Cinderella in Her Odyssey Years

After graduating as the most senior student in the history of her school, Elaine moved to Reno for more school.

Ever since she migrated from China to North America, she had moved around a lot, but she had always clung to the West Coast. The phrase “fresh off the boat” explained it all. Even though boats were no longer the primary means of crossing oceans, immigrants still tended to concentrate along the coasts. Reno was the farthest inland Elaine had ever dived in. No seafaring vessel could have delivered her here.

During her first two days, Elaine was struck by the warmth of the local people, something that felt distinctive from the sprawling coastal cities she was used to. She had bought a potato peeler at Walmart, but two days later, she found another potato peeler at the bottom of a box she’d shipped from home, so she went back to Walmart to return the new one. The woman at customer service looked like the kind of grandmother you often see on a birthday card. She nodded sympathetically after hearing Elaine out: “That happens a lot!”

Elaine told her she’d lost the receipt.

“Receipts are made to be lost,” the woman reassured her.

Elaine swiped the credit card she believed she’d used for the purchase. The woman looked at the screen and chirped, “There you go. $4.42 back to you!”

Elaine was touched by the way locals seemed to go out of their way to make her feel good, but nothing could change the fact that Reno was small and, therefore, somewhat inconvenient. Many brands Elaine liked didn’t have stores here. Reno’s weather was whimsical: rain could suddenly pour down while the sun had been scorching the earth only moments before. Elaine needed a pair of outdoor boots, but the closest store carrying her favorite brand was in Sacramento, a two-hour drive away. Of course, she could buy almost anything online, but she liked to try shoes on in a physical store.

There is a proverb in Chinese: “Marriage is like shoes: only the wearer knows where they pinch.” This probably explains why online dating is so difficult: it is like online shopping for shoes.

Saturday afternoon, she asked AI, “Where can I go if I want to buy shoes?”

AI told her to go to the Summit shopping center. And here she was, her Tesla parked between two giant pickup trucks. She looked toward the edge of the parking lot, where a long line of storefronts stretched before her, but there wasn’t a single brand she was interested in.

She raised a hand over her eyes to shield them from the scorching sun and took a closer look. There was a store called Dillard’s. Judging from its size, she guessed it might be a department store. She decided to check it out. As she walked up the stairs, the automatic doors opened for her, revealing clothes, cosmetics, and handbags.

It was a department store indeed!

Embraced by the cool air-conditioning, Elaine began browsing the footwear department. Curiously, almost half the space was dedicated to discounted shoes. She scanned the shelves without much enthusiasm, thinking, Now that I’m here, I might as well make the best of it.

Elaine was tall and had large feet, something her grandmother used to mock. Her grandmother had been born when the centuries-old Chinese practice of foot-binding was beginning to die out. But because she had grown up in a remote inland village, her own feet had still been bound for several years as a child. Suffered was Elaine’s word for the experience. Her grandmother, however, often looked at Elaine’s feet with genuine concern, wondering what a refined gentleman would marry a woman who needed such large shoes.

Elaine wandered between the aisles with her arms crossed, bemusedly thinking about her grandmother and her ideas about shoes. Then something clicked. She thought of Cinderella.

Fitting shoes were indeed a metaphor for an ideal marriage. But in the old Chinese tradition, a woman distorted her feet to fit the marriage; in the Western fairy tale, she waited for a marriage that fit her feet.

Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts, a pair of size 9½ boots seemed to beg for her attention. They were exactly her size, exactly the color she wanted, and exactly the style she had been looking for.

Elaine’s eyes widened. She pulled the boots from the shelf and tried them on.

They fit.

And they looked good.

And she had never heard of the brand, so she whipped out her phone and looked it up. It turned out to be a luxury brand from Spain.

And the price? Only about half the price of a pair of new Nike shoes.

Unbelievable! A luxury brand she had never heard of at such a bargain price, in Reno!

She rushed to the cashier, clutching the shoebox against her chest as if claiming future ownership.

The cashier was a young woman with a strand of purple-highlighted hair and a nose ring. She asked Elaine if she was a member. Elaine said no.

“Why don’t you put your phone number in here so you can earn loyalty points?”

And Elaine did just that.

As she typed, the woman commented on the area code. “Is that somewhere in California? I don’t see it very often, but it looks familiar somehow. I see 916 a lot. That’s Sacramento.”

Elaine said it was Southern California.

“Oh, I remember. Orange County!” the woman exclaimed. “Are you visiting, or are you moving here?”

“I’m moving here.”

“Good for you! People in Orange County are evil.”

“Why?”

“They only eat salad for dinner.”

“Ah.” Elaine couldn’t help laughing. “They’re probably just hell-bent on being healthy.”

“They tried to make me feel bad for eating meat.”

“I see! I still think evil may be too strong a word. How about boring?”

The woman tilted her head and shrugged, apparently unconvinced. “Do you eat meat?”

“I eat everything edible.”

“That’s why you’re here.” She smiled victoriously. “I’m glad you’re here.”

That’s not why I’m here, but I’m glad you’re glad I’m here, Elaine thought.

And with that, Elaine felt she had been initiated into Reno.

Elaine was writing a dating diary, and she had challenged herself to open or end every entry with a reference to a literary work. For this entry, she thought of The Odyssey. This train of thought owed something to the Nolan adaptation. Even though she disliked some of the changes Nolan had made, it was undeniable that the adaptation had brought The Odyssey back into public conversation. Perhaps that was why, as she carried her loot back to her car, a phrase shimmered in the back of her mind: the Odyssey years.

“The Odyssey years” describes that period of young adulthood when people explore careers, relationships, identities, and beliefs before settling into conventional adulthood.

Elaine felt as though she had been living her Odyssey years all her life, trying to find three things: shoes, a good man, and a home.

Do we have to change ourselves to fit a life, or do we keep wandering until we find a life that fits us? Perhaps the answer was a bit of both, in proportions determined by each person’s choices.

Could Reno become her home? Could she find a good man here?

Who knew?

At least she had found a pair of fashionable and fitting shoes at a bargain price.

It wasn’t bad at all that she had achieved one out of three goals in the first week.

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