angeleno

I still don't know how to drive. I promise I’m working on it.

Not knowing how to drive in LA is like not having air conditioning; it is inconvenience bordering on the inhumane, and most people will wonder how you survive. I will say that I don't survive easily, and only on the kindness of friends and family, but I do get by. There are buses and the occasional train in Los Angeles.

Someone told me that if I don't know how to drive in Los Angeles, I'm not a true native to this city. A normal person would laugh off the sheer presumption of such a statement, but it threw me, the hyper sensitive and ever insecure, into a small crisis. Was my citizenship to this city really so fragile?

I catch myself, sometimes, saying, "I was born and raised in Los Angeles," even though many parts of this sentence are wrong. I was not born here, and I was technically not raised in Los Angeles. My suburban hometown is at the edge of the county, barely included in its defined borders. I met someone randomly in D.C. who was from my hometown and they asked me how I described my hometown to outsiders. I said that it was a strange desert bubble, and they laughed and said it was a charitable definition.

Santa Clarita is famous for its horrifically engineered roller coasters, its various strip malls, for being the target city of Los Angeles white flight and Korean immigrants who dreamed of suburban life but could not afford Buena Park. In this town, I was not born but raised, and I grew up sheltered by its relative anonymity, its desert wind, and by a ring of Korean-American friends who were all similarly puzzled by how they had ended up in such a place.

It's hard to understand the full scale of a thing until we are outside of it. When I lived in Santa Clarita, it was all I had. I knew to measure the weather by the dry sun and the heat rising off the asphalt, to measure distance by the parking lots that stretched from the local Barnes and Noble to the public library to our shopping mall. I knew who I was based on how my peers juggled the impressions of our mostly white teachers. I laughed when a teacher did a mocking impression of our accents and pretended to know us because she had known other Koreans, and I was silent when the mocking transgressed to the unacceptable. What I was doing, what we were all doing, was trying to move past the borders of our city. My hometown was a transient place, made to be left, and some days, I can't help but feel that I am guilty in having been part of making it so.

I get very confused when someone describes Los Angeles to me. They mention kale smoothies and yoga pants, which means that the Angelenos they know are usually white, moneyed, and from somewhere else. Perhaps they think of Joan Didion, who makes me wonder what kind of Los Angeles she lived in — one with empty desperation in its weather, the hellish gust of the Santa Ana fires, the green groves of Pasadena with a white Spanish-inspired house and tiled mosaic floors. My Los Angeles is the one with the 9.99 donkatsu deal at Koreatown Plaza and the one Korean-Chinese food place with the cheapest bowl of black bean noodles. There's a Mexican rotisserie chicken place near the intersection of Wilshire and Vermont and a Sizzler's only a few blocks away, neither of which I've ever tasted because my family only ate the donkatsu special or the black bean noodles when we came to Koreatown. What would a kale smoothie even taste like in such a place?

In Ansan, the city I now live in, immigrants have created their own ethnic enclaves in the city. In the few streets surrounding an area called Ttegol, Soviet Korean immigrants live in villas and basement apartments owned by Chinese Korean immigrants, and Russian-language bakeries and restaurants and hair salons are only a few blocks away from an aptly named Multicultural Street. When I talk to Soviet Korean students who are growing up in this area, I feel the haunting that comes from knowing the vague ghost of their future. Someone will ask them if they are actually Korean, someone will assume that the Korea they know is the Korea that exists in the common imagination. When this happens, perhaps these students will think of Ansan and Ttegol and wonder if they missed something while growing up.

My sister recently told me that she feels like she is neither Korean or American. She said she is an Angeleno. What a great term, I thought. I had never tried to claim it for myself, because Los Angeles was a place where I was neither born nor raised. But no one else is really from here, and what we claim, instead, is this ability to be from nowhere. Here was the term for it, some semblance of naming.