When I was in college, all I really wanted was to be a white guy. I didn’t want to be a sophisticated or important white guy. I thought the whole point of being white was to be able to slip into the background. Also, my tastes naturally drift toward the mass market. I once announced to a friend that what I was most looking forward to was the next Paula Abdul album and the next James Bond movie.
My best friend in college, Peter Shiau, was a lot like me, except kinder and less weird. Peter was of Taiwanese origin and for a while he wrote his name as “Peter Shaw.” He told me he’d first realized that he wasn’t white when he was looking in the mirror, at age eleven or twelve, and suddenly noticed his eyes. Both of us were the much loved sons of nervous parents. Among the ways our parents kept us in line was by not giving us money. And the way we dealt with them was by lying.
During spring break of our sophomore year, in 1990, Peter and I decided to drive from New Jersey to Disney World. We did this not out of some ironic feeling for Disney and what Disney represents but because we wanted to ride Space Mountain.
We left on a Friday evening and took rolls of quarters. The quarters were because we would have to phone our parents and pretend that we were still in New Jersey.
We went in my gray Honda Civic, and the journey was immediately wonderful. This was the first time that either Peter or I had struck out into America. Many years later, I read “On the Road” and realized that our drive had triggered the same ecstatic response in me as the one that Kerouac describes. I loved the enormous highways, how they lifted us and then gently set us down. To me, authentic America was fast-food restaurants in rest stops and eighteen-wheelers asking, How am I driving? All around us seemed to be life: life in a traffic jam near Baltimore and a sudden fog in Virginia, life in the accent of a woman in Georgia and the click-click of palm fronds rubbing against one another in Florida, life that seemed more real than our own, because it was occurring in spaces that in my mind belonged to white people. One of the anxieties of feeling peripheral is the sense that what one loves will probably be taken away. On our drive, Peter told me he was certain that when he got married his wife would cheat on him.
We finally arrived at Disney World. The sky was a perfect blue that made everything beneath it—Cinderella’s castle, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad—picturesque.
My experience has been that even public places in America are segregated. Nonwhites tend to cluster in certain sections of the beach. Many restaurants are frequented primarily by people of one race. But the lines at Disney World were like no public spaces that I had ever been in before, in that there were white and Black and Asian and Hispanic people standing next to one another. Most of Peter’s and my time was spent in these lines. Every ride seemed to require a long wait, and there was nothing to do except talk to those beside us. Day after day, we stood and talked. My tendency with white people back then was to make up stories. Lying was a way of showing disrespect, a disrespect that came out of my fear of whites. I told one man I spoke with that Peter and I had driven down in a white Lotus. Another I told that we were the sons of ambassadors. These lies made Peter uncomfortable. He asked me to stop telling them. I did, and then he and I began having ordinary conversations with our line-mates. Some of these led to confidences. A woman had recently got divorced and was recovering from this by treating herself to a trip to Disney World. A man told me about visiting his grandfather in a nursing home and petting his dog. His grandfather, who had dementia, shouted, “Don’t hit my dog,” and rose to punch him. The man thought, Well, I guess I’ve got to let him hit me.
I didn’t know what to do with these intimacies, but they affected me. I remember reading in Malcolm X’s autobiography about his trip to Mecca and how it made him realize that whites had feelings, just like Blacks. I had the same experience in the lines at Disney World. White people were human, too.
Each night, when we left Disney World, Peter and I would drive to a rest area to sleep in our car. There were other people there, too—not just couples but entire families, some asleep with their car doors open. Peter and I would keep our windows down, and sometimes, at two or three in the morning, we’d hear people murmuring to each other. Their voices felt all of a piece with the sky and the soft air and the clicking palm trees. ♦
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