Life of Zengo

Incidents from the life of my Los Angeles neighbor who sacrificed for his family who did not appreciate him, and my own departure from the West

Two Fridays ago I woke up at 6 a.m., after a night with my roommates of what in nineteenth century novels would have, I think, been called ‘parlor games’ (Secret Hitler, then a Saturday NYT crossword puzzle projected on the living room TV, then a Sunday), for Imogen’s birthday, and I was thinking about my former Japanese neighbor in Los Angeles. I think this was because I was reading about Ray Kurzveil, who was suggested to me as the most famous futurist when I asked my roommates on the coworking floor (3) about who I might should talk to for the article I’m writing about the future, and anyway I was reading Kurzveil’s Wikipedia entry that morning, thinking about this lineage of New York City public school scientists, of which Richard Feynman is probably the most famous, but there’s also Marvin Minsky, who single-handedly caused the last AI winter. Anyway, as I was working I had this image come to me of some kind of archetype of a guy working hard in the middle of the city on somewhat technical and obscure work that doesn’t necessarily pay a lot but which if you keep doing it assiduously you might scrape together a living; also I was listening to Rei Harakami, because of this Substack I subscribe to called Flow State, which sends you an ambient or classical or otherwise wordless album to work to every weekday morning, and also maybe there was just something about a birthday, even of someone else, that made me think about what’s important. Indeed, someone else’s birthday perhaps facilitates memento mori better than your own birthday, because it comes without the personalized anxiety, which can cloud your thinking.

Anyway I was thinking about Zengo, my Japanese neighbor in Los Angeles last year. Zengo was a graphic designer—for a lot of his career, freelance. He was 77 years old last year, close to my parents’ age. The first time we hung out I made him a portion of what I eat for lunch or dinner most days, a peanut-based vegan stir fry loosely based on a Chinese dish called re gan mian, which I bought from a married couple who operated a wheelable wok in an alley and ate for breakfast when I lived in Wuhan and which Zengo and I ate at the long wooden table in his Silver Lake garden that smelled like jasmine, where he told me about “kiti-chan,” a cat of his who had recently died, who he had loved very much, and who had been very friendly, and who he had taught to do complicated tricks, like a dog, such as turning around in a circle before she got fed; turning around both ways; high-fiving; and lying down. He said one time he asked kiti-chan to do all the tricks in a row, and she had heaved a heavy sigh, like a dog, and he thought that was very funny.

During the year I lived next door to him, Zengo told me the story of his life and career.

He grew up on a small friendly Japanese island, Tanegashima, in a large family. He was the black sheep of the family—literally, he said; he was tiny and dark-skinned and “looked like a monkey.” His older siblings “looked like beautiful and well-fed rich kids,” and his neighbors teased his mother, asking who his father was. His peers ignored him and his father didn’t pay attention. His older brother was the first-born and special and his younger brother was a beautiful baby (again, literally) and always spoiled, and Zengo as a child made sacrifices that went unappreciated. But nonetheless he was never bullied and it was basically a good life to grow up on the obscure island. One time, after he’d moved to LA, he ran into an actor who was shooting a historical drama on that island, about Portuguese merchants washing onto its shore, and the captain falling blindly in love with the daughter of the local chief, and Zengo was jealous that this actor got to visit his home, which Zengo at the time could not afford to do.

Anyway, one day in high school, Zengo’s father had a terrible car accident and became disabled. Teenage Zengo was encouraged to go to America to work and support his family by sending money home, which he did reluctantly. He borrowed money from his sister’s husband and a disaster fund to afford the plane ticket. At graduation, when word got out that someone in the graduating class was going to the US, and they found out it was Zengo, someone said “are you in our class?”—they didn’t even know he’d been part of their cohort. He’d been invisible.

When he got to Los Angeles in 1965 he attended an English school for foreigners during the day and worked at a Japanese cookie factory until midnight. It was very physically demanding, and after working for two years he got a duodenal ulcer. But it was another full year before he had finished paying off his and his father’s debt and was able to quit and start studying at Los Angeles City College (LACC), which was at that time free for city residents. 

He still needed a job though, and as a student he put his name on the college’s seeking-employment board, which is how his name came up when a rich doctor called LACC looking for a housesitter.

The doctor had mistaken LACC for UCLA—he’d been looking for a rich kid. He got Zengo instead. The doctor had a four-bedroom mansion in Bel-Air and had recently gotten a divorce and was dating an extremely beautiful and also nice and very rich woman who also lived in Bel-Air. The doctor’s two daughters were away at boarding school in Europe, so the house was basically empty. The interior was all blue and had been occupied by Elvis “while making those cheesy Hawaiian-themed movies in the early sixties.” There was a staff of a gardener and three other people, but the house was always getting deliveries, so that was Zengo’s job, to accept the deliveries and coordinate the staff and care for a “beautiful but dumb Irish setter.” He lived in this house for two years and was paid $100 a month to do so, which at the time, according to Zengo, was a decent amount of money to live on. The doctor’s girlfriend didn’t think so though, and so she had her housekeeper send him groceries every week.

The doctor and his girlfriend knew famous Hollywood people, and one time in 1969 when the doctor’s girlfriend’s housekeeper was delivering groceries, the housekeeper said the doctor’s girlfriend had invited Zengo to her party. The first time Zengo showed up, he went in the back door, where the help entered, because he thought he was supposed to. They had to tell him, you’re a guest, you go in the front door! So he went in, and the party was filled with Hollywood celebrities, people he’d seen on TV and in the movies. He was introduced to all these celebrities, but he didn’t know what to say to them, and also his English wasn’t that good, so he just said “hi, how are you,” and that was it.

After graduating from City College, in his twenties, Zengo worked for third-rate design firms, learned how the graphic design world worked, and met influential people. Occasionally people took notice of his work and encouraged him to apply to the world-famous “Art Center College of Design.” Zengo didn’t know if he was good enough, so he took a night class to see what the standards were like. It was probably a futile exploration, he thought, because he was still sending money to his mother and three brothers in Japan and couldn’t afford an expensive college. Plus he was almost thirty and probably too old to make some big change.

But once Zengo enrolled as a night student at the Art Center, things unfolded fortuitously. An instructor showed his work to the director of the school, and he was offered a full scholarship.

One condition of the scholarship was doing three hours of work a day for the school. Zengo accepted. It was grueling, but his work was shown frequently in the college gallery, which led to freelance gigs. Soon Zengo had more work than he knew what to do with, and when he graduated he was head-hunted by Saul Bass’s agency, the most prestigious design agency in Los Angeles.

Negotiating his salary at Saul Bass’s agency was the first time Zengo tried to stand up for himself a little. They offered him the starting ‘college grad wage’, but he already had a lot of work experience and knew he was worth more. He almost didn’t take the job. But the hiring manager talked to “the tough financial guy,” and this guy said it was okay to pay him more than the normal starting wage, and so he took the position. This taught Zengo to speak out when he felt he was “worth something.”

Some of this stuff Zengo asked me to insert—I sent it to him for fact-checking—though most of it was in place when I sent it to him. He also wanted me to mention that he was born in Shanghai. There wasn’t a good place to do it earlier, so I’m doing it here.

Anyway, with Saul Bass on his resume, Zengo was set up for life. He worked for upscale firms, became a highly paid freelancer, started his own company, designed the logos for Keiser Permanente and Acura, and eventually bought the house where I met him, which he’d worked out of for decades before work-from-home was a thing. Silver Lake was not a fashionable neighborhood when he bought, and he was pleasantly surprised by his rising valuation.

Zengo never married. He helped, financially, his younger brother come to America, and his brother never thanked him—he received the money like it was owed to him. This brother lives in Los Angeles (married, two kids), but he and Zengo don’t communicate anymore. Zengo also has an older brother, though, who also has a wife, and two sons, “who did everything for me.”

Zengo’s mother visited him three times before she died, in that house. When she visited, Zengo says, she realized she barely knew him, whereas Zengo knew her very well. They got to know each other, though, and when long-distance calls got cheaper they spoke on the phone and became good friends. Zengo had been sending money back to her for years before this. When he was a child Zengo had stuck up for his mother when his dad yelled at her—Zengo would hit his dad with anything he could grab. Zengo also protected his older brother, who came home crying one day; Zengo went outside with a stick and chased the neighborhood kids away. They couldn’t do anything because Zengo was only two years old. For these incidents Zengo was labeled a problem child, and he became very quiet.

In 2008 Zengo was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer. His brain suddenly “switched everything” when he heard this; he was now not afraid to die, not at all. Zengo had stayed in one place his entire adult life and had become very social in America, despite remaining single, and despite his childhood quietude, and he’d been rewarded for this with community and friends, some he’d known for 54 years. His friends’ wives were good to him. They would bring him food and take him to his hospital visits. Japanese people of his generation in Los Angeles remained fairly close-knit. Zengo was ordered to quit working by his surgeon, which he thought was a death sentence, so he took up a ceramics class at Glendale Community College, he says, to make the most of what remained of his life. He made many new friends, and his sculptural works have since been shown at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, selected in national competition, and exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum and the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

In recent years Zengo has started talking to his sister more, who still lives in Japan. They email back and forth quite detailed letters. They, too, had not known each other well until recently.

Zengo and I lived next to each other for a year. He had two large orange trees that yielded a lot of oranges, and he would invite me to take as many as I wanted. In retrospect I could see that I could’ve taken a lot more, there were many more oranges than either of us, or anyone we knew, ate. But I was always shy about it and it never seemed like the right time to go over and take oranges from his trees. I usually waited until we saw each other over the fence and he invited me to come over.

There was an avocado tree in the backyard of the house I was subletting, and I would offer Zengo and anyone who came by avocados. Similarly, there were more avocados than I could eat, but Zengo never came over of his own volition, and whenever anyone came by there were always more than I could give them.

I didn’t socialize a lot that year. I was trying to figure out how to be a screenwriter, but no one knew who I was and I didn’t have time to meet anyone and the people in “the industry” I did meet, with a few exceptions, I didn’t like, couldn’t imagine myself working alongside for the rest of my life. I was working long hours at my coding job, for a Canadian salary compressed by Quebec taxes and the exchange rate, and in my free time I didn’t want to work on “my pilot.” In any case I wasn’t in a good emotional place to do creative work; I often wasn’t in the same room as another human for more than about one hour a week. The few friends I had I didn’t really have time enough to get closer to even if we’d wanted to, and besides they moved away from LA at a rate of about one a month. I felt desperate, behind in all areas of life. I would occasionally go on Hinge dates at Bar Bandini, drink two glasses of wine on the back patio, improvise naively, and walk home under the palm trees of Mohawk Street and Scott Avenue. Occasionally I’d stand in the back of a poetry reading.

But Zengo was always next door, tending to his luscious garden of jasmine and citrus and tomatoes and kale plants that swayed above both of us. I offered to make him lunch again after that first time but I got the sense that he felt it was vaguely unmanly, or maybe he just sensed that I was only offering because I couldn’t afford to eat out, and so he would take me out for lunch. We did this twice: once at the Thai restaurant on Sunset at the end of our street, and once at a classic old Japanese restaurant in downtown LA that had been there since the 1950s, where he knew the waitress, who had been working there for decades, and now had a daughter who sat at the counter and diligently applied a marker to a coloring book very close to her face.

The last time I hung out with Zengo we drank tea again at the long wooden table in his garden that smelled like jasmine on a warm Sunday afternoon. The night before, I had taken a girl I’d met on Twitter to the opera, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, spent two hundred dollars I didn’t really have on tickets and wine, and she’d bailed before the show even started, pretended to go to the bathroom and live-tweeted her way down the stairs. A mutual had DM’d to tell me not to worry, this person was known for drama, and filled me in on all kinds of bicoastal backstory, which I’d appreciated, and I relayed some of this to Zengo. He was somewhat interested but mostly he wanted to introduce me to his new cat, Gilda. Gilda had been abandoned by Zengo’s former neighbor, become wild, was befriended by kiti-chan, and now had moved in. Gilda was eager to meet me, came right up to me, arched her back and nuzzled my wrist. Zengo said he was surprised, because she hadn’t been friendly to anyone else. “She senses who is good,” he said. I then watched her go back to him, and as she got up into his lap I considered Zengo’s big white-haired head in the sunlight with his tangly droopy orange tree in the background, and I thought, here is one of the great people in this world; I can’t believe he lives next door to me. But also, from the perspective of the world, who is he? Like most of us—like me—he’s not really anyone.

When our teacups were empty Zengo invited me to pick a few oranges from his tree. As I picked oranges and removed their stems and placed them in a white plastic bag, he said, if you like the opera, there are lots of good classical concerts in Los Angeles, some of them free. We made plans to go to one, but I moved away very suddenly after that. Sasha slept on my couch for ten days and casually tipped me towards another universe, and then I spent the summer going to friends’ weddings, and the day after coming back from a month in Utah I had coffee with Brandi—my second-last friend in LA—on the bright green Astroturf at Cafecito Organico, and as soon as I sat down she told me she was moving to Pittsburgh, and I knew at that moment I would leave, but I didn’t make the decision officially until I was sick with covid in a basement in Newfoundland, where I’d gone for another wedding, my friend Oliver’s, and in that cool quiet basement, hearing the sounds of women and children thud and shriek throughout the house—Oliver had four or five kids, and was about to marry their mother—my heart, though sick, was distinctly full, and this made me realize how deliriously unhappy I’d been waking up alone on that broken bed frame in Silver Lake, the physical toll the sadness had been taking on the hollow muscular organ in my chest. My ambition, I felt, was murdering me, and I should not let it. I arranged to sublet the McCollum house on a week’s notice from a lawn chair on Oliver’s wraparound porch in Paradise, Newfoundland, beside two large white styrofoam coolers of leftover wedding beer, and after that I only went back to Los Angeles to pack up my things.