How to Be From Somewhere

An Unexpected Discovery

Los Angeles Traffic by Luke Jones

Only one of the two small elevators at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA works, but the young person with gorgeous forearm tattoos working the front desk assures me that everything’s fine. The Ace (calling itself “ADTLA”) is designed to communicate a casual, rock vibe — autographed electric guitars for sale glow in a case behind the front desk, the back wall holds shelves of vinyl albums and turntables from multiple eras, and the usual hotel-room stationery is a slight stack of music staff paper, presumably for personal “notes.” (Get it?) The whole place leans back in its chair and says, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Relax, man. It’s cool.”

An out-of-order sign finally appears in front of the broken elevator the next day and remains for the rest of my stay. We guests accumulate in the checkered-tile lobby, working out amongst ourselves how to divvy up the trips in a way that balances light-pandemic safety and something like speed.

The nonchalance about the broken elevator squares with my LA experience overall. As my son, a new LA resident and lover of NYC, puts it, people in LA have just accepted that the general moving around from place to place is fundamentally broken and also nothing can be done about it. Traffic in LA is correctly notorious, continuously snarled, interminable, resistant to reason. Going any distance at all takes at least 40 minutes, likely longer if you travel between 8 am and 12 pm or 2 and 8 pm. And nearly every part of the city is unwalkable or underserved by public transportation, leaving you crawling along sealed in a car, anxious about crossing another four sclerotic lanes in time to make the correct freeway exit. Even with a steering wheel in my hands, I feel passive, removed from the neighborhoods and lives I pass through and by. I might as well be watching a movie of glitz giving way to homeless encampments under overpasses clogged with people slowly on their way to somewhere else.

For all the legitimate criticism of its traffic, moving around New York means being in New York. We almost never drive in NYC because we almost never need to, but driving through Manhattan puts you on the defensive, reminding you that pedestrians rule. It’s not uncommon to have people remarkably close around your car at intersections, narrow streets — pretty much all the time. Besides, New York pulls you out of your apartment or vehicle onto the sidewalks and into the parks, encouraging you to be a participant in the city, one among a beautiful many.

I’m not in LA to fight with the transportation, however; I’m here for my son’s first Parents’ Weekend put on by his new university. The point of Parents’ Weekend is to assure you that your adultish child is properly stimulated, educated, supported, and safe. Enriched even. Most of all, the university wants to show families that their children have found a home in a vibrant community, one that they will identify with forever in their hearts and financial planning. My son’s university has a deeply devoted community — so many moms and dads proudly fill campus with their PARENT lanyard and paperback-book-sized name tag dangling in front of officially licensed university merchandise, dads’ eyes shielded from the aggressively optimistic LA sun by logoed hats, moms’ things ported in tote bags bearing pictures of the mascot ready to defend them in battle. I look into participating in the spirit with a t-shirt or hat, but the checkout line at the campus bookstore looks like the 110 highway at 8 am, and the New York in me isn’t up for it.

I feel a little on the outside of it all. What would it take to feel inside? What does it mean to be from somewhere?

Q, unlike her brother, doesn’t like New York. Walkability and public transportation give kids early freedom to move around on their own and with their friends, but the city receives boys much differently than girls. The comfortable neighborhoods shrink when you’re female and on your own, especially at night. And NYC pushes itself upon you constantly, its noise and people and towering height incessantly after your attention, often leaving your whole self feeling like a bruise. Q wants to leave the city and the state for college, ideally for a small liberal arts school somewhere in the Northeastern woods. She wants to find more of her people in less of a city.

My wife and I have lived in New York for over 25 years, but neither of us are from here. My wife’s origins are layered and complex. She was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the U.S. at a young age. Her family was sponsored by Lutherans in Minnesota, and she did most of her growing up there where basically no one within 50 miles looked like her family. Like me, she has spent more of her life in New York than anywhere, but she is in many ways as much from Vietnam and Minnesota as she is from NYC. Food, language, family — all branches extending from a tree planted across years and the world.

I’m from a small rural town in southwest Kansas, about as far away from New York as you can get on any sort of map or measurement. But whether it’s the traffic or weirdly happy sunshine in LA or the slow sprawl of the Midwest, I find myself most from New York when I’m away from it. Waiting in line for a coffee back in Kansas, I see how quick some corners of my life have become and how my levels of patience have been recalibrated. (New Yorkers know how to stand in lines — as long as the lines keep moving.) I can see how I have developed hardened opinions about what is and is not a bagel and the benefits of a folded pizza slice. I can see that where I’m from is the place I can retreat to and feel at home, where my expectations, both good and bad, are most met and have therefore become hidden assumptions. Leaving reveals those expectations, makes them salient again and present for examination. And now and again the Kansas in me reminds me of New York’s parochialism, how satisfied it can be with itself, and therefore how incurious and mistaken it can be about so much of the country.

M and I tire of all the pre-fab Parents’ Weekend activities, and we spend our last afternoon and evening together driving around LA running errands. He wants a new rug for his dorm room, maybe a lamp to throw softer light against the cinder-block walls, and even a few plants, probably fake ones so that he doesn’t have to worry about keeping them alive. We find the rug he wants but not the lamp, and we pick up four fake potted grasses that look nicer than they should. It’s not lost on me that these are things to make himself a home here in Southern California.

We find it easy to talk about where we’re from in broad terms — Kansas, the Midwest, Vietnam, Minnesota, New York — but we are always from places within places. I’m from rural Kansas, but also from a house in town with a tall tree in the side yard perfect for climbing, shelves of books, a brother shooting baskets for hours in a neighbor’s driveway, fresh biscuits for dinner that steam madly when you split them. I’m from the sound of the Santa Fe railroad murmuring through in the night, cars full of coal or wheat or cattle, always with a little room for my dreams. I’m from the cadence of my father coming down the stairs on crutches given to him as a child by polio. I’m from mourning doves calling as the sun retreats, making the world seem somehow at once so empty and so full. I’m from where at night you can put down the window and drive as fast as you dare on a long-legged road and never see another car, the sky a broken black jewel above you. I’m from where I never quite felt like I fit in, where people often found me odd and inscrutable, someone already on the way to somewhere else.

Wherever M&Q end up and whether they like it or not, they will always be from New York. And M&Q will always be from our bit of it — our table where we pass huge helpings of rice and noodles and wicked jokes, from an apartment filled with music and books and more books. M&Q will always be from us.

How unexpected to discover that to truly know where you’re from, you have to leave it.