By Stephen Lawson
Last summer we visited that insistently cheery icon of American pop culture, Disneyland. It’s meant to be a world unto itself, cradled within walls and trees that are supposed to block out all the views outside, though I tried this time and found I could easily see through the gaps. It was my first trip there since I moved back from Hong Kong. The park was too crowded and most of the rides weren’t as thrilling as I remembered, but on a deeper level I was very happy in “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Far from breaking Disneyland’s spell, those glimpses of the buildings and freeways outside were part of a larger attraction: Orange County. It was in the hazy sky and baking sun above, too, and in the bizarrely non-native but mature trees and flowers around the park.
It all felt so much like home. I’ve never actually lived in Orange County, but I grew up right across the border and went to school there. It was Orange County that dominated my childhood and teen-aged universe: its stucco homes and strip malls, its doting Cub Scout parents, its bomber plants, its Space Shuttle, the warm evenings of tennis, rainy drives through the green hills, the Guns ‘n’ Gold shop, a right-wing agenda clothed in the gingham of small-town values. I knew where I was. A few miles up Imperial Highway was the barrio of La Habra – which people who lived in the heights near us called “Guadalahabra” – and a few blocks away, my high school. My best friend in elementary school told a joke: “What do you call a white man driving a Cadillac? A successful businessman. Black? A doctor with a thriving practice. Mexican? Grand theft auto.”
I moved to Northern California more than a decade ago, but Orange County memories keep rolling along like a miniature railroad. The only ticket I need is the music of Tom Waits, a would-be sailors’ troubadour who hails from nearby. The sounds and the place have a connection like a sturdy Boy Scout knot. I’ve always blamed that on the cassette copy of “Anthology” I got in my early 20s just as I started dating a man from Garden Grove. I lived in LA then, and after many long drives the whole thing ended like the sad ballads on that tape. Yet as I listened to Waits again on Interstate 5 the day after that trip to Disneyland, I realized it was more than a chance association. He sings of foreign mysteries and the inexorable call of the sea but also of isolation and homesickness. Though he’s said to have two distinct sounds, those themes play off each other constantly. In “Singapore,” a typical creaking, rollicking Waits tune, every verse begins, “We sail tonight for Singapore” and elaborates another fantasy of wanderlust and debauchery. But much of his work comes back to a wistful, landlocked loneliness. The ballad “Whistle Down the Wind” is about a man who’s “been as far as Mercy and Grand.” He sings,
And sometimes the music from a dance will carry across the plains That’s the feeling I have about Orange County, of a place where the local and the familiar is all that’s really real. I remember it as Reagan Country, where my Mormon Spanish teacher grinned proudly as he played the inauguration and hostage release live on the radio that January morning in 1981. He didn’t hear any revolution that day, just the sound of America coming to its senses. There, life had always been about “America – Love It or Leave It,” with the threatening, the exotic, and the just plain different all pushed to the other side of that imaginary line. Apart from small outposts of mohawked punks and other discontents, the county I knew was comfortable, complacent, and insular.
Yet mixed with that isolation was a fanciful twitterpation with foreign lands. Disneyland wasn’t the only particleboard jewel box of exoticism. There used to be another theme park just up the road, Japanese Village and Deer Park, where divers would retrieve a cultured pearl just for you. Irvine, then rural, had Lion Country Safari, with replica Masai and Zulu villages. Motels and family restaurants laden with theme kitsch still litter Anaheim’s landscape. The downtown of Westminster, named for the storied borough of London, was decorated faux Shakespearean.
Other parts of America share the same garish xenophobia. The irony of Orange County is that it’s been a global crossroads for centuries. Spanish Jesuits, commanding an army, claimed the land in the 18th century as they built missions up the coast to hold off Russian expansionism. Later it was part of a Mexican province. Then Germans settled Anaheim and immigrants from Japan helped establish agriculture in the county.
Just over the county’s southern border lies Camp Pendleton, where the Marines trained for World War II beach landings. Some came back after the war and watched as aerospace factories and tract homes bloomed like the singing flowers in Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. In the Fifties, as these men flocked to the Magic Kingdom, many of their young sons faced a future that would have more in common with the Jungle Cruise than with a mission to Mars. When those sons came home from their own adventure land, their South Vietnamese allies followed, first to Pendleton, soon to Westminster, and then all over the county.
Today South Korean automakers and Taiwanese high-tech companies run their U.S. operations from new industrial parks, and the county still lies a short drive – or a long walk – from the Mexican border. As we drove toward the San Diego County line, we saw a warning sign along the freeway illustrated with a silhouette of a family running: Undocumented immigrants crossing the lanes to evade the border patrol. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of the population was foreign born.
Those who came to Orange County from across an ocean or a border must see it differently than I do, as a place of change and opportunity. Now it’s their county more than mine. A visit of just a day and a night can’t show me everything that’s changed after nearly 20 years away.
What does a swirl of memory and imagination matter in today’s world, where the meeting of countries and cultures is so inescapably physical? For me and for America, it means more than I like to admit. Though my view of the outside world is more sober than that of the people who designed the Pirates of the Caribbean, or of Waits’ narrator in “Singapore,” who says he “Drank with all the Chinamen, walked the sewers of Paris,” the American delusion factory is part of where I come from.
The squeaky globe I gazed at as a child, imagining lands of firelight and tile roofs, is long gone. It was all an invention anyway, no more real than the sense that we were shrinking on Monsanto’s Innerspace ride. But I remember being so fooled by that illusion that I touched my best friend’s arm just to make sure. The gesture made no sense; if we were shrinking, we were shrinking together, and the world, like those Styrofoam snowflakes that loomed above, was closing in on us both. I can’t forget that moment any more than I can forget his Cadillac joke or the sound of the fireworks carrying all the way to our backyards on summer nights. Those are the knots in my rigging, and I lost that merit badge somewhere long ago. I can’t untie them now.
Copyright © 2003 Stephen Lawson