Hiking Home
Christmas Day in the Sears-Wang family wouldn’t be complete without a grueling, six mile hike.
Every year after presents and breakfast, my mom, stepdad, and myself—and, if we have any, our guests—head out to the nearby mountains. In a place like my hometown, Las Vegas, where temperatures rarely drop below mildly chilly, the brisk winter weather is a welcome change. The season makes the Red Rock mountain range, located a convenient half hour outside of the bustling city, particularly pretty, sharpening the limestone’s vivid copper color and the meandering lines of the landscape.
Our hikes—on Christmas Day or otherwise— are both simple and powerful. Much more than an escape or form of exercise, hiking is a tradition that unifies my family. And given the significant cultural and generational differences between my mom, my stepdad, and myself, we are a family that could use some unity.
My very Chinese mom came to the States some 20 odd years ago, with my dad in tow. She’s built a life here since then, breaking glass ceilings in her professional life and raising me as a single parent for a few years after my dad died from lung cancer. But though the immigrant story—you know, that almost-clichéd, I-came-with-$40-and-adream story—is told over and over, the part that is never portrayed is that the immigrant experience never ends. Not when you’ve got a stable job. Not when you’ve learned the language as best you can. Not when you’ve nabbed your portion of the so-called American dream.
On the surface level, this is reflected in her inability to correctly pronounce the word “umbrella,” her lack of appetite for cheesy and creamy sauces, and her failure to grasp sarcasm and pop culture references, all characteristics that are most often joked about good-naturedly. But on a deeper level, my mom is still the girl who grew up during the heart of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She retains a cultural identity and set of values that cannot be removed or covered up, one that is built into her very self and being—and one that I, having experienced a completely different childhood and reality, often cannot understand.
My stepdad, on the other hand, is an all- American baby boomer, born and raised in the heart of Wyoming. His Midwestern, midcentury upbringing has made him old-fashioned in many ways. Most content sipping beer on the back porch or woodworking out on the “shop” he’s built in the garage, he’s often baffled by the degree to which my mom has emphasized and prioritized my education. He’s likewise baffled by youth culture and technology, and occasionally asks me what I could “possibly be doing on the computer all the time.” But with his comical confusion, he has also brought a degree of calm to the house and, more importantly, an appreciation for imagination and abstract philosophical thought, things my more linear-minded mother has little patience for. His encouragement of me to pursue things like Speech & Debate and creative writing has influenced who I am today.
The magnitude of the differences between us makes it easy to forget that we, both as family and as humans, are part of the same world— and that new generations are simply reflections and products of the ones that came before. But the act of hiking, the act of carrying out one of the unique traditions we’ve created in our shared time, never fails to remind my family of our commonalities. Over the years, our loyal Toyota has taken us from Yosemite to Havasu Falls, from Joshua Tree to Yellowstone, and though I no longer sit in a car seat, not much else has changed. Though our traditions may not be typical, they serve their purpose: they remind us that, though the world is constantly in flux and we have our differences, family will always bind us together.