and Words
On a dark desert highway
Cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas
Rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance
I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy, and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
It was 1978, and my dad passed away nearly a year before. I stayed for the remainder of that school year in Puerto Rico, but we moved shortly after finishing that grade. I barely knew how to speak English; in fact, I failed English when I took it in Catholic school.
Upon my finishing third grade in Puerto Rico, we moved to Florida where my mom enrolled my younger sister and I into a bi-lingual (Spanish and English) classroom. Before we learned to adapt to living without my father, our mom yanked us from that environment and thrusted us into a new location (country even, though Puerto Rico is a US commonwealth), with a new language, and no childhood friends.
We had no family in Florida (nor anywhere in the Western hemisphere), but we had a number of Chinese friends. Though this may be a technicality since among the Chinese, we treat close friends as family. In fact, we frequently referred to them with titles like ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’.
We straddled three distinctly different cultures; each highlighted by their language (Chinese, English, and Spanish). Each had its own set of rules and idiosyncrasies. I embraced some and abandoned others. Chinese was the one culture that I couldn’t escape.
We had a handful of such friends who helped us when we first arrived in Florida. Our family was composed of my mother and three kids, the oldest of who was fourteen years-old. We were still unable to speak the language. Everything was a struggle; accomplishing many tasks that now seem simple, like filling out a driver’s license form or even taking the test, seemed unsurmountable.
Side note: You may hear me complain about substitute meat products. I have no qualms about the product itself nor am I opposed to consuming it, which sadly is what many will hear. My issue is with the packaging and product placement. If you’re not proficient in reading English, you’ll miss descriptions like ‘impossible’, ‘beyond’, or ‘substitute’ and may end up getting this product by mistake. This is not okay.
My mom shopped at Chinese grocery stores. These were barely larger than a convenience store, but it allowed us to get items that were familiar to us though exotic for others. Being a single parent, she would often bring us with her to these stores. I did not read Chinese and these products sat on the shelves largely unlabeled. For some, the packaging had English text, which at the time was still unhelpful to me. I only knew what they were from visual recognition and failing that, I’d ask my mom if I was curious.
A stack of records sat at a corner of the store; this was their music section; Polydor, the record label, published most of these. Each held a collection of hits from particular years like 1976 and 1977. We purchased a number of these records to cover a number of years; my older sister played them endlessly. This was my introduction to music in English.
These songs carried me through those first couple of years in Florida when I was still learning the language. Some records were sung in Cantonese. I understand the spoken language, but Cantonese is much too idiomatic to understand in music. Sam Hui’s performance of Hotel California is the one that first heard off those albums. This record played in such alarming frequency that it seared into my brain. It brought comfort like an old pair of shoes or a favorite sweatshirt. I didn’t realize until years later that it was merely a cover of the original song.
The following summer my family went up to Toronto to visit my mom’s friend. She was, in fact, one of my mom’s best friends from Hong Kong; she was married with two kids. The visit was initially supposed to last a few days, but we stayed behind for what seemed like the entire summer. I carry truly fond memories of that summer to this day. It felt as though we hit the pause button on all our troubles for a while; I may have even forgotten that my dad had passed. It may have been one of the few instances where I saw my mom genuinely both relaxed and happy.
Toronto’s Chinese community was much larger and well-established than Fort Lauderdale’s. Furthermore, it was easy to get around the city. The subway station was only a few blocks off on Pape Avenue. Sometimes the collection of just the kids, five of us in total, may wander out on our own to explore. We did parks and sightseeing. We spent a day at Niagara Falls and studied, in quiet fascination, the barrels used on the trip down the falls.
And naturally, we got a ton more records because we could in Toronto, vinyl discs filled with popular music covered by Chinese musicians with only a slight accent. We brought those down to Florida where they became some of my sister’s prized possessions. Those tunes filled the remainder of my childhood; they were the soundtrack to those early years in Florida and that blissful summer in Toronto.
I’ll be forever grateful to those friends in Toronto. They took my family of four into their modest home at a time when we most needed it. They gave us a refuge, if only for a while, from everything else that weight down on us. Those kind people gave us hospitality, compassion, and even love when it was, for us, a limited resource. A genuine thank you.
Naturally, I did eventually hear the Eagle’s version of Hotel California. And it too burned into the recesses of my brain, though in different ways. The hoarseness from Don Henley’s vocals gave it a distinctive rawness unmatched by Sam Hui’s version. By the time I heard this rendition I had learned enough English to function here in the states. It eventually came to replace Sam Hui’s version as ‘the standard’ in my mind.
While both versions sang the same words, I was only finally able to digest the true sinister nature of this tune. As I listen to it, my mind imagines what it’d be like to visit the Hotel California, if only for a moment. I also consider that someone could, given the right circumstances, make it into an exceptional film.