the american dream

Above: A boy and his car. ©ChristineChangHanway

“The car to my father was what white picket fences were to my mother.”

My mother was in a hurry to leave her 1950’s post war life in Taiwan behind. She could not cross the world fast enough to reach her vision of Doris Day’s perfect life of white picket fences; the American Dream she and her friends knew from the Hollywood movies they watched in Taipei cinemas. At the age of 18, the minute she finished high school, she left for America on her own. The scholarship she won to study at a Catholic girls junior college was her ticket out and her gateway to a new life. 

If my mother chased her American dream, my father lived his or tried to as best as he could. Before the horrors of war seared their traumatic scars across China, my grandfather who was a UN diplomat moved his family to America when my father was 10. They were lucky to be able to duck out of the impending dangerous, chaos that was about to befall the country. Limited in his income generating options, my idealist academic grandfather and worst businessman ever opened a Chinese antique shop in an established Long Island suburb. The wealthy town meant my father was able to do his teenage years in the quintessential, American high school. The kind you see in Hollywood movies, with the single path leading up to the main entrance of the august brick or stone building; surrounded by a big green lawn, dotted with tall venerable trees and filled with clean cut boys in their varsity jackets and wholesome girls with their ponytails and bobby socks. You know. When America was ‘great’ and everyone looked the same, like the sweetheart next door. Years later, my father would raise us on the aspiration of assimilation. When I look at the photographs of him in a classroom, sitting in a sea of white faces, I understand. 

Above: My father and his classmates at Great Neck High School, Long Island.

The car to my father was what white picket fences were to my mother. In the 1950’s especially, the car was synonymous with a teen’s coming of age. With drive-ins everywhere from restaurants to cinemas, cars meant freedom. More importantly for my father, I suspect it meant social acceptance and being an American man. His senior prom photos make me wonder if he drove his date in this car with its UN plates that my mother tells me the family bought second hand from an elderly woman who never drove.

Above: Driving into the future.

Ten years later when he and my mother got married in Hartford, CT, I can see from the smile on his face how much he loves his convertible, bought with his salary as an insurance executive, and how much he loves that he can drive his new wife away with him to their honeymoon in Niagra Falls. It wasn’t until we were in our teens and several station wagons later that my father allowed himself to indulge in another convertible, 1970’s version. Highly impractical, it was olive green and drove like a boat. My mother hated it. It took up a lot of space and even more gas but it was useless for taking us to boarding school, camp or university. That’s what the trusty station wagon was for. No, dad’s car was just that, dad’s car; his American Dream.