When I was on tour for my memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, I ended the tour in Atlantic City – a city that I hadn’t returned to since I was a child, accompanying my father while he gambled each day at Caesar’s Palace. In the title chapter, I write about him disappearing into those brightly lit, velvet carpeted rooms: “My father is whiskey-eyed and half-asleep – a drowsy raccoon hunched over the blackjack table.” This was the place that led to the closing of our family restaurant due to his gambling debts. This was the place where I lost my father, the beginning of my estrangement from him. Atlantic City, for me, was a haunted place. It had been probably over twenty-five years since I’d been on that boardwalk, sand stuck between my toes. And it was my book that brought me back.
Mighty Writers, a wonderful non-profit organization that nurtures young writers, invited me as a guest to read. My mother also came with me, decked out in crisp white pants and huge sunglasses. It was June, and summer on the Jersey Shore was in full swing, as were the seagulls who stole every pizza crust they could find on a grease stamped plate. We stayed at the Tropicana, a hotel and casino. This was the first time my mother and I had stepped foot in a casino since the ‘90s. At first, we felt out of place, confused by the constant ringing of slot machines and the labyrinthine journey to find our hotel room; casinos are built so that they feel like miniature towns – and finding the door out took many attempts. With each wrong turn, I felt like I’d run into my father, his suit coat draped along his chair, a cigarette dangling in his mouth. I imagined him looking up at us, open-mouthed in awe: “There you are,” he’d say. “Where have you been all this time?”
There was so much ache within these casino floors, so much devastation and loss in each speck of sand, in each tourist t-shirt hem. We had been afraid to return all these years, and yet there was something about returning on our own terms, in the afterspace of what was lost. Atlantic City for me and my mom was completely changed and tenderized by community and possibility. We met some incredible locals at my reading and were so moved by their humor and generosity. At Tony’s Pizzeria and Grill, I devoured pies and laughed so hard, tomato sauce drooled out of my mouth. It felt like home. It felt like a reckoning. That night, after meeting so many amazing community members, my mom and I went back to the Tropicana and she nudged me as we entered the doors: “Let’s gamble,” she said. “What? Why?” I asked, shocked. She smiled, linking her arm with mine. “So we can rewrite this story,” she said. And we did – for the first time in our lives, we put money into a slot machine. We lost five dollars immediately and cried and ran off to the boardwalk, where my mom let me play as many games as I wanted. I shoved dollar bills into claw machines over and over, pawed at stuffed animal jellyfish and seagulls. We returned to being children, laughing and pointing at all the funnel cakes we wanted to eat. I was six again and my mother was twenty-six again, so young.
I wonder if I would’ve been brave enough to have this homecoming trip if I didn’t write this memoir. If I didn’t move away to Washington decades later, a place that is my new home, thirteen years now and counting. If I didn’t have distance in order for me to reconcile the ways place can call us back, anew. I can describe Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City as a book that is a love song to my mother, a book for radical Asian American restaurant babies, a rally cry for working-class immigrants. But the book, on a more vulnerable level, is a salve for me. This memoir is everything poured out of me, and then some. Even after I’ve written it, it’s still writing itself.
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NWbooklovers posts original essays from this year’s award winners as featured posts in January and February. You can enjoy essays from past winners of the PNBA Book Award in our archive.