A new short stories of mine, “Tickets to Disneyland,” was just published by The Margins, a literary journal of the NYC-based Asian American Writers’s Workshop (AAWW). The magazine is dedicated “to inventing the Asian American creative culture of tomorrow.”

My inspiration for “Tickets to Disneyland” comes from my years working at an Internet powerhouse in the Silicon Valley. It was my first job in the U.S. For quite a few years when I was there, I worked long hours, sometimes from 8am till 9 or 10 in the evening. Like me, many of my coworkers were young, single, hardworking and ambitious. “They wore faded jeans and the tee-shirts bearing the company logo, ” as Yong Chen, the protagonist in the story, a janitor, observes.

Here is a passage about how Yong does his cleaning:

“Yong began to clean the conference room ‘Australia’ at the end of the building. He liked how the company named its conference rooms after countries. It was like being on a global tour free of charge—actually, better, since he was paid to be on the tour. ‘China’ was on the second floor near the kitchen, a big space three times the size of his apartment, with a computer, a whiteboard, and a purple-surfaced round table at which he sometimes sat to take a break. Other rooms were called ‘India,’ ‘Germany,’ ‘Brazil,’ and many other countries, all but ‘United States.’ At first, he was puzzled. Later it made perfect sense—why name a conference room the ‘United States’ when the whole company and all of Silicon Valley were in the United States?”

In my years working at the Internet company, I got to know several janitors by name, and one of them, a bright-eyed and cheerful young man from Mexico, liked to chat with me with his broken English. He told me that he had two daughters back home living with their mother, and said that he’d like to bring them to the U.S. someday. When I was writing “Tickets to Disneyland,” I thought about this man and his daughters back in Mexico.

“Disneyland” is a specific physical location, but, to Yong Chen, is also a symbol of family reunion, and of freedom and establishment. When the economy plummets, his hope evaporates, too. Disneyland is just an unachievable illusion to him.

The tense shifts at the end from the past to the present. It’s a deliberate decision. By doing so, I wanted the reader to see the leap from illusion to reality, and to add more psychological depth to the story.

I completed the first draft of the story three or four years ago, but didn’t think it strong enough to be published. Over the years, I rewrote the story several times, including new endings.

Thanks to my editor Anelise and The Margin for giving the story a beautiful home.

To read the complete story, please visit: http://aaww.org/tickets-to-disneyland/