of “luxury right to your doorstep” glares back at me from the myriad advertisements wrapped around scaffolding. It’s a sign that — without intervention — the sweet comforts of my childhood in Fremont will become even more distant for those who want to live and flourish in my hometown.