My first travel experiences were all wrong. They looked nothing like the way travel is supposed to look, according to glossy magazine spreads featuring white sand beaches, Parisian cafés, and cruises down the Nile.
My parents viewed travel as an unnecessary waste of their hard-earned money. Four-star hotels, Michelin-rated restaurants and valet parking were not in their vocabulary. But at the same time, they did not want to deny their children opportunities they did not have themselves, growing up poor and struggling as working class immigrants. And so they took us on the most frugal form of travel possible—the all American road trip.
We packed our brown Oldsmobile station wagon with Safeway bags full of clothes, laundry detergent, a rice cooker, a used cooler, packets of instant ramen, and house slippers. Our trips involved an endless game of finding the most freebies on the road: two-for-one admissions, a carwash for a tank of gas, or public swimming pools with complimentary soap and shampoo.
Travelodge was our motel of choice, and my dad always insisted on a ground floor room so we could wheel in our mobile kitchen. Our fellow travelers consisted of working class families—often immigrants, speaking Vietnamese, Laotian, Spanish, and Brooklyn Yiddish, all on their own versions of the American road trip.
We silently acknowledged each other at the early bird, all-you-can-eat, roadside buffets. We saw in each other that familiar mix of foreignness and tenacity. And so our parents dragged us away from our cartoons to make our way to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon or Reno—places that, they thought, represented the very best of this beautiful country.
We kids avoided eye contact because we had already learned our all-American sense of shame. I blushed deeply when strangers glanced at us leaning against our car bumper, eating glutinous rice and meat wrapped in banana leaves. I cringed when my mom swiped fistfuls of napkins and toothpicks wherever she could, or when she insisted we share one soft drink because of the endless refills. I pretended I belonged to another family when I saw my dad squatting in front of our portable cooker outside the Travelodge, making instant noodles. All I wanted was for us to be a normal American family, like the Brady Bunch, attending an exotic luau in Hawaii.
Even as a young child, the media had deeply shaped my perception of what “good” travel was supposed to look like. Our experiences, as a working class Chinese family, were not part of such narratives. And so I dismissed our trips as inferior, and vowed to travel the right way once I had grown up.
Decades later, I have flown business class as a corporate professional. I have gotten sunburned on that magazine-perfect white sand beach, eaten at overpriced conceptual restaurants, and sipped cocktails while cruising on the Nile. I have also come full circle and started doing my own Travelodge road trips, nostalgic for something I haven’t been able to find no matter how far I thought I’d gone. And on these road trips, I see families, reflections of my own, setting up their rice cookers or picnicking at a truck stop off the highway.
I want to make eye contact with those kids, sullenly eating their moms’ homemade food, wishing they could go to McDonald’s instead.
I want to tell them to stop and look up at the twilight sky. I want to tell them that one day, when they have proven what they need to prove to themselves, they will remember how delicious those homemade lunches were, and how their ma got up before dawn to make them. I want to tell them this road stop right here is their America too. I want to tell them what nobody ever told me, which is that this trip they are on right now is perfect. It is already everything those travel magazines talk about: an endless road, an ache to belong, a constant questioning of self and place and other. No glossy spread or hipster blog will ever name it as perfect. But we can. Just like that. For us and between us, as we look towards the motel, the mountains beyond, and the headlights transforming into shooting stars against the darkening highway.
