Our second week in Southern California is spent on my parents' side of the megalopolis: the arid region of desert bedroom communities, chaparral steppes, and sandy arroyos known as the Inland Empire. My parents relocated here from Rowland Heights after my sister and I both left for college, sliding ever eastward and inland from Los Angeles proper, and downsizing into separate homes. Although the boundaries are certainly blurred and ever-shifting, and all of the region looks rather samey from the freeway carpool lane, the IE has a distinct physical and cultural identity compared to the posh, gleaming communities of seaside Orange County. The morning haze, a combination of coastal mist and air pollution, is more prominent, blown inland and caught between a few different mountain ranges. The land is drier, freer, more open. The highway cuts east-west through miles of desert scenery, and beyond the car window, the San Bernadino Mountains loom ever closer - appearing over twice as large on the horizon compared to where we were the week earlier. The diaspora is well and alive here, with all its attendant immigrant mentality and nouveau riche materialism - but here, there are noticeably fewer staid fusion restaurants where one pays for novelty, and noticeably more homestyle restaurants, family-run joints, taco trucks, and michoacanas. In short, the Inland Empire is more my speed: a relative bastion for the more authentic and cherished scenes from my childhood, which are being buried beneath a landscape that I increasingly cannot identify with. Our brief week here is focused on exposing Jordan to the bits of his family and legacy that can be found nowhere else:
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December 21, 2024: A quiet afternoon after my mom drives us over to her home in Chino. Jordan plays with the toy model train set that I grew up with (and my parents have re-assembled in my mom’s living room). We take some family photos at the nearby community lawn, with its colorful winter crape-myrtles, and my mom prepares an extensive seafood spread for dinner.
December 22, 2024: Jordan (and we) accompany my mom to church in Rowland Heights; from the kids’ room behind soundproof windows, we watch her perform in the choir. For lunch, we takeout El Pollo Loco. In the afternoon, we drive to Highland Park to visit my cousin and meet her kids (Jordan’s second cousins), and eat dinner with Jordan’s great-aunt and more second cousins at Jiang Nan Spring in Alhambra.
December 23, 2024: A morning trip to my Ah-Ma and Ah-Gong’s graves in Rose Hills Memorial Park (Jordan’s paternal great-grandmother and great-grandfather), in between the 4th and 10th anniversaries of their deaths respectively. Jordan peels an orange for each of them (his favorite activity recently - why buy your todder toys when you can just have him peel fruit for you?). We then take Jordan to see the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights, which I grew up visiting around the major lunar calendar holidays, and made a large early impression in my own spirituality. The little man, unfortunately, takes a faceplant and concrete bonk to the forehead in the temple’s central courtyard. He is all better, though, by the time we eat a huge Chinese-style breakfast at nearby Four Sea. In the afternoon, we take a brief photo trip to Chino Hills State Park, and the grandparents treat Jordan to a sashimi dinner. We stop by Chino’s city hall after dinner, where there’s a pretty display of Christmas lights and a holiday performance of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Jordan enjoys wandering across the lawn, looking at the giant tree, and making a few toddler acquiantances.
December 24, 2024: We head out to my dad’s neck of the woods in Riverside, hiking up to the summit of Mt. Rubidoux in the morning. While the others forge ahead with Jordan in the stroller, I take great interest in faraway landscape shots toward the mountains, and involving the sweeping expanse of desert washes below. The cottonwood groves lining the Santa Ana River, snaking its way westward across the plain, make for a particularly colorful subject. After photos at the summit, we return to the car and get takeout tacos from Taco Station (a cute little breakfast-and-lunch joint built into a remodeled gas station) to eat at my dad’s house. The afternoon is a quiet one spent at home.
December 25, 2024: On Christmas morning, continuing to intentionally expose Jordan different cultures and faiths, we visit the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in nearby Chino Hills, a massive Hindu temple complex that I have seen many times from the highway but never had an opportunity to explore. It’s a quiet morning at the temple, and Jordan enjoys running up and down its mostly deserted sandstone walkways and open courtyard. We admire the astoundingly ornate interior shrine (carved entirely from imported white marble) before having a quick breakast of pakoras, cloyingly sweet treats, coffee, and lassi. In the afternoon, we go to Jane’s parents’ house in Anaheim for a Christmas dinner gathering with both sides of the family.
December 26, 2024: We, Jordan, and Ah-Ma drive to Brea’s Carbon Canyon Regional Park to meet back up with Jane’s parents, sister/brother-in-law, and Jordan’s cousins. We take the quick walk to the park’s small grove of 80-year-old redwood trees - dimunitive compared to their old-growth counterparts up north, but nevertheless a special (and artificially maintained) sight in the arid canyons of Southern California. On the way home, Jordan begs for pancakes, so we stop at the IHOP in Chino for second breakfast. Jordan devours a plate of hashbrowns, eggs, pancakes, sausage, and ketchup in between sips of apple juice. The afternoon is a quiet one, spent mostly cleaning, packing, and finishing leftovers at home.
December 27, 2024: Our final full day in California. After a relaxed morning of packing and loading the car, my mom and dad drive us to the Redondo Beach Pier for a magnificent seafood lunch at Pacific Fish Center & Restaurant. I grew up coming here for special occasions - usually around holidays, with family friends, or classmates. It’s an impressive place to spend an evening, out on the water with the pounding surf below, the hubbub of the pier fishermen and beachgoing tourists around, and the gulls screaming and crashing through the air above - a place of many sonic, visual, and tactile memories. We stroll around the pier, and Jordan takes a liking to a giant brown pelican. The surf is impressive today - remnants a major offshore storm blowing off the Pacific; I photograph waves exploding on the nearby breakwater. In the afternoon, we drive the short distance up to our hotel near LAX, where we’ll be staying before our flight the next morning. I’m nursing a worsening respiratory infection (in fact, have been suffering from symptoms for most of the trip, likely a series of back-to-back-to-back viruses acquired from the cauldron of toddlers we have been stewing around), so my parents say goodbye, and the three of us settle into the hotel room after I walk down the boulevard to buy another round of In-N-Out burgers, fries, and shake. Jane takes Jordan, bored out of his mind in the hotel room, on several spins around the towering hotel atrium in his stroller.
December 28, 2024: The next morning, it’s an early ride to the airport and a breeze through security (we are way too early to the gate, so Jane and Jordan take a bunch of walks while I make repeated trips to the bathroom to remove my mask and blow my nose), followed by a long but uneventful flight back to Boston. Notwithstanding my plane-induced hearing loss and subsequent week of sinus and middle ear infections, we make it back to Brookline by early Saturday evening. Jane and Jordan take the following week to relax and play together at home, recovering from jetlag and travel fatigue; meanwhile. my hearing slowly returns over the course of a workweek (with no small help from steroids, antibiotics, and every decongestant on the planet I know how to self-prescribe). We exit 2024 much as we entered it: a bit sneezy and congested, but in good spirits, and mainly glad to be back on home turf.
