ANDREW LAM-Pacific News Service
Editor's note: Many young people who know that owning their own home is no longer economically feasible are reimagining the American Dream. For Generation X, home is likely to be an e-mail address or a home page on the Internet where the door is always open to visitors. PNS associate editor Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese American writer based in San Francisco.
Not along ago I read about a young man who was arrested for stealing car batteries to power his high tech equipment in San Francisco. He lives in a tent with a computer, modem, CD-Rom, and cellular phone. He is not, he insists, homeless. After all, he has a full-time job. It�s just that instead of spending his hard-earned money on rent, he prefers to create a home for himself on the Internet where a cyberspace community knows him intimately. There is, I think, a bravery about this young man. He is imagining what he wants to get out of life and the classic Ozzie and Harriet version of the suburban house is no longer at its center. Like many members of my generation, he is giving the American Dream a radically new interpretation. "I can do without a house of my own," a friend tells me. "But not without a computer and a modem." Why? "Without my modem," she says, "I would feel disconnected from almost everyone I know. Going home for me means checking my e-mail messages." If a house was once "the most lyrical of American symbols," in the words of Max Lerner, those symbols today are the modem, the beeper, the lap top, the fax machine. For young people who came of age in the high tech communications era, these aren�t luxuries but necessities; they are what give us our sense of home. They are home. When I was a teenager I coveted this dream house overlooking the ocean. I fantasized about how one day I would entertain friends or relatives in its spacious dining room. We�d have dinner parties to discuss literature, then retire to the patio for dessert and a view of the Pacific at twilight. Today I�m a San Francisco renter. I�ve long since downsized my vision of the American Dream-reinterpreting it minus the material trapping. My friends refer to my laptop as "Andrew�s baby." It�s where I store my short stories, addresses, e-mail messages, essays, recipes, interviews, letter, ideas, schedules, journal entries. In a fire or earthquake, it�s the one thing I would risk injury to save. My older brother and his wife, both engineers, recently created a home page for their daughter, Amy, who had just turned four. The homepage updates her activities and it comes complete with photos-see Amy dance in the ballet class, see Amy learn her first piano lesson, see Amy play with Barney, the purple dinosaur. From time to time Amy�s relatives, including her writerly uncle, dutifully get on line to update themselves on Amy�s progress. "I have more than one home," Amy boasts when I talked to her on her birthday. "I have a home with mommy and daddy, and I have a home page in the computer, too." Amy is a lucky child. She lives in a world where she is loved and where her sense of home expands effortlessly beyond yards and walls and gardens to a universe of far-flung friends and relatives. Here is a community revitalized by technology. Her sense of home transcends geographical boundaries. What is a home, after all? If it is a place where we gather to bask in familial intimacy, then it�s easy to empathize with the young man who steals batteries to stay in touch with his own community. A house is a physical space that offers shelter form night prowlers and the weather. But home speaks of intimacy - a dining room table with friends around it. In cyberspace the home page is sunny and hospitable. The door is always open to visitors. Those who blame technology for the isolation and fragmentation of our society miss the point. It�s human selfishness that breaks down community. Technology is just a tool. For many in my generation, it�s how we keep in touch, connect, reconnect, discover our sense of belonging. "I�m building a place where people will come and recite poetry and tell their stories," says Hai Nguyen, a computer graphic designer in his 20s. "It�s not the place I�m living in which is way too small. It�s my palace in cyberspace." "Home," a friend writes from Cairo via e-mail. "It�s anywhere and everywhere. Home belongs to the imagination."