Why I Love Los Angeles
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Los Angeles may seem hard and uncaring but it's the best place to discover who you really are.

I absolutely love Los Angeles. After traveling more than I have in the last five years within the last two weeks (I went to New England last week, Oklahoma/Texas this week), I’ve come to realize why it is I could never gather the courage to leave the Greater Los Angeles area for a prolonged period.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and as I’m sitting on a United flight from Oklahoma’s Will Roger’s World Airport to LAX, I can only describe my emotional state as one of melancholic relief. Confusing I know. I’m not an idiot. I know other areas of the world have much to offer but there’s really no place like home, especially if home comes in the form of Los Angeles.

I have friends that love to travel, spending every vacation traversing the various nooks and crannies of the United States and beyond. One of my friends will have been to all fifty of the U.S. States by the time she turns 25 in May. She talks about the character of other cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Portland that can’t be found in L.A.

Hollywood has romanticized Los Angeles to the point that international travelers make Los Angeles a must-see location on their itinerary. I’ve talked it over with my friends before. Los Angeles is not a friendly town. From LAX (notoriously lacking in customer service) to the lack of convenient public transit, Los Angeles is a town that seems to be built to keep a curious traveler frustrated. A city devoid of any notable landmark is not a tourist-friendly city. What do you end up visiting? The Hollywood sign? The filthy concrete stars emblazoned with the name of Hollywood stars past and present? Do you end up taking a 40-mile commute to visit Six Flags Magic Mountain, Universal Studios or Disneyland (none of which are in the same direction)? Do you decide to go to Santa Monica pier to get solicited (harassed) and shop in stores you can find pretty much anywhere else?

If I had to give Los Angeles a character, it would have to be “unapproachable jerk”, which might be precisely why I like it. Mysterious, hard to understand — that’s definitely a draw, isn’t it? I like to think so. It may take time to get it but once you do, you come to appreciate it so much more.

Los Angeles is wonderfully diverse. Before I moved out here for school, my sense of Mexican food was hard tacos served with poorly-seasoned overly-stewed shredded beef that was a staple of the grade-school lunch menu. And I detested it. And I’d never tasted Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, genuine Japanese cuisine at all. The list of just foods that I’d never experienced was enormous and that doesn’t even touch on the cultural depth that is Los Angeles’s bread and butter.

Los Angeles is essentially a city composed of cultural enclaves that give you a minute culturally-genuine experience. For example, you can, as a Chinese immigrant not speaking a lick of conversational English, spend most of your life in the San Gabriel Valley and not ever have to learn English. The same is true about the other cultural enclaves. You can feel perfectly at home, whether you are Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Ethiopian or Hasidic Jew. This cultural richness is such an asset because you can experience so much without having to go very far at all.

In that diversity, Los Angeles allowed me to come into my own. Growing up in Connecticut and Oklahoma, I’ve always been at an uncomfortable impasse with my Asian American identity. I’d always felt that I needed to go beyond the stereotype to be a successful ambassador of Asian America entrenched in a predominantly Caucasian community. So kung fu master, bookworm, rice-rocket connoisseur I became. Growing up, I’d always felt a little uncomfortable in my skin. It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I was able to finally settle down, become confident in myself as a person and flourish. And for that, Los Angeles, I am forever grateful.