Vampiros de cultura.

After a few days of rest and relaxation in Grand Isle, our little group of bookpackers arrived in the New Orleans’ Central Business District, settling into our hotel rooms. Despite its nickname, “The Big Easy”, I’ve found very little about it to be easy so far.

I’m used to the organized chaos of Los Angeles; the ruckus of a melting pot. I know which bus will take me where, how to navigate the streets depending on which neighborhood I’m in, and where to go for a cheap meal nearby.

Maybe that’s why I feel so disoriented in New Orleans; it reminds me too much of Downtown LA. The unfamiliar morphs into the mundane with the snap of your fingers. There’s the unhoused sleeping on the sidewalks, and thick, warm air that you can’t quite escape. Both cities seem caught in the cycle of appealing to the ‘newcomers’: cafes with no prices listed, hotels plopped next to one another, shops that appeal to the niche of the city. However, being born and raised in Los Angeles confirms my belief that my city is being gentrified, I’m not quite sure if New Orleans has always been this way.

Eating out while staying in a hotel for three weeks is not for the cheapskates, such as I. Nearly every meal so far has cost me $20. This is more than I’d hope, but there seems to be an unspoken rule when it comes to being a tourist and spending without hesitation. You’re not just buying food; you’re paying for an experience you may never have again. That’s not too bad, as I have been personally victimized by the Hailey Bieber smoothie, but it adds up when you’re not working during this trip.

When you go somewhere as a tourist short-term, there’s a different level of control than when you’re a long-term tourist. It’s easy to spend because you don’t know when you’ll be back; you need all the memorabilia and will eat all the local food. You become aware of the façade. The urgency to collect souvenirs or eat ‘authentically’ fades into a quieter realization: it’s all available, over and over, from the ‘I Heart NOLA’ shirts to the beignets. The city wants you to spend, to believe in the illusion it casts. That’s the American cycle of tourism. You’re never just seeing a place—you’re consuming it. 

This awareness surprisingly came to me before we had officially arrived in New Orleans, while on the Cajun Pride Swamp Tour. The tour guide, who was friendly and full of jokes, pulled out the tour’s big showstopper: a baby alligator, who was to be passed around for anyone on the tour to ‘pet’. Its mouth was bound with what seemed like a bandage, safe for any liabilities and ready to take pictures with, like a party favor.  As our boat wound through the seemingly endless swamp, he called into the trees at every stop with a startling “AY-YUP”, summoning the conditioned wildlife with treats. Racoons, boars, and gators came out of nowhere to feast upon fistfuls of marshmallow and dried corn, all urbanized versions of themselves. Everyone there was trying to get something out of the other; the tour guide hoping to make some tips with his story telling, us tourists who wanted to immerse ourselves in the culture, and even the animals hoping to be fed. Perhaps we have not inherently caused interference with the animals’ way of life, but we’ve fed into it. We have smiled ear to ear, ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the creatures, held the baby gator, who was separated from his mother, while having our picture taken. As tourists, we are feeding into the economy that lets opportunities like this continue.

In this system, we are complicit. Our wonder feeds the machine. In Interview with The Vampire, Louis reflects, “Never in New Orleans had the kill to be disguised. The ravages of fever, plague, crime—these things competed with us always there, and outdid us.” Just as he fed on humans, tourists feed on the curated versions of local culture. The city does the same thing, needing to thrive on tourism and in doing so reducing the value of its culture. Louis saw New Orleans as a place where he could disappear, where horror mixed with beauty in a way that hid his darkness in plain sight. He was invisible because the city made room for monsters, because it had already learned to sell its suffering.

New Orleans, like LA, confuses origin with invention. In LA, I know what cultures shape the city—Latino and Asian communities have built it, and the American version has diffused it. Here, the history is more entangled: French, Spanish, African, Creole. Colonialism left its fingerprints everywhere, from architecture to cuisine. Maybe that’s why fast food seems strangely absent. You’re meant to eat gumbo, po’boys, and beignets. If you don’t, you’re “not doing it right.” You’re not consuming correctly.

As a group, we’ve been to various places north of the Mississippi River, yet not too north as to meet the lake. I cannot say I know New Orleans, because I have yet to know all of it. This is how I feel about people who have ‘visited’ Los Angeles; you do not know Los Angeles if you haven’t traveled South of the 10, or East of the 110.  

Louis’s love for New Orleans was always conditional, even if he does not acknowledge it. He could admire its decadence without ever being a part of it. The city cannot love him because it does not know him; if it did, it would reject him. Tourists enjoy the city the same way Louis does: from a distance. We don’t get to know the full truth, only the filtered version that we can tell friends and family about. We crave intimacy without responsibility.  

Perhaps, like Louis, we too are feeding off this place—its food, its stories, its tragedies polished into spectacle. The city dances for us, and we smile for photos. And when we leave, it will reset for the next group, the next “easy” experience. But nothing here is easy, not for the people, or the gators, or the culture.

Skip the preface.

Novel introductions are the cuckolds of the literary universe.

There is no greater joy than walking into a bookstore and picking up a new book. You find yourself excited at the prospect of something new, something you have yet to fully synthesize and digest. You’re at the threshold of a new understanding. You flip past the first few pages, still crisp and containing the aroma of ‘new book’, ignoring the copyright page and all the things that come before that first paragraph of text. You’ve gone through the foreplay—browsing the store, observing the covers, picking your poison. You reach the first real page, the one that contains substantial paragraphs, but find that it isn’t the novel itself. It’s the introduction.

That always ruins it for me.

My trauma with novel introductions began with David Cronenberg’s introduction to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I picked it up at the Downtown Central Library during my junior year of high school, not in preparation for any exam or class, but to understand literature that people called ‘classic’. Less than two pages into the introduction, Cronenberg spoiled the ending. In that instant, my sense of wonder, sprouted from the ambiguity and possibility of unfolding the text’s meaning, had disappeared. It turned the novel into a sterile text that I knew the points to.

Since that moment, I’ve refused to read introductions, especially when it comes to the classics.

That rule remained firm when I picked up The Awakening at Barnes & Noble, alongside the rest of the books required for the Maymester, in Santa Monica. The knowledge I had of Kate Chopin was limited from my work as a teaching assistant. Each school semester, I help prepare my class of seniors for their AP English Literature exams. One of our recurring texts is Chopin’s short story, The Kiss. The students are tasked with reading and annotating the story, then writing a thesis that responds to a prompt regarding the story. Yet, because the class only meets twice a month, and the grade they receive only impacts their standing in the program, I get the absolutely worst theses that don’t make any sense as to what is occurring in the actual story.

When I first exited the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport—or MSY, as I prefer to call it—with our group, I was hit with a wave of heavy, sickly heat. It was a reminder that summer had started, though I suppose that my Los Angeles upbringing had skewed my sense of what ‘summer’ felt like. As a late summer baby, you’d believe I’d love, or at least be used to, the heat. I grew up in apartments with subpar insulation that stops the cool air from the summer nights from coming in, making my home feel like an oven at night.

That morning, I had left home in a thick USC sweatshirt and black leggings, believing that I was capable of withstanding the under 90-degree heat of Louisiana. That frigid LA morning hadn’t prepared me for the smothering air. Arriving almost an hour later than scheduled, which had ruined the Houston Airport for me, I realized I was not prepared for what came next: a three-hour car ride with a pile of suitcases that preferred to topple over my head at every turn instead of remaining in a neat stack.

Still, I found myself unable to sleep on the ride. I watched Louisiana slowly transform from city to swamp, so unlike LA’s endless loop of houses, shops, and freeways. This place shifted from urban density into a raw rural landscape. The roads weren’t crowded with impatient drivers, not the ones that were too stupid to move forward and willing to hit you with their cars. There was space, stillness.

On our first full day at Grand Isle, we were given our first simple task: finish two thirds of The Awakening by the end of the day and finish it by our 5 p.m. seminar the next day. Here we were, surrounded by beach, tranquility, and the endless possibilities given by a new environment. You get so wrapped up in trying to experience Grand Isle and the limited time there that your brain tries to tell you to go, step on the beach, and get to know the people around you. But time was limited, and we all knew we had to read it.

Reading the novel in Grand Isle added an odd sense of dissonance. I struggled to map the novel’s world onto my own surroundings. Edna Pontellier’s Grand Isle was slow and romantic, painting a picture of pleasant summer evenings on the warm beach. The one I saw was cluttered with red seaweed that made you anxious to step on it, containing bits of washed-up garbage, and dense clouds that could almost trick you into believing that outside couldn’t possibly be that hot. The air was thick, unrelenting, enveloping you the second you stepped out of an air-conditioned space. No possibility of an Amazon delivery, or a quick bite at McDonald’s unless you wanted to drive 50 minutes away.

And yet, despite the environmental disconnect, I connected with Edna. I resisted the urge to look up a summary. Normally, I can’t help myself; if a movie or book moves slowly or is filled with flowery language, I will open the Wikipedia page without a second thought. But I held back. Edna’s internal state, her longing, her desire for complete autonomy—I knew it. While on Grand Isle, every day felt like I was waiting for something that never came, something that would propel me out of la-la-land and had me unable to fully relax. But it never did, regardless of that itch for transformation.

In Edna, I found myself enveloped by her similar feelings for longing and belonging, outside of my space in Grand Isle. It was the hope that you’d wake up and feel different, that your achievements would not only make you feel better but transform what you knew as life. That desperate desire for some accomplishment, some shift, that rewards you with the kind of happiness you’ve been looking for.

And somehow, this reminded me of why I don’t read introductions. I don’t want someone else’s interpretation shaping what I’m about to feel. I want the characters, the language, the setting, to meet me where I am. Knowing information and context about the author and the time in which the story was published is important to the understanding of the novel, but I don’t need it shoved and synthesized down my throat before I’ve read the first sentence. The Awakening didn’t need an introduction. It just needed space to reach me.