a piece I wrote a few months ago. Enjoy :)
La Habra is located on the northwestern border of Orange County, California. It’s sandwiched between Whittier, the city that holds Richard Nixon’s college alma mater, and Brea, famous for its oil development history. La Habra was founded in 1896. Its city flower is the hibiscus. The city tree is an avocado. It’s also where I’m from.
La Habra, in Spanish, translates to “pass through the hills.” I always interpreted that to mean that the city was just a passageway to get you to your real destination. The city does not have any landmark features. No malls, no plazas, not even a freeway entrance. We do have a light-up welcome sign that reads, “LA HABRA CIRCLE.” But, even when lit, only the last lights running on a drop of juice read “LA ARA CIRC.” People can go through the city without ever knowing its name. Even if you do have to pass through it, it’s easy to pass over it altogether. The truth is that La Habra can be quite boring.
Boring means to cause boredom. If we break that word down more, “bore,” in addition to meaning that something is tiresome or devoid of interest, can also refer to the hollow barrel of a gun or a tube. If we stick to the image of a gun, the bore acts as a passage for the bullet. The suffix “-dom” can refer to a collection, a general condition, or a domain. So, to say that this city, the “pass through the hills,” is boring is actually not as harsh as it sounds. Boredom is practically in the title. Boring is what La Habra was destined to be.
Whenever you move to a new place, the first thing people ask you is where you’re from. After I moved to New York last year, my answer would usually start with just “La Habra.” But whenever I said that, I’d get a blank stare. If I was lucky, maybe even a courtesy nod. Panicked by the awkward silence, I taglined my answer with the phrase “it’s about thirty minutes away from Los Angeles.” The mention of that big city makes their faces light up, turning their courtesy nod into a wide-eyed “Oh!” Then the conversation keeps going. Los Angeles carries so much lavishness and mystery in people’s minds, and now they’re relying on me to confirm or deny it. And since I’m not the most extroverted person, I take the opportunity to connect and chat, even if that means not fully connecting with myself.
Even the city’s website describes it as a “quiet residential community, it is conveniently located within an hour's drive of many beaches, mountains, and desert recreation areas.” La Habra lies on the bounds of Orange County. When people think of Orange County, the quiet luxury beach houses of Laguna and Newport Beach or the bliss of Disneyland are what spring to mind. When the popular 2000s teen drama The O.C. aired in 2003, it seemed like teen life in the county was glamorous and carefree. But La Habra has never had that image.
Both my parents grew up in Whittier, the neighboring city. When I ask my mother what La Habra was like growing up, the first thing she says is “dead.” I laugh. She continues, “It was the city that you passed through to get to Brea.” Even when my parents moved out to Moreno Valley in 1997 with my older sister, the city had not changed that much over the course of two decades. They stayed in Moreno Valley for a while and had me in 1999. But my parents grew tired of their almost two-hour commutes to work. The price of gas and childcare was more than they could manage. Meanwhile, my grandparents were living in La Habra in a home that had been in the family for over twenty years. My grandmother didn’t work. She could take care of me and my sister. So, in March 2002, we moved into our La Habra home, only a five-minute drive from my grandparents. “It just made sense,” my mother says.
. . .
Every year since we moved, La Habra continues to get weighed down by chains—chain stores and chain restaurants. My mother says that when we moved there in 2002, some of the biggest stores the city has now weren’t built yet, like Costco and Northgate. “It was very quiet,” she says. Now, it tries to keep up with the Joneses. It attempts to keep up with the Orange County image, thinking that brands and popular chains might make it more relevant. In adopting these places, though, it continues to lack originality. I’ll drive past a construction site on a building or store and think of the possibilities of what they could turn that space into. A few weeks later, when I can just make out the logo of an Amazon Fresh, I sigh, but I’m not surprised. My hometown friends and I wish that there were more independent and family-owned businesses.
In high school, we wished that we could study at local coffee shops like we saw in movies and TV shows. In New York, there’s a cafe on every other block, but we had to settle on the (now closed-down) Panera Bread. Since it really was the only place to do work, we could bet that we’d run into other people from school there. That’s the other thing about a small town: the gift of anonymity does not exist like it does in New York. I walk all through Manhattan, looking like a mess, without caring a bit. The chances of seeing anyone again are slim. In La Habra, I try to look decent even for a quick errand because I am bound to see someone I know. If they see me looking like a mess, they go and tell their friends, and that image of me lingers in the back of their minds. That’s not how I want to be remembered.
I recently came across the German word fernweh in writer Teju Cole’s “Far Away From Here.” Fernweh, as Cole puts it, is “a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places.” It’s a concept, Cole says, with “a sickish, melancholy tinge.” I realized that I experienced fernweh for almost all of my teen years in La Habra. I felt it so much that it really was sickish. Ever since the third grade, I knew that I wanted to be in a big city, like Los Angeles or New York. I was also told that if I worked hard, those dreams would come true. I could move out of La Habra. I grew to believe that something larger was out there for me. So, I did what I needed to do. I worked hard. In high school, I worked so hard that I became restless. I had the grades, the test scores, and the volunteer hours. What more was left? What was taking so long? La Habra tried to catch up to snatch me, but I ran faster. I could see my exit. My great something awaited me around the corner. I didn’t even know what it was, but I only hoped that it was anywhere but La Habra. Now, when I find myself looking back, I’m half dreading and half hoping I’ll see it still chasing after me.
. . .
It was here recently in New York that I first called my La Habra childhood home “my mother’s home.” It didn’t roll off my tongue casually in conversation. I was hesitant, feeling pressured to use the phrase after hearing my peers refer to their “parents’ house.” A sense of loss infiltrated me as I pushed the words out of my mouth. I felt the 2,826 miles between me and La Habra. I felt my age, as I usually tend to think of myself as younger than I am. With just three words, I unknowingly gave the demolition the green light. My mind couldn’t even stay present while my peers chatted and laughed around me. A wrecking ball just slammed into a room of my childhood home.
After this, I noticed myself thinking a lot more about home. At first, I couldn’t get past its blemishes. In the areas that have not been overtaken by popular chains, there’s the zombified strip malls that have been half-alive for years. The “For Lease” signs have been there so long that they have practically burned onto the walls. The parks here are not being used to their fullest potential. Too much green and not enough people. But it’s within some of these faults and cracks that I also hold a lot of memories.
In high school, this landscape created a mutual feeling of boredom among my friends. We’d usually drive out to the neighboring cities if we ever wanted to do something like grab a bite, go to a movie, or maybe run an errand. But even when we finished that activity and had absolutely nothing to do next, we still never wanted to go home. Since we were also broke, we began parking the car in some near-empty lot and talking for hours. It became such a habit with us that we had our go-to parking spots. We rarely ever said it out loud, but we would always rather be in the company of each other and do nothing. Even then, something came out of the nothingness. The first couple of hours were just joke after joke. Someone passing by might have thought we were hotboxing, but we talked so much that no one could see through the windows. Then, as the night deepened, we also went deeper in thought, sharing with each other our anxieties and all the other thoughts that we felt ourselves crazy for having. So many times did I see my friends in the backseat with tears in their eyes, only noticing because the buzzing neon sign of a fast food restaurant lit their faces. I remember crying in front of Yogurtland.
In our senior year of high school, my friends and I would frequently drive to this neighborhood called Hawkes Point that lies right outside the border of La Habra. None of us lived in this gated community, yet one of my friends managed to get the passcode. We drove past all of these cookie-cutter homes to the top of the hill, got out of the car to then walk up another hill to finally get to the viewing spot. It was worth it. Sometimes we played music, maybe danced a little, but I remember the silence most. Our ears tuned into the chirps of katydids and cicadas and the murmur of faraway freeways. Sitting side by side on a rock, I miss feeling snuggled by my friend’s warmth. So many words not said, but never needing to be in the first place. Then we’d hear a couple of strangers coming up the path, and it was time to go.
….
I think of La Habra, but that’s all it is—thoughts. It’s not homesickness, because I’m not unhappy in New York, nor do I have any desire to move back to La Habra. I’m not feeling particularly nostalgic, either. What is it called when you love, hate, and fear a place all at once?
I still enjoy visiting home when I can. I get so accustomed to taking part in the go-go-go of New York that I forget what it feels like to slow down. It feels nice at first to come back to La Habra to visit old friends and family. There’s nothing like taking that first bite of firecracker chicken from my favorite Chinese food spot on a cold winter night. No one will ever make rice as moist and perfectly seasoned as my mother. My feet thank me for finally taking a break from walking all over Brooklyn. I like not having to wait in a Trader Joe’s line that wraps around the whole store. New York is no dream either, and it feels nice to be the guest of honor for a week or two when I’m in town. Then, a day comes during my visit where I have no plans. I don’t have anyone to see or something to do, so my only option feels like sitting around all day. My body wants to relax, but I refuse to be vacuumed into my mother’s microsuede brown couches. I’m wary of their comfortability. If I sit on the couch, I might never get back up.
In between my love and hate for La Habra, I am also deathly afraid of it, of what it’ll do to me if I return. I fear it will weigh me down, swallow me. I fear I’ll find myself one day cemented from the waist down into the freshly-dried concrete. When I came to New York, I was on a mission to do something. I wanted to sign my name into the concrete rather than be in it. So, I fear that if I move back to La Habra, the boring and forgotten town, that I, too, will be boring and forgotten. I think that’s why I choose to hate it so much. If I continue to reject it, then maybe it’ll cower and leave me alone. Even then, a part of me believes that with my luck, I’ll reject it so much that I’ll somehow have to end up staying there, and my life will become a cruel irony. I think I’ll be like my parents, stuck with no other option but to return.
Hate and fear are only two of the emotions I have towards the city. I also love it. As I’ve gotten some distance and gotten older, I can see the complexity of emotions and how they align and blend to create depth with so many tones, tints, and shades. There are shadows of love within my fear and hatred.
We think of the latter emotions as negative, and while I’m still guilty of having them to some degree, I don’t think they’re feelings to necessarily be ashamed of. La Habra was destined to be boring. If I never felt bored there, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. Whenever I am bored, I tend to daze out and fixate on a certain object, like a chair, taking note of the cracks in the cushion, the ware in the wood, its shadow, and its shape. I’ll look at someone and come up with reasons why the glazed eyes and pursed lips. A breakup? A long day at work? Just thinking? I wonder if we’re more similar than we know. And without my fear, I would have never felt the push to want more in life. I probably wouldn’t be in New York.
I love La Habra, but in a way that’s more “Thank you for being a part of my life. You’ve been my passageway, but I must move on without you.”
1. Such essays are exactly what I expected and need as a break from studying Japanese while listening to 1930s jazz in a mall coffeeshop north of Tokyo. 2. My innocent comment is that it seems you depend on the outside environment to add value to your life. This is a lightweight observation based on one essay. there’s an abundance of satellite communities in the LA area..It’s probably a challenge to add enough memories to make many of them special and worthy of some consideration for some entertaining reason. So think about all those unique individuals making their souls journey to LA to find their identity worthy of inscription in some La Habra sidewalk.