"Little hill."
That's technically what El Cerrito, my hometown, means in Spanish, but our namesake little hill doesn't even reside here. It's actually in the next city over, because of course it is.
El Cerrito is nothing special. There are about 24,000 people here, and our biggest cultural attractions include a two-screen movie theater, some nice parks, and a shopping plaza. One of the most exciting moments in recent El Cerrito history was waiting 45 minutes in line to check out the new Safeway when it opened a couple years ago.
Nonetheless, it's home to me. I grew up amongst a variety of different kinds of diversity. My high school was made up of a majority black and Latino population, and I went to school with poor kids from the projects and rich kids from the hills. I attended meetings with folks who loved President Obama and other folks who worried about tax cuts and freedom. El Cerrito is both urban and suburban, and for some reason, a ton of my friends have chickens and grow their own food. My memories of playing on playgrounds and climbing mountains are interspersed with getting out of the city and finding other things to do, like going to the Asian mall in Richmond, Solano Avenue and the bowling alley in Albany, and Cheeseboard in Berkeley. Our summers were made up in the pool, at the Fourth of July worldone festival with bhangra music blasting, and walking around Cerrito Vista Park into the dead of the night to raise money for the American Cancer Society.
Growing up, I was taught to believe that if I put my mind to it, I could do anything. Whenever I would go away on long trips, to Yale, to Europe, to Berkeley, to Asia, I would come back and always be surprised that other people were still here. It wasn't that El Cerrito wasn't a great city (it is), it was that there were some people who lived amongst this land full of multiplicity and difference and resources and didn't feel like they had to do anything with that.
In addition, I'd come back and feel oddly uncomfortable. While I love El Cerrito, being here for so long, my physical body and spirit in this physical, tangible place becomes more like one of my band concerts: a performance and a simulacrum, something wasn't quite real. I played into the persona of "Josh Ko," whatever that was to whoever, and that in itself fostered feelings of self-hatred as I tried to be so many things to people that I instead became an incohesive blob of nothingness. When people have known you for so long, it can be difficult to try out new things or act differently than what people expect.
Like my city, I am a paradox. I am young but sometimes feel old, I am too Asian or too American, I am either too liberal or too conservative, depending on who you ask, I am confident but have crippling self-doubt, I am too quirky or too quiet, I am driven but lazy, and I work hard while hardly working. I am nothing necessarily special - I am not one of the most well-known students at Cal, while I'm not the EECS major with net zero friends. Like my city, I'm a little boring, although I have a lot of surprises up my sleeve. But see, while we might be average, there's only one El Cerrito. And there's only one me.
