The West

i finished the first draft of my large paper lastnight, and aside from some french homework and reading for my other class, i feel--finally--at leisure to write again.

i went to New Jersey...three weeks ago for my grandmother's 80th birthday.

New Jersey.

i was born and raised in California, a first generation American and all that. but i don't think anyone will understand the distinctions i make between an American and a Californian, unless you are both, like i am. this state is one of the younger ones, added to the union...oh, i don't know, sometime after 1849. this place doesn't have the history, the age that other states have, especially those on the east coast. where i am specifically in southern California is a place that is still developing--the avocado fields and orange trees are gradually being pushed back into the hills, but there is still a lot of empty farmland around us. new shopping centers, housing communities, public schools, corporate centers are being built here everyday. and even before them the land consisted of just fields. my university is the same way. it is only 40 years old and our oldest buildings are from the 60s. even those are being torn down to make way for new, more modern constructions. the room i am sitting in at this very moment can't be older than i am.

you can imagine how i felt, then, when i went to Jersey and saw what kind of buildings they have there ( i was in South Jersey, by the way, with all the Wawa stores). we had to take the red eye out on thursday night, which means we got there around 10am on friday morning, which means i didn't get any sleep thursday night. but despite my fatigue, my eyes were wide open drinking in the colonial style housing in Philadelphia, and later, the large houses spread haphazardly around Jersey. i could imagine so much history, so much age, in these places. i didn't care that the roads had potholes and that the houses weren't sitting in neat rows facing the same direction. i didn't care that my uncle called the place the ghetto. i didn't care that the powerlines were above ground, on rickety wooden poles.

because i am starved of history.

here in California, i always took pleasure in leaving Irvine. San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey and Santa Cruz: all these places had so much more history. i worked the book festival again this year and i loved seeing the UCLA campus again. they have brick buildings from the early 1900s, and the grand houses surrounding the campus are from the 1920s. i loved going to Hollywood Hills and seeing the houses there that emulate old Hollywood, with their 1920s architecture. Once in LA i saw a decrepit movie theatre that looked as if it could have been something grand in the 30s and 40s. but on the side of the theatre, in block-lettered spanish was a notice that a swap meat was held inside the theatre every weekend. just across the street was a park. i could imagine how it would have been: moviegoers would enjoy a movie, then sit in the park in their wedge heels and nylons, with their blazers and hats and talk. the city would have been quieter then. but the park was littered with trash and the low walls were pitted with scars from skateboards and other misuse. it made me sad.

that's how it was when i went to Monterey and Santa Cruz: i loved the boardwalk and old pictures of Santa Cruz taken in the early 1900s. i loved the old canneries at Monterey. i love the Hotel del in San Diego for the same feeling of age. and even in Laguna Beach, the old Laguna Hotel boasts pictures and telegraphs from early decades. but this was the extent of my history. the early 1900s and no further. this coupled with the fact that i'm a first generation American...i don't have much of a heritage. most of it was left behind on the Islands when my parents came here.

i truly am starved of history.

so New Jersey and what we saw of Philadelphia was something like a treat. we're planning to go to Europe in September and i can only imagine how old those places are, how much memory is in that earth, and in that stone. we're not staying nearly long enough, but we plan to go back.

we're watching another French movie in class. in the last scene we saw for today, the children at the boarding school are watching a silent film from the 1920s with Charlie Chaplin. the laughter stops when an image of the Statue of Liberty comes up. its hard for me to fathom what they must have been thinking upon seeing it. the camera panned their faces, but even if they were acting, there was some truth in their looks. do they realize how young America is? do they realize that because of what she is and what she was founded on, her people are hard to define? because being an American doesn't mean coming from America.