I never felt so self-conscious about being different until we left Woodland Hills. Growing up in L.A. until I was 12, with a Japanese mom and Jewish dad, left me with many identity questions. But I never felt completely out of place. I was surrounded by kids of all ethnicities at school, from Black to white to Persian to Vietnamese. But later, when I moved — first to France, then Arizona, then Michigan and New York by college — I never felt like I had a sense of home. I continued to feel unrooted without a singular religion or culture.
After school, I was grateful to be back in California. One day in my new apartment building post-COVID, I noticed a glamorous, petite Asian woman heading to the door next to mine. I guessed she was in her 50s.
“You must be the new neighbor,” she said. “I’m Susie.”
Although running late to an appointment, I was intrigued by her outgoingness and New York accent. Prior to that, I couldn’t recall meeting an Asian person over the age of 50 who had been raised in the U.S. Everyone I knew in that category, like my mom’s fellow Japanese friends, had been born in their home countries.
“Do you hike?” she asked. “A few of us in the building go together. You should join us sometime.”
While I wasn’t an avid hiker, I figured I could use a new crowd to hang with. Aside from the guy I was dating, much of my social circle had left California during the pandemic. So what if my new friends were 40 years older than me? Despite her younger appearance, it turned out Susie was almost 70.
As we exchanged numbers to make plans, she asked about my last name.
“Oh, Raskind. From my father’s side, Eastern European Jewish,” I said.
“My husband was Jewish,” she said, smiling.
I noted her use of the word “was” but decided not to say anything.
On the trail by the Pacific, as I panted and shook with fear in my new hiking boots at the bottom of the mountain, Susie was already on top, cheering me from above. If I wasn’t so scared of tumbling into the ocean, I would have laughed at the fact that a woman who was technically a senior citizen was the one assisting a twentysomething.
Fast friends, we’d hike nearly every weekend together. She shared more of her incredible story: She’d been one of the first women, let alone Chinese American women, in the fields of investment banking and venture capital in the 1980s. Interestingly, she had also spent many years in Arizona, where she had raised her son, who, like me, is Asian and Jewish. Finally she revealed more about her husband: He had died suddenly when Rocky, her son, was 13, leaving her a single parent.
“Does it ever feel lonely, growing older by yourself?” I asked.
“No,” she said, with a look of serenity. “I had 25 years with Robert. It was enough to last a lifetime.”
She recalled how Robert was so funny that he made her fall off her chair laughing on their first date. He somehow blended perfectly with her Chinese family, all eating latkes together and mixing Yiddish and Shanghainese words.
“Is this my long-lost family?” I thought, as Susie invited me to gatherings with her relatives. With the exception of her son, who lived in New York, nearly all her kin was on the West Coast, so I met her siblings, nieces and nephews, who were all just as kind and social as she was. I soon became so connected to everyone in Susie’s world that when my parents came to visit from New Jersey, even they joined us for our walks.
For the first time in a long time, I felt normal. We continued our routine for several months until one day, I felt a pit in my stomach and realized I needed to make a drastic change.
It had finally clicked for me that things would not work out with the guy I’d been dating for a few years.
I went to Susie’s house and cried at her dining room table.
“Will I ever find the perfect match?” I asked. “Where everything just falls into place?”
She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It was like that with my husband.”
I vowed, as a newly single woman, that I would find someone like that.
I needed a change of pace, so I spent the next few months in New Jersey to be close to my folks. I missed seeing Susie, but it was nice to know at least her son was close by.
I got to know him better. He was only five years older than me. I learned he had grappled with identity questions too. Even more strikingly, he had just moved to Brooklyn from L.A., where he had spent the last 11 years living everywhere from West Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles.
“That’s where I found myself,” he said.
I also realized how funny he was. I told him how cool I thought his mom was. “Are we talking about the same person?” he said jokingly. He was kind, too, doing things like holding the door for me automatically. Susie had raised him well.
When I was back East, we’d be in the same time zone and FaceTime eight hours a night, talking until we could barely keep our eyes open. And he was cute, I realized.
We were both single. So he asked me on a date.
I hesitated for a few days. I didn’t know him nearly as well as I knew his mom. Plus, if it didn’t work out, what would happen to my relationship with her?
“Was this the guy I was supposed to meet, where everything falls into place?” I wondered.
I said yes to dinner.
Two years later, he proposed, and a few months ago, we wed in Pasadena.
Before the ceremony, Susie asked for a sign that Robert would be watching. Inexplicably, the lights flickered during the groom-mother dance.
I knew that to celebrate, we couldn’t do it anywhere other than the city that had made us, accepted us and helped us accept each other. When I looked into the crowd, I saw my cousins and best friend I’d played with as a child, all of whom had driven in from Burbank, Thousand Oaks and Santa Clarita. In front of our Chinese, Japanese and Jewish families, serving latkes with chili crisp and doing the hora — with the in-laws I already knew so well — I finally felt completely normal and at home.
The author is a writer and works in tech. She is working on a book of essays about multiculturalism. She is originally from Los Angeles and now lives in New York.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
