driving to Princeton

The US can be called the land of the road. Roads and highways crisscross the country. People drive everywhere. One of the prominent icons of American literature is Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”.

Most of the highways have numbers. Some have names too, but the primary way most highways are referred to is by the number. For instance, Route 101 is the backbone of life in the fast lane in the California Bay Area, cutting through Silicon Valley. Route 66 has been the beloved subject of an old song, and is also known as “the Mother road”. The situation is reversed in other countries like Malaysia, where expressways are typically known by their names, even if they also have numbers.

So I fly into the US to go to Princeton for college – and I go from the airport to the university on Route 1. Yes, Route 1 – not Route 573, not Route 1928, not Route 6873 – but Route 1. The first drive to college, on the road called Route 1. It’s the kind of thing that’s too perfect to be made up.

My dad accompanied me to college. We had flown in from London, where we had spent a few days visiting my uncle and aunt before going over to New York. We landed at JFK airport, one of the 3 international airports in the New York City vicinity. I would later end up almost exclusively using Newark Airport, one of the other 3 airports, but that day we flew in to JFK. Till today, I still don’t know how to drive to and from JFK. Till today, I have also never been to the other airport, LaGuardia. For all I know, I may have been duped and LaGuardia may not even exist.

Upon arrival, we were picked up by a driver in a limo. This had been arranged by a company that my dad was going to visit while in the US. Having (by now, not then) observed cars on four continents, I’d have to give the award for biggest cars to the North Americans. A limo is usually just a so-called “full-sized” car, not a compact car or smaller, which would be the norm in Europe and Asia. It’s not a big deal to ride in one. A stretch limo, on the other hand is cause to ooh and aah. You may catch one on the rare special occasion, like at some weddings. Alternatively, if you travel to and from the airport often enough on business travel, you may one day find yourself in a stretch limo on the way to the airport, not because you ordered one and are going to have a lot of explaining to do when you get back, but because they didn’t have any other car in which to pick you up that day. This actually happened to me once and I have the photo of the inside of the stretch limo to prove it.

Nick, the driver, was a big man with a receding hairline. He turned out to be quite talkative. I don’t remember all the things he said. However, I remember that he spoke passionately about the virtues of capitalism. My dad and I (especially my dad – in those days I was not in the habit of speaking much – I was more of an observer than anything else; I’ll write more on Asian culture and so on in a future entry) probed the depth of his thinking – we asked “what if …”, “but how …” and so on. He had an answer for everything. I now suspect he must often have had such conversations and was therefore well rehearsed.

Meanwhile, the drive on Route 1 was slow, almost leisurely. It was the first time I was in the US after having visited as a tourist when I was 11. I was struck by how far apart everything was. One-storey strip malls were strewn about here and there, and they had huge carparks (which I later learnt were called parking lots in the US) in front of them. People were also driving on the wrong side of the road. That didn’t impress me as much in those days before I had learnt how to drive. The turns felt funny, though. Even funnier were the jug-handle turns (a New Jersey specialty!), where people would keep to the right lane to make a left turn, or keep to the left lane to make a right turn.

There came the decisive moment when Nick got to the bottom line. He said it as confidently and optimistically as everything else he spoke that day, infused with conviction. It went something like this: “there will soon come a day when they will recognize the error of their ways; they will turn to capitalism … (long pause) … and we will welcome them!” And we would all live happily together afterwards … end of story (or so, one might add). This was way back in 1988 when the Cold War had not yet ended. The world was just the US and it allies, and the USSR and its allies. Some people thought the Cold War would last forever, or until mutually assured destruction happened. Others, more optimistic, could dream about the day when the communists would come around, and the world would be ushered into a new and glorious age. Little did we know that the Berlin Wall would be coming down in a few short years, that it would crumble before I and my classmates got out of college.

Neither did we foresee Tiananmen, Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, and other crazy events like those. The contemporary historical narrative was on the verge of great changes that would soon see a new world order. On that day, however, it was just the three of us driving along Route 1, and I was concerned not so much with the new world order but with my own new world into which I would be stepping. Unlike many of my classmates, who I presumed had visited the campus one or more times before deciding to attend, I had never stepped foot in Princeton before. I knew nobody in the US, and the nearest relatives that I knew of lived in London, whereas my family was all the way on the other side of the globe. Now, as we were cruising past strip malls and listening to Nick, we were getting ever closer to the end of that journey and the beginning of another journey.