The year was 1983. I was thirteen years old. My family was living in the town of Cedarburg, Wisconsin.
My parents often felt the need to shield me from difficult discussions because they knew I was a sensitive child. What I didn't know at that time was that our family was in the midst of a financial crisis. I didn't really understand then, since I was a kid, but my dad worked as an investment broker, and he had made a very big mistake. He traded bonds for institutional clients and had made a classic buy/sell error. In other words, he sold when when his client's intention was to buy. The fallout came to the tune of $100,000 and he was on the hook for it.
Let me back up for just a moment and describe Cedarburg. In the early 80's, it had a population of about 6,000 people. It is located about a 30-minute drive north of Milwaukee and many residents make the commute downtown to work, as my dad did. It is a typical Midwestern town with limestone buildings, a scenic creek winding through it and a big Catholic church at the end of Washington Avenue (Main Street).
Overall, Cedarburg was a good place to grow up. We could ride our bikes anywhere without supervision. Everyone played soccer, which was a big deal because a lot of people in Southeastern Wisconsin have German and Polish roots. In the summer, we fished in the creek and in winter we ice skated on it. There was one movie theater with one screen and a new movie every Friday night. Oh, and it was lily white.
Back to the story. The solution that my parents came up with was out west. My dad had an acquaintance in the industry that had moved out to Newport Beach, California to manage a branch office for a national wirehouse. He offered to bring my dad into his office and give him a substantial signing bonus that would be a great deal more than what he owed for the error. Problem solved!
Well, sort of. No one in our family had ever moved outside of Wisconsin, with the exception of Illinois. This was a BIG move away from our family and anything we had ever known. When I first heard of the plan, I was both excited and scared to death. The biggest fear in my mind was earthquakes. I thought they happened all the time and had heard that they were due for the "big one." I was genuinely frightened about it.
The reason for my excitement was that I was ready to be done with Cedarburg. Despite the idyllic surroundings, I had been bullied in middle school by neighborhood kids and ones that I had played soccer with. As I mentioned earlier, I was sensitive. That's what they called it then. Today, I know it as depression and anxiety. Anyway, I ended up having to go to the school counselor's office several times. There was even an incident where kids I had grown up with since second grade had planned to get up and leave the lunch table when I came and sat down. For some reason, I had decided to eat with other kids that day. I don't think I would have handled it well. Luckily, we will never know.
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Fast forward a few months to October 6th, 1983. My mom and I boarded a plane with one-way tickets bound for Long Beach, CA. My dad had already been there working for a couple months and my sister, Shelly, was away at college. I had been in high school for just one month.
My parents, obviously, had made the decision to go for it and there was no turning back now. We stayed for about a week at a hotel and my mom enrolled me at Irvine High School. We moved into a rental house in an area known as Northwood. To put it bluntly, things were very different than I had known. Really different. First of all, in Wisconsin, everyone had big yards and no fences. Here, nobody had a big yard and everyone had cinder block fences between every single house. They were crammed so close together. There was the smell of oranges and eucalyptus trees everywhere. I didn't know what a "planned community" was. Turns out that Irvine was the world's largest planned community, at least at the time. No Main Street, just strategically placed strip malls and every neighborhood had a name like The Ranch or College Park.
The surprises did not stop when I started school. Irvine High School seemed mammoth to me. It was like a college campus, not a high school. The students ate their lunches outside! In Wisconsin, where winter temps can go below zero, we did not eat lunch outside. Also, they gave you these tiny lockers that were outside and you had to share them. This all seemed just nuts to me.
I thought really hard about what I should wear to my first day at school. I went with an REO Speedwagon concert t-shirt, blue corduroy pants and checkerboard Vans. Needless to say, that is not what Californians wear to school. Checkerboard Vans were already passé and no one would be caught dead in the other stuff. Bermuda shorts were in style and many of the boys sported bowl cuts with dyed blonde hair on top. In my case, the mullet didn't help either. I didn't even know it was called a mullet. In Wisconsin, we called that a haircut. This was long before the internet and it took time for new trends to reach the Midwest.
The final surprise was the biggest one and what this story is really all about. My school in the Midwest had maybe one African-American student. It seemed to me on that first day that Irvine High School had kids from every nationality on Earth. That's not exactly true, but a lot of nations were represented, mostly from Asia.
To recap, I had just moved halfway across the country. The Caucasian kids dressed in a way I had not experienced before and I had never been in such a multi-cultural environment. I felt like an outsider in my own country. Don't misunderstand though, I wasn't angry about it, I was just overwhelmed because it was all so new.
There were kids with heritages from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, The Philippines, Thailand, India and, of course, Mexico and Central America. At first, I was lost but I was smart enough to join the marching band. It was generally students with Asian backgrounds that first started to help me assimilate to my new environment. They went so far as to invite me over to dinner with their families. I learned that I needed to remove my shoes before entering the house. I learned of new foods like curry and that there are things called garbanzo beans or chickpeas.
Gradually, things started to improve. There was a group of boys who had aspirations to join the tennis team. I started practicing with them at a park after school. This group is where I started to make real friendships, some of whom I'm still in contact with today. They were and are an ethnically diverse group. Today, they are doctors, chefs, business executives and more. But, mostly doctors, haha.
These were first and second generation Americans who came to this country via immigration or were refugees from Vietnam. For what it's worth, I went to my junior prom with a girl from Vietnam along with her twin sister and my friend Perry, who is Filipino. We had a great time except their parents wanted them home by midnight.
My family ended up living in the Irvine/Newport Beach area for about a decade. I still count that as one of the best decades of my life. I learned so much about myself and also about the kindness of others. These young people didn't have to help me become part of the community, but they did, and I am forever grateful for it.
The current administration's policies are trying to destroy all of these good things that immigrants bring to our country and I believe we can't let that happen.
My story is a perfect reason why.
Editor's note: I subsequently worked with my father for two decades. There were no more $100,000 errors on my watch.
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