Sacramento's special hodgepodge 20 December 1999 I didn't move to Sacramento until 1995, and still spend a lot of time telling old friends in other cities why I like this place so much. Jimmy Yee's selection as the city's first Asian American mayor may become my new shorthand for explaining the prime attraction. More than river vistas or satin summer nights or even our fabled proximity to attractions from the City to the Sierra, what I like about our town is its diversity. The passing of the mayoral torch from a former Chicano farm worker to a former Chinese American day laborer -- the oath administered by a congressman who was interned with his Japanese American family as a child -- speaks volumes about that. I drive along a block on Broadway where the blend of people and cultures that shapes Sacramento is echoed in the store fronts. Starting at C&B Liquors and walking east is like strolling the plaza of nations: New Station Chinese restaurant, Casa Grande Tortilla Factory, Maharani Indian Restaurant, New Edokko Japanese Noodle Restaurant, an Indian and Fijian grocery, a vacant cell phone shop, the Catholic Store, a mailboxes service, Broadway Hardware and, finally, Jamaica House. Few of the world's most cosmopolitan cities can boast a richer lineup. That same diversity is abundantly on display every Sunday morning when we gather under the W-X freeway at the boisterous farmers market where I've learned that not even a former football lineman should stand between a bargain-hunting 4-foot, 6-inch Hmong lady and the best vegetables. The crowds there sorting through bok choy, nopales and lemon grass might be standing in a lobby at the United Nations, so rich is the tapestry of colors, clothes and manners. That is not a universal condition in our region. Some Sierra foothill towns and outlying counties are among the most uniformly monoethnic in the state. (Although many of us still think of Orange County as the whitest, most Republican area in the state, I read not long ago that the most common last name of people buying houses there nowadays is Tran.) But in the city of Sacramento, diversity is more the rule than the exception, an enclave where the demographic future has arrived a little earlier than elsewhere. It is no accident that U.S. Census officials selected Sacramento as a prime test case for the coming 2000 head count; no other metropolitan area better mirrors the national diversity in a single locale. Los Angeles is multicultural, to be sure, but disproportionally Hispanic when measured against the national average. San Francisco similarly is overbalanced with Asian Americans. River City is no one-note symphony. Here we tap into cultural traditions and ethnic heritages from around the world. As Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the big crowd at the Japanese American Citizens League last week, it's almost as if the United States gets a head start on all the other nations: "For 300 years, we've been getting the best people from all the other cultures -- the people who weren't afraid of leaving home, of leaving everything behind, of starting again." That constant selection and sifting has been America's greatest strength, a process refreshed anew each generation. Being from Alaska, I am naturally enough a big fan of ice hockey. I was especially thrilled when America's young amateurs defeated the mighty Russian team in the 1980 Olympics, and there was a small but telling lesson about diversity illuminated by that experience. One need only look at the names on the American team roster to see what I mean. Of course there were boys of Anglo and Irish heritage, as you would expect -- players with names such as Craig and Johnson, McClahanan and O'Callahan. But there were also star players named Eruzione, Pavlevich, Janaszak and Verchota. It almost seemed an unfair advantage: Our team got to pick the best from all those nationalities, and they were all Americans and they all skated in jerseys of red, white and blue. That advantage continues to serve the country well -- in the competition for economic strength, in the competition of scientific and scholarly discoveries and in the competition of political ideals. In a world full of changes, we can't be sure of winning every game, but as long as we attract the best from all the rest of the world, we don't have to worry about anybody else's hockey teams -- or their medical researchers, or their software engineers or their soldiers, for that matter.