I affected the air of a seasoned traveler even when Mama and my younger brother gaped in wonder around me. I didn’t find the drab beige interior of the plane all that attractive anyway, and the uniformity of everything was off-putting, the identical seats and plastic trays, as if nothing in that aircraft had been made with human hands. The takeoff was wondrous though, even when we sat in the section of four seats in the middle of the giant plane. Mama let me take the aisle, so I at least peeked out the window, as the mottled landscape got blurrier the farther we got from the ground.

I wore a jacket my grandfather in America, Lolo Bert, had sent me, sand-colored with “Members Only” emblazoned on the breast pocket. But coming out of the arrivals terminal, it felt just as hot as it had been when we took off. Lolo Bert had visited once when I was little, though I didn’t remember his face even after he hugged me; my grandfather led us to a gigantic blue car called a Cadillac to take us to my uncle’s house, where we would live while we got settled.

“There is a change of plans,” he said. “You will be at your uncle’s nursing home.”

My uncle Tito Romeo had worked as a nurse for many years, at a hospital in Chino, California. But I learned on that car ride that he’d recently bought a house that he converted into a facility to take care of old people.

“Why aren’t their relatives taking care of them?” I asked.

“It’s different in America,” Lolo Bert explained as he drove. “Here, old people don’t live with their children.”

The alien concept merged with the strangeness of our surroundings when we left the airport. Instead of the lush, green fields of home, we drove on the widest road I’d ever seen, between buildings like giant boxes, the land barren except for identical trees on the edge of some roads. Giant signs for SEARS, TOYS ‘R’ US, and PACE were the only shifts in color amid the blue sky, the dusty earth, the gray roads that formed mazes as they intersected. Everything, everything was improbably big and wide and far, as our own giant car hurtled for miles.

My grandfather told me we were getting close. We found ourselves in a barren-looking town of squat buildings instead of skyscrapers, with no people on the sidewalks. As we passed row upon row of nearly identical single-story houses painted in shades of dust, their roofs reddish-brown, it felt as if the America I knew was just a trick of my imagination, even as I would later learn how the Hollywood that built my fantasies was only an hour away.