Growing old and alone in Fremont

What a shock to open up the Times Digest, a condensed digital version of The New York Times that arrives in my "in" box each day just before midnight, and see a Fremont, Calif., dateline on a truncated story headlined "Quietly, Elderly Immigrant Population Surges."

A shock because while I'm used to the Times spilling lots of ink on the place where I was born (Berkeley) and the place where I live now (Portland), I don't recall more than a mention or two of the place where I moved as a 5th grader and lived until age 19 and the start of my junior year of college.

That place, of course, would be Fremont, a suburban bedroom community 40 miles south of San Francisco. Previously, we'd lived in Union City, a smaller, adjacent town, in a working-class neighborhood populated by fellow Mexican American families. It was a jolt when we moved to Fremont, where I was greatly outnumbered and initially intimidated by my white, middle-class peers.

One of the fixtures back then was the Fremont Hub, an outdoor mall at the corner of Fremont Boulevard and Mowry Avenue, roughly half a mile east from where I attended high school. I remember the mall as a strictly functional place where we shopped at a discount drugstore and department stores like Mervyn's and Montgomery Ward, both now defunct. It was not a place where I hung out, at least not in the way teenagers do at today's cookie cutter indoor malls.

So, imagine the incongruity I felt upon reading about The 100 Years Living Club, an all-male group of elderly immigrants from India who meet five days a week at The Hub to sip their chai tea and commiserate over the loneliness and isolation they often feel as new arrivals in a new country. Many are widowers and live alone.

In the full version of the article, "Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left With No One to Talk To," Patricia Leigh Brown reports that these Indian men make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group -- the ethnic elderly.

"Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say that America’s ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. Seventy percent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children...

"Immigrant elders leave a familiar home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home in communities like Fremont that demographers call ethnoburbs," Brown writes.

"A generation ago, Fremont was 76 percent Caucasian. Today, nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 percent are Latino and it is home to one of the country’s largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a setting for the best-selling book “The Kite Runner”). Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque; a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple."

My mother, in her early 80s, still lives in Fremont, so I've seen these demographic changes take place over the past two decades. On my visits home, I have become accustomed to the sights of turbaned Sikhs and hijab-wearing Afghan women and wasn't at all surprised to meet the Indian doctor who performed an angioplasty on my mom last year.

Here in Oregon, where Latinos constitute the largest minority group, it's easy to imagine a lot of elderly Mexican immigrants feeling just as lonely and out of place as the members of The 100 Years Living Club in Fremont.

Brown has done a splendid job illuminating an issue that goes beyond Fremont or even California. Since 1990, she reports, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 percent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050.

That's a long time from now, so who knows how accurate such a projection may prove to be? In the meantime, it's good to see Fremont mentioned in the same breath as Chicago as cities that are responding to the needs of elderly immigrants.

"Fremont began a mobile mental health unit for homebound seniors and recruited volunteer “ambassadors” to help older immigrants navigate social service bureaucracies," Brown writes. "In Chicago, a network of nonprofit groups has started The Depression Project, a network of community groups helping aging immigrants and others cope."

My old hometown. A national leader in culturally-specific social services? Imagine that.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times