When the Flames Went Out
February 04, 2026 at 03:16AMA year after the Eaton Fire burned down his Altadena house, Anthony Dinh Tran struggles with the idea of rebuilding. In his Los Angeles Review of Books essay, he examines what rebuilding really means: not just a structure, but a sense of safety, history, and belonging shaped by generations of displacement. Moving between the intimate and the systemic, Tran reflects on the shock of returning to a charred lot and scorched orange trees, the cruelty of inventorying a life for insurance forms, and the realization that Black households were disproportionately destroyed. Rebuilding, he suggests, isn’t a clear path forward but an acknowledgment that some losses can never be recovered, only carried.
There are clinical approaches to reconstructing a home: aisle by aisle (Costco as proxy), estimating what it would take to refill a kitchen, a bedroom closet, a garage. These systems work best when your life resembles a catalog. Most lives don’t. It’s the unintentional lists that are the hardest. I’ll be at a friend’s house and touch something and murmur, “I used to have this.” Gifts resurface as well: reminders of kindness, generosity, and a particular unevenness that makes you come back for more. I jot them down in my Notes app as an attempt to strip away sentimental value.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/03/rebuilding-altadena-eaton-fire/
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