Closer to Heaven
California Northern magazine

For more than a decade, Kong Tith, a wry and wiry senior monk , has been driven–by dreams, he says–to build dozens of colossal Buddhist statues at the Wat Dhammararam, located just off an industrial stretch of Highway 99 frontage. Rendered in chicken wire, wood and concrete, the statues were declared “absolutely spectacular” by a characteristically breathless Huell Howser visiting Stockton with his public television crew several years ago. Most of the pieces illustrate scenes from the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who would become Buddha: the infant Prince Siddhartha, miraculously taking seven steps just after his birth to Queen Maya; Siddhartha as a young man, cutting his hair off with a sword and renouncing his life of privilege; and, in the twelve-foot-high, fifty-four-foot-long showpiece of the temple, Siddhartha reclining serenely in the moments before his death.

Painted in brazen golds and blues, each statue is the realization of a vision that came to Kong in his sleep, he says. Dreams guide every step of the endeavor, from each sculpture’s subject to its location on the temple grounds. If Kong is mistaken in the smallest detail–if a statue’s painted eyes are gazing in the wrong direction, for example–another dream comes to correct him.

Kong says he builds the statues, in part, to soothe the grief that has long dogged his community of Cambodian immigrants, many of whom came to the United States as refugees fleeing terror and killing in their home country. “Many times, people come in from outside the temple. They’re angry,” Kong says. “When they see the Buddha, they calm down. Their minds calm down.”

And a Song Shall Carry Them Home: The Journey of the Brothers Fermin
The (Stockton) Record

In 2005, a group of brothers left Acojtapachtlan, a village of about a dozen cement houses in the hills of southern Mexico. They came to San Joaquin County without education, without money and certainly without permission. They brought little more than their ambition and their audacity. One of them carried along his dream to save money, to buy instruments and to form a band. 

The brothers Fermin were like millions of other Mexicans who have crossed the border already and like thousands who, even today, will attempt it. But the ties of home and family are strong. On Oct. 17, the village of Acojtapachtlan honors its patron San Lucas with a festival. Two years of work in San Joaquin County had earned the brothers enough money for televisions, clothing, tools, accordions, guitars, speakers — and a truck to haul it back.

This series earned recognition from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Associated Press and the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.

Cynthia’s story
The (Stockton) Record

Cynthia Rosas was 20 years old and nine months pregnant with her second daughter, when I met her at a youth shelter. Not long after, while we were on a bus downtown, she told me she had always related to Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who had accompanied the Lewis and Clark expeditions.