By Geo Ong
I am moving to New York City. I read somewhere that the air is better there. My departure date is 22 July 2011. Mark your calendars, just in case I forget.
I am a Los Angeles native, an angeleno as most people no longer call it, and have lived here all but one year of my entire life. Like most people’s opinions of their hometowns, I held many criticisms of mine. But this has less to do with my disliking Los Angeles than it originally started out. Like nearly everything you have but no longer want, you soon want what you no longer have.
I am, in one sense, walking away from an opportunity to join a small lineage of Los Angeles writers who don’t write screenplays or pulp fiction. I consider myself a writer whose inspiration and exploitation comes from my surroundings. Now that I’ve decided to leave, I finally see the complexities of Los Angeles – I just never really bothered to write any of it down.
That’s a lie. I’ve written some of it down, most of which can be found by clicking the Los Angeles tag on this blog, in the form of negative, ranty articles. But Los Angeles can be beautiful, like carrion is beautiful to a vulture.
No jokes. I am proud – so very, truthfully, genuinely proud – to come from a city no one can define. My writer brain is simply too inexperienced. It is unable to take it all in at once. It has only been able to register the bad things. Maybe this is why the lineage of Los Angeles writers who don’t write screenplays or pulp fiction is as small as it is. Los Angeles is not only a young city, but it has metamorphosed frequently in that short lifetime. It has yet to achieve a stable and true identity, which writers have difficulty wrapping their brains around. How do you describe a kaleidoscope without the use of the letter m, anyway?
Los Angeles, like all places, has its fair share of superficial identities – namely, superficiality. Also: beach culture, car culture, and Hollywood. But there are truer identities that are more difficult to see and more difficult to understand: poverty, cultural amalgamation or the attempt at cultural amalgamation, and separation through urban and suburban sprawl. All of these sub-identities – both superficial and true – come at you at once, cloud your assessments, and leave you with a confused idea of what Los Angeles truly is. This happens, quite often, to people who’ve lived here their entire lives.
It can be considered fortuitous, lucky, or the result of hard work, drive and ambition, to love the place you inhabit. For so many people, that choice is simply not there. Instead, what is there is either what you’ve been born into, what you’ve been given, what you can afford, or, sadly, what no one else wants. I respect and admire the writers and artists who’ve turned their surroundings and their unstoppable musings on them into words, sentences, images, and works of art and importance. Furthermore, I respect writers who’ll remain in one place for as long as it takes to figure the place out – or until they die, whichever comes first.
Take, for example, Kim Barker, author of The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite the dangers of being not only white, a woman, an American, and a journalist, but all four at the same time, she couldn’t leave Afghanistan for years because it had become part of her. Or she had become part of Afghanistan. Perhaps there’s no real difference.
Another example: Rebecca Solnit, a California writer who, much to her credit, has recognised the size of her native state and has since dedicated several books of hers on different aspects of California life and California history. As odd as this statement may seem, Los Angeles had the potential to be my California. If only I didn’t have to drive fifteen minutes to a decent coffee shop.
If this has become so important to me, why am I leaving? Growth can occur in different ways, for different people, and to borrow an idea from Solnit herself: growth can occur in getting lost. ‘You get lost,’ Solnit writes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, ‘in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.’ And I fully intend on getting lost in the City, especially since I have no intention of purchasing an artificial-intelligence phone anytime soon.
New York City will not be any easier, but I feel it more suits my writer brain at this particular moment in my life. Time will tell whether I’ll ever feel able to call myself a New Yorker. Much has been made about the author sign-off of Ulysses, where James Joyce closes his book with ‘Trieste – Zürich – Paris, 1914-1921′, the places and times he worked on a novel based completely in and on his hometown of Dublin, Ireland. When asked, much later in life, whether he’d ever return to Dublin, Joyce replied, ‘Have I ever left?’
I’ll be getting lost soon, but you’ll hopefully be able to track my progress in the articles to appear on this blog in the near future, and maybe you’ll be able to tell whether I’ll really ever leave or not.
