ALISA OCHOA

RESEMBLANCE

My brother Tony and I are hybrids, offsprings of ethnically and culturally dissimilar parents. My mother is Thai-Chinese; my dad is Mexican (and about a dozen other ethnicities). From my parents’ kitchen came even stranger hybrids: dinners of hot dogs and jasmine rice and chorizo with macaroni and cheese. Their multi-culinary imagination was limited only by what was on special at the supermarket and vegetables that grew in their garden. They weren’t as concerned with defining identities for my brother and I, as they were with creating a loving family. In their small home in Las Vegas, my parents Ralph and Anong cultivated curiosity, imagination, generosity, and a joy of mixing things.

Since I can remember, I have plunged myself into the richness of form and saw myself as a part of the play of natural events. I viewed people as a whole, a gestalt, so that every part of my visual image of the whole affects every other part. When my dad shaved off his moustache in the 80’s, and then grew a goatee in the 90’s, the whole Dad seemed changed. No matter how small a subdivision is taken, like his facial hair, the subsection contains no less detail than the whole.

Another activity concerned with modulating organic growth was my mother's garden. Gardening provided Mom with a link between spheres of work and leisure; much of her time was not only devoted to laboring in her garden but also talking to our neighbors. The manual work of tending to her lemongrass, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, and peppers was pleasurable for my mom. The results were appreciated not only by my family but also by our neighbors. She was so tickled that she could grow anything in that Las Vegas dirt. As a child it seemed strange to me that people like my parents would enjoy work and want to prolong it.

I remember my eyes feeling like they were going to explode into tiny particles when my parents took Tony and I to the Strip for the first time. Years later, I still find myself consumed in a similar awe thinking about my hometown. For me, the most pleasurable part of the landscape will always be the way the flashing neon lights competed with the dawn of the sun. I often try to describe my memory of watching the sunrise in Las Vegas to friends who have never witnessed this phenomenon. It’s knowledge so beautiful that it is almost wordless or incommunicable because it so depends on the context of looking. All I can relate is a compressed description of a dusty blue sky growing increasingly brighter as the flashing lights of the casinos fade, like the neon lights are pushed into an invisible envelope by the sun. The last pulsations of pinks, golds, and blues were replaced by waves of lavender, orange, and gray; its endless variation, its subtlety, and complexity warmed the Vegas sky. All these colors begin to swirl and open, just like a flower.

© Alisa Ochoa 2010