California Capers

Searching for an equilibrium of understanding in this brief sojourn to America.

Los Angeles is the persistence of the past. I moved to the city to start school the summer I was seventeen, so eager to embrace that delirious Californian sunshine after wallowing for years in the muggy climes of the heartland. But I didn’t uproot myself from the Midwest and go there straightaway. Rather, after my high school graduation, I spent an interstitial month in Suzhou, China, where my family lived at the time, my mind grappling with the contours of a future I could scarcely imagine, until I finally completed my transit one day in late August, soaring skyward on Northwest Airlines via Shanghai Pudong and Tokyo Narita.

Though it would take many more cities and experiences for me to make even incremental progress, it was in L.A. that I began to step into my adult identity in earnest. The confusion, hurt, and loneliness of my teenage years continued to ripple through my life during college and afterward, but at least I had space enough to release these feelings, to grow familiar with them, to bathe in that ache. The city was my first stop in learning just how unfathomably huge the world really is, and discovering the millions of pleasures and sorrows that constitute an existence.

Almost exactly twenty years later, I found myself making the same journey from Tokyo to LAX on the cusp of summertime. I spent two weeks criss-crossing the city by car, train, bus, and foot. I careened down the 10 in the backseat of a manic rideshare, eased into newly built stations on the E Line, trundled back and forth down Slauson with gritted teeth, ambled eastward on Venice Boulevard beneath the midday sun.

I thought a lot about who I was in college, whether I would even recognize that person now. On the one hand, there was an undeniably beautiful continuity in every reunion with old friends over burgers in Highland Park or tacos in Culver City, casually recollecting the past two decades or two months while drinking too much bourbon in Los Feliz and perambulating around Echo Park. Another part of me felt thrust into the inscrutable nowness of my visit, walking the tightrope of my creative and professional obligations, searching for an equilibrium of understanding in this brief sojourn to America.

Back in college, I would never have guessed that I’d end up in Japan, of all places, and that returning to the country and city that made me who I am would inspire such a strange froth of feelings. It was like I’d entered another realm from the moment I stepped into the departure lounge at Haneda Airport, the familiar casualness of American chitchat and the diverse assemblage of people at the gate a palpable reminder of my history and upbringing.

But L.A. was cloudy and cold when I first landed, temperatures much lower than Tokyo. I barely saw the sun for days on end. I stubbornly made my way around on public transit where possible, shuddering at the inhospitable infrastructure of this ashen metropolis, the trash strewn over the sidewalks, the brazen inequities, the callousness of mundane interactions.

If I could feel this way at thirty-seven, how was it that I managed to not only survive, but locate beauty and hope in a city like this so many years ago, when I barely even knew who I was? The thought of it alone was bewildering and unmooring. I couldn’t decide if I’d been more naive or less jaded. Able and willing to blindly believe that goodness would prevail, that all would turn out right as rain.

I kept on keeping on. The sun eventually came out. I forged new connections and communities, found relief and relaxation. I scooped up pieces of the past while wading through the waters of the present, squinting at shards of light dancing on the distant and not-so-distant horizon. America, in all its grotesquerie and sublime serenity, still pulses in me, day in, day out. I came back to Tokyo earlier this week and have happily reprised the rhythms of my routine, picked up projects where I left off. But the exclamation mark that is California still sings to me somewhere within, urging me to write it all down and to never forget its timeless, feckless glory.