My mom was telling me about a time when it was just she and my dad. It was the early 70s. They were leaving their crappy apartment in South Central LA to drive their crappy Volkswagen Bug to a crappy basement apartment in Queens, NY.
This meant they had to drive through the Midwest.
Now there are some areas of the country that even today I am afraid to visit. I can't imagine my parents, my fresh off the boat parents, stopping for dinner in a diner in the rural Midwest in the early 70s.
They were in Kansas or some nearby state. The moment they walked in the door, everyone turned around and stared at them. (At this point in the story, I imagined the needle slipping off the record in the corner jukebox.) Everyone literally gaped at them, their eyes bulging. Forks dropped from petrified hands onto plates. As my parents made their way to a table, Caucasian eyes and heads followed.
"It was so uncomfortable," my mom said.
"You don't say," I replied.
They had no problems thankfully. They simply ate their meal awkwardly as the entire diner blatantly stared at the Orientals seen only on TV or in newspapers.
It was just another dinner in a diner in the good ol' U.S. of A.
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