California: Joshua Tree National Park

Our second December trip to Southern California in as many years. On the cusp of Jordan’s 3rd birthday, we bring him “home” again, this time for a tour of the region that includes the high Mojave Desert, coastal San Diego County, and time again split between a few different houses, different family members, kids and cousins. His first visit to a U.S. national park: we buy an America the Beautiful annual pass (grabbing mine ASAP before a certain idiot-fascist’s face is printed on them). We rent out a house on the outskirts of Joshua Tree, an old California ranch home whose backyard is dotted with the funky, namesake trees, whose living room windows look out on the northward mountain slopes where the bajada meets the desert washes below. Jordan is growing into a resilient little kid, one who loves lying on the desert floor, sweeping sand up into his clothes, and tracing his favorite train tracks in whichever scenic patch of open ground we lead him to. He troops through these two weeks of late December, on long car rides, train trips, bouncing around the arid region like pinballs in a holiday-themed machine. He skips some naps and catches up elsewhere. Jetlag means he’s frequently up well before dawn; on our first morning in the state, we go out and grab breakfast at Black Bear Diner near my mom’s house in Chino. It’s the holidays, so I’m leaving everyone at least a $20 tip. After arriving at the Joshua Tree ranch home - home for the first stretch of the trip - Jordan settles into a nice pattern: exploring in the morning, coming home for lunch and a nap, playing with Mama in the backyard, and watching Thomas the Tank Engine and listening to vinyl records after dinner. My mom and I do groceries for the house, and wind up roasting a prime rib on Tuesday night; this is vacation, after all. We go out for little outings in the national park, walking the paths around the Hall of Horrors and Barker Dam. My dad fails to exercise basic outdoors safety and then throws a stink about it when I give him an earful. We head up to Keys View to take in the golden hour over the Coachella Valley, with views stretching southward toward Indio and the Salton Sea, and northward across the San Bernadino Mountains. A beautiful, memorable sunset sky - admired, as usual, from behind the steering wheel on our long drive back through the desert and downhill to the house.

At night, Jordan and Jane wander outside to stargaze. I find them standing in the dark in the backyard, singing “Twinkle Twinkle” rapturously. I ask Jordan how many stars he sees: “So many!” “Can you count them?” “One two three four five - TWENTY!” he yells. To his toddler brain, twenty is the pinnacle of multiplicity. He gets spooked when a bush rustles in the wind: “Is there snakes!?” “I think that was the wind, Jordan.” “I’m so scary [scared]!” He heads back inside for his bath and bed routine. I stay outside awhile with my tripod to frame the bristles of a nearby Joshua tree with Orion’s belt. On our last morning in the region, after firing off some time-sensitive, fellowship-related work emails, I head out for sunrise on my own while Jane and Jordan move through their jetlagged breakfast routine. On a pullout just inside the park boundary, I stop and inhale deeply. Fragrance of juniper and mesquite on the wind, clouds like wisps of fairy floss, and first light on mountains. I take long-lens shots of trees backlit by the rising sun. Satiated, I head back to help pack up the house and pick up the family. We drive back through the Inland Empire and to the Riverside downtown train station, to continue our journey in Orange County.

California: On Toddler Time

Near the end of our first week in California, we move down to Orange County. We stay this year with Jordan’s uncle Ray and aunt Kate, who bring us on a trip to San Diego along with Jordan’s cousins and grandparents. It’s been, more or less, exactly a year since we were with Jane’s side of the family, and it's both gratifying and bittersweet to see the little ones growing up and growing into their personalities more and more. In comparison to some of the extroverts we meet during the week, Jordan is moody and mellow, plays happily with others, but retreats into himself when things get a bit too much. At a holiday get-together at our high school friend’s house, Jordan leaves the other kids, opens a baby gate, and goes downstairs on his own. I find him singing to himself in the dark, and riding a little push-car at max speed around the empty kitchen (making use of those spacious, California single-family model homes). I watch him zoom along and see so much of myself (and Jane) in him. One night as I’m cuddling with him on the couch in Chino, Jordan tells me that he’s tired and that he wants to go home. “But we are home.” “I want to go to Brookline.” Two weeks and a total of seven changes-of-accommodation have taken a toll. I rub his back and tell him that I miss home too.

In between, lots of joy. Jane’s mom, who is sentimental without really knowing how to express it, invites us all to Jane and Kate’s childhood home in Anaheim for a Saturday family lunch. As the next-most sentimental person present, I corral everyone for a Christmas portrait and take shots of the house and the neatly-tended succulent garden in back. We ride the Pacific Surfliner down to San Diego with Jordan’s cousins and grandmother, and I spend most of the trip sitting next to and talking with cousin Luke, who at five years old tells me that he likes school more than home because he “learns a lot” and has friends. In San Diego, Jane and Jordan and I get a family caricature done by Khryzstof at his little booth next to the USS Midway, and Jane’s dad drives us to the San Diego Model Train Museum in Balboa Park, a building which essentially validates every fiber of Jordan’s being. The next morning, Jordan enjoys running around our hotel and nearby Seaport Village with cousin Clara, and swimming that evening with Mama in the hotel’s rooftop pool. The car ride back up to Orange County is heavy on traffic (the day before Christmas Eve), but Jordan talks through the whole two-and-a-half hour trip, our non-stop chatterbox and fount of stories, songs, and silly laughs. We head back to Chino to bookend the trip - by this point running on fumes, Jordan elects to spend most of Christmas Eve and Christmas hand-rolling model trains around the living room - the same model train set that my parents used to set up during my and Evelyn’s childhood at Rowland Heights. He also eats an entire bunch of organic bananas (six total) over 36 hours. We eat lunch on Christmas Day at the nearby Sizzler Restaurant - not our tradition growing up, but certainly the oddball tradition of Asians all over the region.

I tell my mom pretty frankly that we may not be back in California for a long time after this trip. She’s saddened and debates whether she should try to return the car seat that she recently purchased. Perhaps we said similarly a year ago (I genuinely can’t remember), but the feeling grows more acute the older we all get. I have a long conversation about this with Jane’s mom, one night in Orange County as the kids play before dinner. The feeling is that we have to focus on our own home life, and our home community now, much like how our parents did when they immigrated and left their parents behind in China and Taiwan. One generation later, the rulebook has changed. All of us (elders and children alike) have our own lives to lead in America, and family is created through choice and intention more than blood relation. Our grandparents crossed the Pacific to live with us throughout our childhood (or perhaps it was for air conditioning, says my mom); Jordan’s grandparents won’t do the same, nor can we expect them to. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t ask our two-going-on-three-year-old child to resolve these different worlds, different threads of his past, by himself. All we can do is to teach him to be strong and empathic, kind and capable of creating community - loving those who love him most, wherever he goes.

We arrive back in Brookline on a Saturday night; tired but quite happy to be home. For the first time ever, Jordan actually naps toward the end of the long plane ride across the continent. We set about chores: laundry, cleaning, ordering takeout for dinner, and swapping out an old battery in the hallway smoke detector. Detoxing from two weeks of whirlwind commotion and endless Bluey, Jordan occupies himself by flipping through his favorite books in the quiet of our living room. Somewhere along the way, we get a rather kind and thoughtful text from Jane’s mom, who says she appreciated everyone’s effort in bringing the grandchildren together for the holidays. We invite them to visit and tour New England with us in the new year.

California: Orange County

In mid-December, we set out on a chilly Saturday afternoon for Jordan’s first cross-country trip to see his grandparents and relatives in Southern California: a two-week stay, exactingly divided between Jane’s family, still located in Orange County, and my family, now located in the Inland Empire. After a relaxed night of exploring Boston Logan airport, lounging around overnight at the adjacent Hilton, and ordering BBQ takeout from East Boston, Jordan troops through his first transcontinental flight - a beastly 7 hours on the plane, all told, in the winter months. He somehow gets through it with a combination of fruit snacks, complimentary airplane breakfast trays, and several hours of screen-time: the sleepytime moon-and-stars on the plane screen, plus cartoons uploaded to our iPad. He does not sleep. We land, and after waiting for all the other passengers to depart, I lug our two suitcases, two backpacks, and travel crib off the plane while Jane puts Jordan back into the stroller on the jet-bridge. We emerge into the odd haze and bright sunlight of December in Los Angeles.

Southern California. We have mostly avoided it through the years since we left and started our careers here on the East Coast, despite the family, childhood friends, and nostalgic places that remain there. Yet, with Jordan now in the picture, it was inevitable that we would eventually bring him back to visit his parents’ childhood home. There are many things that I hate about the place, which I am going to air out so that I can move on to its redeeming qualities, if any. And, I want to be clear, some of these are not the fault of Los Angeles or California themselves, but rather the milieu that we grew up in, and are inevitably surrounded by whenever we return “home” for a visit. The disregard for the natural environment, as evidenced by the endless sprawl, the total lack of land ethic or conservation ethic, the glittering cities-in-the-desert fed by stolen water from the Owens River Valley. The rampant materialism: the car culture, the shopping mall culture, the second homes, the third and fourth cars (as if our planet could afford whatever our bank accounts could afford). The utter lack of season or temporality or passage of time (aside from hot-and-dry and slightly-cooler-and-dry), made all the worse by the denizens who swear by the weather and could not imagine anything better. The sense of confinement: an entire region embalmed in childhood memories, accompanied by a lifeway that seems to constantly, vociferously encourage the default, the rat-race, the re-prioritizing of wealth over reflection, the why-live-your-life-when-you-could-have-this. The being-confined-in-the-car and lectured about where we should live and how many children we should have, as if we weren’t capable of making our own decisions (I won’t outright state which grandparents did this, but a gentle hint: the ones who’ve made the far lesser effort in terms of time, presence, or thought/energy spent on child-rearing). I hate all of this, can’t stand any of it. Jane’s opinion is perhaps worse.

So what is redemptive about this place? Here is what I love: The boundless space. The uniquely Western experience of open skies, the miles of chaparral and alluvial floodplain and desert, stretching out between wherever you are and the Pacific coastline. The sense that there is a truly beautiful landscape buried somewhere a few layers beneath - if one could but wipe all the houses and restaurants and strip malls and parking lots and industrial office parks off its surface. The culture. The interplay between immigrant dreams, mother languages, multigenerational upbringings, and homegrown cuisines that Angelenos so freely navigate, admix, live by. The history of the place: native, Spanish, mestizo, Asian diaspora, and beyond. Family. And yes, that Mediterranean climate. The beach in December. One could get used to it, it’s true.

These redeeming qualities are the things we tried to focus on showing little Jordan, in some small way, during his first visit here. One day, perhaps, he’ll forgive us for not visiting more often. One day, perhaps like us, he’ll have a core of fondness for this place, even as he tries to find his own, different place in the wider world. Even as he learns that some places cannot be called home, no matter where the heart once was.

———

December 15, 2024: With Jordan up well before dawn thanks to jetlag, we head out to catch sunrise at Newport’s Back Bay. Jordan enjoys running along the trails overlooking the estuary here. We then visit the beach in Corona del Mar before heading home for a nap. In the afternoon, we drive to Newport’s Fashion Island shopping center to eat lunch and meet up with my mom. It’s quite sentimental watching Jordan play around beside the outdoor koi pond and the same fountains that I grew up with (well, except the splash pad, which is long gone).

December 16, 2024: A morning walk in Peters Canyon Regional Park. Jordan loves playing with the reeds in the willow grove here, but he gets quite upset because he can’t fathom the idea of a loop hike (we later realize that he pooped somewhere on the hike, and was trying to get us to hustle back to the car for a diaper change). We meet up with a high school classmate at a local park. In the afternoon, I cook dinner for Jane and family.

December 17, 2024: A morning visit with Jane’s parents to Crystal Cove State Park in Newport, followed by brunch, a nap, and an afternoon meet-up with local friends and their toddlers in Irvine.

December 18, 2024: We go out with Jane and her family to San Juan Capistrano to show Jordan his first Spanish mission - a bit of California history well-known to every fourth-grader in the state. Jordan enjoys running up and down the corridors of the historic mission complex. In the afternoon, we take Jordan and cousins to South Coast Plaza to have dinner and let them gawk at the mall’s giant Christmas trees, toy trains, and carousel.

December 19, 2024: A morning hike in Irvine’s Bommer Canyon with Jordan’s grandma, uncle, and cousin. After the walk, we break off from the others and take Jordan out for second breakfast at a local shopping plaza, which consists of four orders of hashbrowns at Dunkin’s (Massholes that we are) plus a large Orange Dream Machine at Jamba Juice (“Jamba Juice! Jamba Juice!” he chants for the rest of the trip). In the afternoon, we visit Irvine’s Great Park and Jordan has fun riding the free (taxpayer-funded) carousel over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…

December 20, 2024: We meet up with our high school science teacher (still “Mr. Wahl’ to us) and his wife, visiting San Joaquin Marsh (my first visit there in nine years) and a memorial to their son (our classmate) Michael. Jordan’s interest in the preserve’s birding brochure (which he studies intently in his stroller) puts a smile on Mr. Wahl’s face. Later that morning, we pack our bags and head over to my family in Chino, CA.