Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all who celebrate! I always had a love-hate relationship with Thanksgiving, even more so than the winter holidays—situated right before college finals and the longer winter break, Thanksgiving break felt like a clear line in the sand between the haves and have-nots. Not just in terms of money—because buying plane tickets to travel around this time for just a few days home is quite expensive—but also love, tradition, care.
Does your family have enough love for you to want to see you for just a few days? Does your family have enough traditions, such that going home to partake in said traditions is a no-brainer? Basically, does your family care enough to have you home for only a few days before you have to leave again?
For most of college and law school, I would have said no. I had very particular—honestly, Americanized—visions of how to celebrate the holidays and express care, and my parents did not score well stacked up against my western ideals (just like how I did not stack up well against their Chinese ideals). I now realize that they loved and cared deeply, although it got lost in translation somewhere along the way between their intentions and my reception. Like antennas on an old TV, my receptors were misaligned to receive their affection. By adjusting those metal rabbit ears, I’m more able to meet my family where they are, rather than where teenage-me wished they were. (But that is a topic for another time.)
Thanksgiving always makes me feel quite melancholy and nostalgic, which prompted me to dig up an essay I wrote in freshman year of college about where I grew up: San Ramon, California. You can hear me trying to make sense of the transition between being cared for and having to care for myself, adolescence and adulthood, past and future. I’m sharing it with you now, in case you’re feeling melancholy and nostalgic during this weekend, too.
Parks are a staple of California suburbia. With the weather always above 50 degrees (and usually even warmer), not a day goes by in which parents don’t take their small children to play catch on the field or push them on the playground swings.
There are 46 parks in the 11.4 square miles of the quintessential upper-middle-class suburb of San Ramon, California. This translates to an average of one park per 0.25 square miles (a half mile-by-half mile block). Granted, not all of them are frequented as often as others, but it is clear that a good portion of San Ramon tax dollars is devoted to the creation of playgrounds and the upkeep of green grass.
On a typical summer day, parking is impossible to find within a one-mile radius of popular parks, as hundreds of parents and children flood into the area. The Fourth of July is an even more futile parking affair, as parks are the prime place to watch the annual fireworks display. In the winter, there are fewer park-goers than normal, but the parks are never completely deserted. The certainty with which I speak of these parks is a tribute to the largely unchanging nature of suburbia—each year is guaranteed to be exactly the same as the last, with exactly the same events at exactly the same locations.
Stereotypically, the suburbs are where one settles down to raise children. People imagine themselves pushing a stroller through the park, watching their now five-year-old climb the monkey bars, and then, finally, snapping photos of that same monkey-bars extraordinaire turned high school varsity athlete. It is a location of expectations, a definitive future to append chaotic pasts. Many of these expectations revolve around the city’s parks, structures that are sure to stand even as the stores in shopping centers go out of business and old houses get torn down to create new residential sprawls.
The suburbs don’t change much. But they do still change: new realty is introduced to capitalize on the “American Dream,” and new schools are erected to accommodate the influx of people to the Bay Area suburbs. The mere mention of “razing parks,” however, sets San Ramon officials reeling in indignation that they would ever consider destroying the lifeblood of childhood. New parks have been built over the years, but old parks have never been dismantled. San Ramon is very protective of its parks, all 46 of them.
During the daytime, the parks uphold the expected image of suburban living. The beautifully consistent expectations of suburban settlers are fulfilled as stay-at-home mothers bounce infants on their laps, glimpsing their futures by watching a four-year-old zip down the slide and a twelve-year-old play a game of pick-up football on the field.
A day-by-day comparison of all the parks in San Ramon yields essentially the same picture. All the park-goers, from adults to children, are engaged in wholesome, American activities, living a dream of which they’ve always, or never, dreamt. The park is a perfect encapsulation of the suburban bubble, where everyone is smiling and laughing and enjoying the warm California breeze.
At night, however, the parks embody the turbulence of living in an environment that never changes. It is illegal to be in parks after sunset in San Ramon, making the very act of being there exciting. Teenagers park their cars two blocks away (so as to not arouse suspicion from passing police cars), then trek over to loiter on the play structures in the dark. Passing around a joint, they take their hits and discuss life in a way that only suburban teenagers understand.
San Ramon is boring. There is nothing to do. It isn’t Manhattan, where adolescents buy their first fake IDs at fourteen and go to clubs every weekend. It is San Ramon, where we sneak out at night to chill on the swing sets of our youth, only because doing so is slightly more exhilarating than staying at home to do the same.