Journey to the spring

Orlando didn't feel like the East Coast. The air and the water were soft and there was that lush Southern greenery, but everything else was new and generic. I knew the recent history of the place, that Orange County was largely open land in the Sixties when Disney picked it for its new, larger version of Disneyland. The county that we see now grew up around that project and Disney still dominates local politics, or so I have read. Nearby, Disney helped create Celebration, a master-planned community designed to evoke an old-fashioned small town just as Disney's Main Street USA does.

So initially I looked at Orlando as a place with no heritage, a tabula rasa upon which all this artificial junk had been built: Theme parks, upside-down buildings, kitschy restaurants. Only later did I think of the other Orange County. As I wrote in this essay, California's Orange County wasn't really a blank slate when Disneyland and suburban sprawl overran it after World War II. Yet, like this place with the uprooted upside-down classical building, it must have seemed so to Walt Disney and others who built places like Old World Village.

They put the "small world" of particleboard world harmony in these places because of the myth that there was nothing there to start with. In the case of Orange County, California, the fake globality of Disneyland and its cousins could only exist because its builders didn't know how other countries and cultures were actually woven into the place's history and present day. Believing Orange County wasn't already a kind of small world, and that it essentially had no history, was a requirement. After all, there can't be a Swiss mountain, a tropical lagoon and an old English town in Wyoming, for example, because they don't belong there. Everyone knows that's the West. (Buffalo Bill and Nate Salsbury told us so.) People mentally emptied both Orange Counties and then filled them up, because culture abhors a vacuum.

All this is by way of recommending Journey from the Fall, an epic drama about a family's escape from Vietnam and resettlement in Orange County, California. Arriving there in the Seventies and Eighties, they landed in an established universe where they didn't yet belong, but they found a way to recreate their world in a small way. Today, the Vietnamese of Orange County have a thriving community, mainstream success, and a measure of political power. But everyone needs a myth, a story that's more than facts and dates. Journey from the Fall goes a long way toward creating one.