Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Let's begin here: on the sand. Or, rather, on the slabs of wood above the sand. On June 26, 1870, the Atlantic City boardwalk opened to the public. Sixteen years earlier, the first tourist train had arrived on the newly minted Camden and Atlantic Railroad. Tourists came to stick their toes in the Atlantic—steel blue, the color of whales they'd never see. They came to lean against each other in the high dunes and make promises they couldn't keep. They let the wind lift those promises up, to be caught in the chandeliers of expensive hotels or the beaks of passing seagulls. The women who came held frilled umbrellas—jellyfish along the shore. And when they returned to their jobs and errands and thumb-sucking babies, they carried sand with them, making the train car a beach in and of itself. Glitter of the sea. This is how the boardwalk came to be: a fed-up railroad conductor and simply too much sand for his own sweeping sanity.

Just to be clear: this is not our story. Not yet. Our story moves across that steel blue world, from another continent, from a place where there is no such thing as "vacation." My ancestors would repeat that word, 假期, as if it were a cloud and could disappear at any point. On this continent, there are herds of oxen and lily pads the size of unkeepable promises. As a small child in central New Jersey, I dreamt of this story. Of oxen, my mother riding the back of one, the hair on its hide so coarse, it makes your throat hurt. Our story, our history, holds a different version of Atlantic City.

In 1988, my mother was still dreaming in Cantonese—not a single word of English wormed its way through her open-mouthed sleep. My brother Steven had just been born, howling like a wolf who knew he was a boy. Four years earlier, when the nurses placed me in my mother's arms, my mother says I stared at her silently. She held me up to the fluorescent light and declared: "I'm afraid. She knows too much." By 1988, my father had been holding mah-jong gambling circles for five years, in the basement of my grandparents' apartment in Matawan and then in our house in Tinton Falls, where my parents had settled that year. Cigarette smoke escaped like doves from underneath the floorboards. And the shuffling. The shuffling sound of mahjong tiles, a porcelain earthquake. I learned later that these tiles used to be made out of bone, backed by bamboo. Now: Bakelite, plastic. My father always invited the same people to play: Uncle Jimmy, the Chicken Bone Man, and Balding Uncle.

Just to be clear again: our story is not about small enterprises. Our story goes beyond the little batons of twenty-dollar bills, passed around the mahjong table. Beyond the table's green felt, stained with cheap Tsingtao and sky-high piles of gnawed bones from the Chicken Bone Man's eponymous pastime.

Our story is Atlantic City. We are talking Taj Mahal, Caesar's Palace, Bally. Casinos depicting worlds my father couldn't fathom, but kept returning to, like a moth drawn to a blinding bulb. At Caesar's Palace, there were towering white columns so extravagant, they held up nothing at all. There were white statues of horses braying, a ceiling painted like the sky with white clouds, the busts of white people we assumed were famous but were really just white. My parents didn't even know where Rome was on a map, or that Rome existed. But Caesar's Palace was irresistible in its whiteness. Who could say no to the patina of wealth? This is how we arrived: on that Chinese tourist bus where you have to fan yourself with your ten-dollar gambling voucher and put your cigarette out in a Dixie cup. Or, if you hit it big like we once did, you can arrive in the dolphin-colored leather of your BMW, before you inevitably...