M is scared. His anger tells me so. When he argues with the Hispanic man (race is always relevant in M’s world) in the line ahead of him just because the man has tattoos and wears his cap backwards, and when he gets into fights on the freeway because he gets cut off, it’s pretty clear that M’s bluster is the icing of a layered cake of insecurity and fear.

It’s hard to have a conversation with him that doesn’t come around to race, but like most humans, M is so much more than his flaw. He is a warm, friendly person (when not picking fights of course), and civic-minded to a fault. He is a loyal, caring and helpful neighbour. And if you’re one of those who trusts the judgement of animals, our dog adores him.

So when he says that Asians cut down all the trees in the neighbouring town for it’s in their blood, all we choose to do is gently narrow the target, and venture that property developers from any race or culture can be blinded by money.

Perhaps the largest layer in M’s cake is a fear of change. He has lived for more than 50 years in the same couple of square miles. He can point to the grassy patch where he used to wait for the schoolbus as a child. What’s changed is the demographic.

Exciting mix

From being an exclusively white neighbourhood, it’s now the exciting mix that characterises most of Los Angeles. There are fish sauce smells from the house behind M, frying red chilli smells from the house in front (that would be us—we eat a lot of chillies), dumpling houses next to the burger’s last stand. People from far-away places come here for jobs M doesn’t understand, buy expensive cars and price the real-estate market out of M’s reach.

People don’t have time for hellos, and no desire to just be a part of the neighbourhood, of the community. They race to work in the morning, and race back in the evening, frequently rounding corners into residential streets at frightening speeds, looking at their mobile phones as they drive.

But if M could see his world would be just as broken if, instead of Chinese people to blame, it was white hipsters, he’d realise that his problems have nothing to do with race, but a lot to do with the fact that the calendar on his fridge says ‘2015’. M’s bones know the word ‘anachronism’, even if he doesn’t. The world has passed M by.

When M will no longer fight, he will run. He will retire to Oregon where, he says, people like him spend their days in a Walden of their own making. (This always makes me imagine a day generations in the future when a bronzed hiking party of no discernable race discovers a tribe of shockingly white people hunting with blow guns deep in the Oregonian rainforest.)

What M is really running from though, is acceptance of his situation. But acceptance is fiendishly difficult. I myself struggle to accept the changes to the place I grew up in (which might explain why I live across the world in M’s neighbourhood, a Walden of my own making?). But I’ve also watched people rail against their circumstances continually for decades, and I can tell you it does not bring happiness.

However difficult, the day M forgoes his safe fast food burger dinner, and goes to the dumpling house to open-mindedly sample the delight of a plump, juicy pan-fried xiao long bao, is the day he will not fight with anyone on the freeway.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Los Angeles.