On Suburbia

22 June 2021

“America is adolescence without end,” Ben Lerner writes in The Topeka School. This sentence, and in fact the entire book, reads more like prophecy than fiction to me — a stunning memorial to much that I remember about suburban America. Lerner masterfully depicts multiple generations and perspectives criss-crossing Topeka, but central to it all, he describes his own coming-of-age in suburbia — that quintessential American experience — and, crucially, traces its logic of violence.

For adolescence is fundamentally violent; it is the first time in our lives that we define our tribes, and by extension, conditions for exclusion. It is the first time time when the “adult world” starts bleeding in, when we become conscious of the hushed exchanges in our homes, in our schools, on the television, yet without a vocabulary or understanding to grasp exactly what is taking place. Paul Graham writes about the American public high school as incarceration, a poorly moderated jail designed to ensure child care for working parents, but in actuality a maze of intense cruelty that only children can be capable of.

I spent much of my childhood in suburban America dreaming of the day that I would leave it behind for good. And since my parents moved back to China shortly after I left for college, there was no real reason to ever return, in Lerner’s words, to that “childhood’s primal scene.”

But when the Covid-19 second wave hit India, plunging the country I live into a state of crisis, I was privileged enough to leave, making hasty arrangements and landing 40 hours later on the East Coast.

For the first time in 8 years, I was back.

The suburbs came into prominence during America’s golden age after World War Two. Returning veterans, massive economic expansion, commuter rail lines and highways, mass-produced housing and federally-subsidised mortgages all contributed to the population shift from urban centres to suburbs. Until date, more than 50% of America’s population resides in suburban towns, each zip code advertising space, cleanliness, safety and the conventional virtues of American life.

Suburbia’s promise of order, wealth, and safety reflected in its very architecture. It was our immigrant family’s American Dream: a colonial house with columns, the pristine lawns, two cars, the unending forest. It was, in short, idyllic. Yet I also witnessed the dark underbelly of suburban life — and perhaps due to my own home’s secrets and unhappinesses, became obsessed with this contradiction.

On the surface, there were all the trappings of an upper middle class town: the highly rated public high school, the large beach houses, the weekend boat trips, the ritualistic parades and proms and sports events, the quaint eateries. And then there were the cracks beneath that surface. Self-harm, addiction and suicide brought on by dysfunctional families or vicious peers. A sex scandal that erupted between an English teacher and 14-year-old students. Raging alcoholism amongst the ladies who lunched and the fathers who fronted— I remember parents of schoolmates picking up takeout lunch at the Chinese restaurant where I waitressed, slurring their words and getting behind the wheel in the middle of the day. Bankruptcies and financial troubles discussed in hushed tones. Unsolved homicide. Pyramid schemes. Casual racism. Parties where teens broke bones, got high, assaulted one another. Uncanny echoes between the unravelling of the older generation and the young.

And critically, an opiate crisis that deepened in the younger generation — the extent of which I did not even realise until I left, year after year reading obituaries or notices of classmates passing away from overdose. Scraps of memory resurfacing — a friend’s trembling voice as she describes her boyfriend stealing her belongings to pawn for heroin or OxyContin; a teacher’s paranoia at anyone laying their head down in class; those through-the-grapevine whispers of so-and-so being away for the semester; the unspoken ring of camaraderie that connected the using. And finally, the grief, the terrible grief, that marked family and friends of victims, so young and so fundamentally innocent.

It was this contradiction that stood at the heart of suburbia: on one hand, the brilliant, seemingly endless, adolescent summer where all was sunshine and invincibility. And on the other — this dark unravelling behind closed doors.

To this day, I have no explanations, no answers, and certainly no clarity. Dwindling opportunities, debt, weakening social and communal ties — certainly all such forces that have led to the massive political polarisation and discontent across America had something to do with the crises that plagued our 20,000-person town, like so many towns. But this explanation is nowhere near enough.

A return to that childhood’s primal scene — where each of us store our deepest secrets, our unsolved riddles, and our half-baked memories that we reach for like clues to unlock some answers about ourselves. That primal scene is the most fertile ground for writers, artists, anywhere and at any time in history, for a reason.

I have spent so much of my life unravelling the clues to my own family, our particular set of secrets and demons. This time, returning to suburbia for the first time in so long, I finally have answers, the reflective distance of time, and my own established independence at my disposal. My family has also gone through its own long journey — from smiling on the surface and closing the door to our demons — to acknowledging, understanding and moving forward.

Now, nearly 2 years of the Covid-19 crisis, my family has been flung back together into that primal scene — and we are rewriting history. For this brief period, we are working, living, writing, eating with one another, enjoying that ages-ago routine and tempo. We have met with old friends and laughed about the good, commiserated about the bad, the lost. We are still imperfect, but we are a family again. And while we may never be truly “at home” as an immigrant household in the strange landscape of American suburbia, I am filled with hope and gratitude. I only wish for better, for healing, in our community at large.

For it is a simpler story for our family this time around — peaceful, happy. Free from contradiction at last.