by Maurene Goo
“So what’s up? If I had known you were coming over, I would have pushed the cleaning extravaganza to tomorrow!” she said as she scratched a spot on her ankle. My own ankle started itching in response. This might have to be a quick visit.
“Oh, just came over to share some AWESOME Kim family news.”
“God, what now?”
“Guess where my family is going for Christmas?”
She cocked her head to one side. “You guys are going somewhere?”
“Yes. It’s an amazing holiday mecca.”
“Er, Bethlehem?”
I threw a pillow at her. “NO.” I paused dramatically. “Las Vegas.”
“Huh? WHY?”
“Because! They don’t get American holidays! They don’t give a crap about traditions like caroling and … and … hot cocoa!”
“Hot cocoa?” Carrie asked, confused.
“Whatever. I mean, it’s freaking VEGAS! Is it too much to ask that my family be normal and functional just once a year?”
Carrie crossed her legs and leaned forward. “Aren’t you being a little overdramatic?”
“NO! Do you even know how many times a year I have to let things slide in my family? Like having no birthday cake, but seaweed soup instead! Art classes? No, no, it’s all about Saturday morning math tutorials! You need special glue for your project? No need to waste money — just use sticky rice paste! Cool summer vacation in Hawaii? Why snorkel when you can hike fifty miles on yet another camping trip?!” I could go on, but I stopped because I was starting to sound a little hysterical, even to myself.
Carrie looked at me with pity. “Are you serious? I mean, I know you used to have math classes on Saturdays, but you have to eat seaweed on your birthday?”
Despite my rant, I felt slightly defensive. Seaweed soup was actually one of my favorites. “Well, it’s not gross. I’m just saying it’s different. But this is the last straw. How in the world can you have a good Christmas in Las Vegas?”
Carrie looked thoughtfully at a dirty stuffed rabbit she had scavenged from under her bed. “Maybe you’ll get to see Carrot Top?”
After helping Carrie clean up for a couple hours (and being delightfully rewarded with fresh oatmeal cookies afterward), I decided to head back home. I took the longest route back, using small side streets and even riding along the beach. But after a while it started to get dark and I didn’t want to incur my mom’s wrath. The last time I got home after dark on my bike she was in tears with a phone clutched in her hand, ready to call the local hospitals.
I stuck my bike in the garage, looking sadly at the discarded holiday lights piled on the floor on my way into the house.
“Oh, look who’s home after pouting,” my mother announced. “Have you recovered from your little tantrum?” She was wearing rubber gloves and scrubbing the kitchen sink, blasting some weird opera music.
I didn’t dignify her with a response and instead skulked by and went to my room, giving my door a “light” slam. Before I could even settle down in front of my laptop to complain about my horrendous holiday plans on the Internet, the door flew open. My mother stood in the doorway, rubber gloves–clad hands on her hips.
“Mooooom, can you KNOCK?”
“Yeah, yeah. What are you doing in here that’s so private anyway? Nothing, I’m sure, ha!” I couldn’t tell if she really thought she was making a joke or if she was just determined to send me over the edge today.
I glared at her from my desk chair. “Ha. Ha. Can I help you?”
“Yes, you can help by being a good daughter for once and say, ‘Why, thank you, Mother, for planning such a fun vacation! So many poor children in the world never go on vacation! I am SO grateful.’”
I could literally taste the barf rising in my throat. “Most poor children are lucky they don’t have to go to Las Vegas.”
There was a half second when I thought my mom might laugh, but instead she pointed a hot-pink-gloved finger at me and said, “You are going to get over this bad mood and have fun on this trip. Actually, I don’t care if you have fun. Just be quiet and don’t ruin the trip for everyone else! OTHER people’s kids are happy to be going!”
And with that, she walked out, leaving my door wide open. My dad popped his head in. “Hey, Holly, you want curry for dinner?”
My head was starting to hurt. “I don’t care, whatever.”
“You don’t CARE? Okay, maybe I’ll ask my other daughter who cares when her father cooks for her!” He amiably walked toward Ann’s room.
My family made me feel like the biggest ingrate on the planet.
Hoisting my Santa Claus bag of goodies over my shoulder, I walked toward the usual lunch spot in the Quad. I spotted Liz first — you couldn’t miss her multiple shopping bags and Santa hat. Only Liz could manage to make holiday costume wear fashionable.
She greeted me with a hug and a “Merry almost-Christmas!” She also handed me a sparkly holiday gift bag filled to the brim with wrapped objects.
“LIZ! This is way too much stuff! As usual!”
“Oh, whatever. Like I have a budget,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. I couldn’t argue with that. I handed her my gift, which was wrapped in newspaper comics and fat pastel yarn. Only the very best for my friends.
“Ooooh!” She accepted it gleefully. Liz loves receiving gifts — one of the reasons I love her so much. I mean, she literally could buy herself whatever she wanted. She even liked that hideous bobcat statue I made in my ceramics class and gave her that one year. That’s a true friend.
Eventually Carrie and David met up with us, also armed with gifts. It was time for our annual last-day-of-school-before-the-holiday-break gift exchange. We looked forward to this every year — almost as much as the MTV Video Music Awards, when we sat around Liz’s huge flat screen and made fun of everyone’s outfits.
Carrie gleefully collected her gifts and growled, “MINE!” David tried to snatch a couple away from her, resulting in Carrie rolling around in the dirt trying to keep them out of his reach. I swear, Carrie’s the brother David never had.
“Oh my Lord, can you guys behave?” Liz cried, trying not to laugh. Soon we sat around in a circle with our presents piled up in front of us.
“Me first!” I exclaimed. I picked up Carrie’s, a box wrapped in brown butcher paper and green-and-red bamboo-fiber ribbon, and shook it next to my ear.
“Oh, please, like that ever works,” Carrie scoffed.
I carefully opened it, peeling the paper back meticulously so that it didn’t rip. Carrie groaned in frustration. “HOLLY! You’re killing me. Get on with it!”
“Okay, okay, sheesh!”
I squealed when I saw it was a DVD set of the entire British Office series. “Awesome! Yes, yes, yes!”
“It has a bunch of extra commentary from Ricky Gervais,” Carrie said excitedly while I read the description on the back cover. “We need to revisit the entire series!” All of us had spent the previous summer completely obsessed with the show. Well, except Liz, who said she couldn’t stand all the British mumbling. “WHAT are they saying?” she’d yell before storming out of the room.
We all opened the rest of our gifts — I got a ton of great books from both David and Liz, including a first edition copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Liz got me an array of nail polishes in hopes of me actually wearing some. Hehe, good luck.
I excitedly watched everyone open my gifts. I had made them mixed CDs with hand-drawn cover “art,” and little photo albums that held a bunch of our pictures from the past few years.
“Awesome!” Carrie exclaimed as she flipped through the album.
David laughed and pointed to his CD. “I see the first track is an RMD classic.” (I had included my favorite Raw Meat Demons song — “Headbutt into My Soul.”)
“Oh my God, I almost forgot about these Halloween costumes!” Liz pointed at a photo of her, Carrie, and me dressed up as zombie Jonas Brothers. We snickered over the bloody brains splattered on Carrie’s face. “So when
are you leaving for the city of dreams?” she asked while tidily putting away her wrapping paper in small folded piles.
“Tomorrow morning,” I groaned. “We’re driving, of course.”
David shook his head. “That sucks, man. But you get to just chill with your cousins and eat a lot, right?”
“I guess. I love my cousins. But even they can’t make up for Vegas.”
Carrie twirled a long strand of hair around her finger and frowned. “Well, at least you’ll probably see a Christmas tree or two there. My parents have banned Christmas trees.”
“WHY?” I asked incredulously.
“Um, because it’s killing trees. Duh.”
David snorted. “Do they not use paper, then?”
“Recycled only,” Carrie said with a sigh.
Liz shook her head. “Your parents would die if they saw our house. I think we have five Christmas trees. They were shipped in the other day.”
My jaw dropped. “Shipped in? By who? Your Christmas servants? Also, you guys aren’t even going to be around on Christmas! Aren’t you going skiing in Big Bear?”
“Yes, we are. But my parents like to embrace these American traditions wholeheartedly. Plus, they want to make sure our neighbors don’t think we’re terrorists.”
David laughed. “That explains why your parents have like, five American flags in your front yard.”
I looked at him. “So, what awesome plans do you have this Christmas? Family skateboarding?”
He shrugged. “You know. The usual. Driving out to Phoenix to hang with my grandparents. Excitement abounds. Maybe this year my grandpa will actually stay awake through Christmas dinner.”
The lunch bell rang and we scattered off to class. I said good-bye reluctantly — it was the first time I was ever sad to be leaving school for vacation.
I grasped for the car handle and stumbled my way out of the giant black Expedition. My knees were weak when my feet touched the ground, and I almost wanted to kneel before the Caesars Palace Hotel and kiss the scorching brick-paved ground. I had just spent six hours in an SUV packed with seven cousins watching WALL•E three times on the DVD system, trying to hold down my lunch. Did I mention that I sometimes get severely carsick, even on five-minute trips to the grocery store?
I looked up at the spectacle before me. There it was. In broad daylight, the neon lights and garish glitter of all that was horribly wrong with America: Las Vegas.
The sky was the color of dirty old blue jeans. Everywhere I looked, giant buildings loomed above us, but not in the compact way of most cities. Instead the awkwardly massive hotels and their various attractions were spread out like one big strip mall.
I had to squint against the sun’s glare because of all the mirrored walls and shiny glass. What is WITH Vegas and making things so shiny? It doesn’t matter, though, because everything still looks and feels dirty.
For example, everywhere we walked on the strip, there were men slapping these plastic fliers for strippers in our faces, their sad-sack kids sitting on the sidewalk ledge behind them. I saw a man in an Elvis costume posing halfheartedly for pictures with gleeful Japanese tourists while simultaneously trying to sell some kind of car parked behind him.
This was where hundreds of families wanted to spend Christmas? I just didn’t get it.
A total of four SUVs had been commissioned to haul all thirty of us from various locations in Southern California. Needless to say, no family member of mine (or family friend, for that matter) would be caught dead on a plane to Las Vegas. Why make a quick and comfortable journey when you could sniff seven other people’s body odor for six hours? The immigrant experience is a rich one.
After we all checked into our rooms, Ann and I decided to do some exploring, letting our parents know that we would meet up with them in a couple hours. In the chaos of getting everyone situated, my parents absentmindedly nodded their permission. We made our way through the hotel, eventually walking into Caesars Palace’s sprawling mall, the Forum.
The ceilings were painted to look like the sky, pale blue with puffy angelic clouds. I think it was supposed to feel like we were outside because I noticed that the sky gradually changed colors as if the sun was setting and rising.
I elbowed Ann and pointed. “Who are they kidding? This is so sad.”
Ann looked up and shrugged. “I think it looks kind of pretty.”
I stared at her openmouthed, then shook my head. “Have you learned nothing from being my sister?” Ann rolled her eyes and walked ahead of me.
We eventually approached a replica of Michelangelo’s statue of David in all its naked glory and immediately started cracking up. Someone had perched a giant Santa hat on his head. And did I mention he was naked?
“Where are we having dinner?” Ann asked as we walked across a three-foot-long wood “bridge” over a mini-canal running neon-blue water by the Versace store.
“At the buffet. Where else?”
I love to eat. And normally, I am all for buffets. But a Vegas buffet was on a whole other level. It felt too gluttonous, even for the holidays. Have you ever seen how many leftovers are carted off by the busboys? It literally makes me think of starving children. If starving children knew what the hell to do with five thousand crab legs as big as their own legs.
Ann pulled out her camera while we were in the Forum. She’s really gotten into photography, so she was lugging around this fancy digital one that my parents got her for her birthday, taking pictures of this and that. We took particular pleasure in a shot of me picking my nose in front of the Prada store. We took off running when we saw a saleslady (wearing what looked like a fancy black straightjacket) rush to the window.
I quickly grew bored, however, because really how many “sunsets” and “rainstorms” can one take while walking past the Gap? It was almost dinnertime anyway, so we headed back to our hotel room to meet up with everyone. It was quite a trek.
Huffing and puffing in the elevator, Ann moaned, “Why did it take us fifteen minutes to walk from the lobby to the elevator?”
“I know. Everything in this place is gigantic. Like, I think they base the architecture on how much dumb, tacky stuff they can cram in here,” I grumbled while pushing the button for the nineteenth floor.
Ann threw me an exasperated look. “Yeah, yeah, you hate Las Vegas. We get it.”
The elevator doors opened before I could think of a good comeback, and we were face-to-face with twenty-eight family members crammed into the elevator lobby. Everyone began talking at once, yelling at us for disappearing. Ann decided to head out with them for dinner, while I told them I’d meet up after I showered.
I waved good-bye to the herd and fled to my hotel room — relieved to be rid of everyone, even just temporarily. The only good thing about being on vacation with so many people was that you could slip out fairly unnoticed. Even my mom’s hawk eye took a break when she was in vacation mode.
As I showered in a bathroom bigger than my living room back home, I thought about the days ahead and wanted to bury myself in the fluffy white hotel blankets. Christmas was still three days away, and I was already sick of this place.
By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, I was so over it. Most of all, I was tired of how annoyingly chapped my lips got from the recirculated air in our hotel room. My lips would like to say a big F YOU, Caesars Palace.
My parents, along with the other adults, were unusually giddy with excitement — they almost let us kids do whatever the heck we wanted. “Merry Christmas Eve, girls!” my mom practically sang as she busted into our hotel suite that morning. My sister and I grunted from where we were lying side by side on our shared bed, watching Storage Wars on TV. We were still in our pajamas while some of our cousins had already gone downstairs for the breakfast buffet. “You’re not going to stay inside all day, are you?” she demanded as she yanked open the curtains that were heavy enough to shield the entire hotel from an air raid. Ann and I hissed like vampires as the sun touched our faces.
“Mooom! It’s too bright!” Ann whined, shielding herself with her arm.
Normally, this sort of lazy bratfest would have had my mom on our asses so quick we’d be downstairs and dressed in record time. But this was Happy Vegas Mom.
“It’s a beautiful day! Guess what you guys get to do on Christmas Eve?”
We stared at her in silence.
“You get to go SHOPPING! For your own gifts!”
Ann finally showed a sign of life. “Really?!” she asked, sitting straight up for the first time all morning.
“Yes! This way, you get exactly what you want! Isn’t that fun?”
“We have to BUY our own presents?” I asked. I knew that I sounded like a giant spoiled baby. But I didn’t want to choose my own gift. That was NOT Christmasy.
My mom looked crestfallen. “What’s the problem now? I thought you girls would love this! You never like the stuff I pick out anyway!”
It was true. Every year my mom bought us stuff like matching sweater sets, or gift cards to movie theatres or Starbucks. Honestly, she was the queen of regifting things her coworkers had gotten her, like the time we got Crabtree & Evelyn lotion that made us smell like old ladies. But at least she thought of us for a nanosecond, and then gift wrapped something. This was just depressing.
“I just … it’s not right!” I exclaimed. And to my surprise, tears started pricking my eyes.
My mom stared at me, aghast. “I can’t do anything right!” Then she shook her head and left the room, calling out, “Do whatever you want. The cash is on the table. Meet us for dinner at the buffet at six.”
When she was gone, Ann gave me a weird look. “What’s your problem? Are you on your period or something?” I threw a pillow at her face, which made her scream and then storm into the bathroom, slamming the heavy double doors behind her.