I just finished reading The City and the City by China Miéville, the first book of his that I’ve read that wasn’t set in New Crobuzon and his Secondary World of Bas-Lag.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

As with New Crobuzon and the city of Armada in The Scar, Miéville once again displays his penchant for creating bizarre and memorable settings. The subject of the title are the fictional cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are supposed to be in the Real World somewhere in the southeast of Europe.

The City and the City is ostensibly a detective story, about the investigation of a murder, which rapidly spirals into an international incident. But the part of it that really blew my mind was the central conceit: Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space. There are areas that are “total”, meaning that they are entirely in one city or the other, but there are a lot of spaces that are “cross-hatched”, literally overlapping areas in the city that are simultaneously in Beszel and Ul Qoma. But the even crazier thing is that the populace has been trained over the centuries to ignore one another. While citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma walk the same streets, they deliberately “unsee” each other, and even do so with the buildings and transit ways that are not in their reality. They even “unhear” sounds from foreign cars and “unsmell” the non-local food.

In fact, to acknowledge the presence and existence of the other city is considered the greatest of crimes, known as “breaching”. If committed, you forfeit your rights to the mysterious agency known as Breach, which is the hidden force that maintains this bizarre division.

What blows my mind about this is precisely because it is plausible. Never mind that there are lots of divided cities in the world: East and West Berlin prior to unification, Jerusalem, the cities straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. The one real world city that Beszel and Ul Qoma perhaps brings to mind is Kosovo, which itself exists in a sort-of existential limbo. But the Orwellian process of unseeing is even more mundane than that. Many reviewers use the example of how lots of people unsee the homeless. But there are other circumstances as well. On public transit, it seems that people readily unsee and unhear each other. Motorists have a tendency to unsee pedestrians in L.A.

And there are the more insidious, institutional forms of unseeing: for example, how people tend to unsee ghettos, which police forces appear to selectively see and unsee. This was made manifest to me during the L.A. Riots in 1992: whatever the reality, it seemed at the time that the police had decided to unsee the violence going on between blacks and Koreans, instead focusing on defending the more affluent parts of the city.

If anything, the brain is designed to unsee that which we do not wish to see. It is the reason why eyewitness accounts are so unreliable. If you weren’t looking for it, you’re probably not going to see it, never mind that the photons actually did hit your retina, and an electrical signal did get transmitted to your visual cortex. Unseeing is the way we make the stimulus-laden world bearable. Without this selectivity, we’d be constantly overwhelmed.

But this selectivity also leads to neglect, and this allows us to believe ridiculous things, like the idea that racism and sexism no longer exist, for example.

It is in this mind set that I think about the recent debates about the definition of the Eastside of L.A.

I’ve had my own thoughts about the geography of L.A. myself, and I don’t ever remember thinking of L.A. as a city with an obvious axis. NYC has uptown, downtown, and the boroughs. Chicago has the Northside and the Southside (and the Westside). Talking about the Eastside never occurred to me. There were districts: Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, etc. On the opposite side of the city, there is a district known as West L.A. It’s only in the last decade or so that I became aware that you could think of the Westside as a single monolithic entity, so the idea of imagining a monolithic Eastside was even more foreign.

But obviously, a sample size of one is almost worthless, and there are lots of long-time Angelenos who think and have always thought of the Eastside as east of downtown.

This seems to be a sane definition of the Eastside. Regardless of how much Westsiders ignore Downtown L.A., it is still functionally the center of the city. The major freeways all converge in downtown, which can be considered their point of origin, and they are named for their distant destination: The San Bernardino Freeway, the Pomona Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Harbor Freeway. And while lots of people commute away from the city, the flows of rush hour (or hours) are still mostly recognizable: in the morning, the heaviest flow is towards downtown and in the evening, the heaviest flow is away from downtown. The light rail, subway, and commuter rail systems are centered on downtown. Dodger Stadium and Staples Center are in sight of downtown. Naturally, the seat of political power—City Hall—is in downtown.

To ignore downtown is to ignore history: this is where the city was founded, where it was first named El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula. But even before this, this is the place the Tongva people called Yangna, the Place of Smoke.

The reason why calling Echo Park and Silver Lake part of the Eastside is problematic is because it is a form of unseeing. It ignores the true Eastside, the people who live there, and their history. And it ignores the centrality of downtown L.A. If Echo Park and Silver Lake is on the Eastside, what are they east of?