LIVING IN THE MAGIC:

Learning to Live in the World Disney and Nickelodeon Created

WRITTEN BY VRISHTI SAVALANI

ILLUSTRATION BY FON LIMSONWONG

I can recall many Sunday afternoons where my Dad would take me and my older sister to what we called “Hidden DVD Shop.” It was a small little closet hidden in the underground parking deck of an office building at the heart of the bustling

Guangzhou, China, where a middle-aged Chinese lady would sell DVDs of every movie and TV show you could possibly think of. The plastic cases would be lined inside cardboard boxes, and my sister and I would flip through the stacks like we were purists flicking through vinyl at a record shop. Despite the sharp edges of the plastic scraping my arms as I tiptoed to peer into the box, I would continue flicking over and over again, taking out one case at a time and adding it to the pile that built in my hands.

When we’d get home, my sister and I would unbox our new presents and begin to organize them in our DVD cases — making sure the TV shows were in one case and the movies were in the other, all of them organized first in alphabetical order and then in chronological if it was a sequel or later season. After our hard work, we’d reward ourselves by picking out one of our new finds, sitting with a packet of microwave popcorn and indulge in our gateway to the land of the free — America.

Before my first visit to America at 18 years old, I had pieced together a version of the country from what I had seen on Disney and Nickelodeon. Even though everything I’m experiencing now is far from that world I once saw, there’s something endearing about how nice it was to escape into it when I was younger. Looking back as an adult, I find it funny that I thought life would be just as picturesque as Disney painted it out to be, or as colorful as Nickelodeon made it feel for their characters. Even though I was smart enough to know I wouldn’t be best friends with a family of wizards in the heart of New York City, at least there were other parts of the world they built that felt magical to me.

Every kid’s world starts in their bedroom. The way they build it and customize everything from floor to ceiling and look back with regret years later only to restyle it. To say that my room was far from customized was an understatement. I shared a room with my grandma and sister. This was a small room in an apartment building, and you would never be able to tell two kids spent most of their time in that room. Most of the room was some variation of beige or brown, just like all the other rooms in the house — it was a way of keeping everything unified and clean. But when I’d look into that screen, I would escape into a completely different room. One that was the size of an entire loft, with a gummy bear light suspended from the ceiling and an ice cream sandwich couch at the foot of my bed. The browns and beiges would turn into purples and pinks, and it would feel like a space built just for me.

Outside of this room, I’d be with my family. The family I grew up with was your average Indian family. We weren’t immigrant parents who moved to the city and opened a sandwich shop under our apartment. Sure, we were an immigrant family in the city, but my dad simply worked in a business while my mom was a teacher. My parents were quite traditional. As I got older, I learned to accept the culture that came with tradition, but when I was younger, I wanted that same freedom and independence a lot of these characters seem to have. Where the parents were just characters on the side to guide you, but this was your story where you could make mistakes and do crazy things with little to no consequences from them.

I’d never been grounded, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get yelled at or in trouble for doing stupid things. I never had the profound speech from my dad on our porch if I made a mistake, or the heart-to-heart with my mom after my first break up. From what I remember, the conversations would always be an intense yelling that led up to an “I told you so” and me crying.

I’d compare it more to an Indian soap opera than a show by Dan Schneider. My sisters wouldn’t embody the stereotypical personas these characters had — the popular one or the nerd — we just existed in our own little world and didn’t really have much of a role in anyone else’s. We did argue just like your average Zack and Cody or Drake and Josh, and our antics never led to any good. But even now I can say we have a special bond that was built off those moments of mischief.

The transition music wouldn’t play as I ended up in school the next day. I went to an international school where your usual stereotypes didn’t seem to exist. We didn’t exactly have your typical cliques with the jocks and the obvious bullies beating up the smaller quiet nerds. I would exist somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy, but I was still crushing on the star athlete. Thinking back about my high school, everything seemed cold with the grays and blues that were my school’s colors, and I wouldn’t walk down the warmly lit hallways that always seemed to have random objects flying back and forth from kids messing around. My best friend and I wouldn’t be talking by the lockers… if anything, I can’t even remember using mine.

When I moved here, none of those moments on screen came to life. I moved here as an adult in the middle of the pandemic, so my first impressions of this country were far from the magic I would see on TV. However, the more I’ve settled in and created a world for myself, the more I’ve found that same comfort and excitement from what I’d see on TV. So, my bedroom doesn’t have a gummy bear light hanging from the ceiling and colorful pieces of furniture, and instead I’m surrounded by unfolded laundry and posters that haven’t made their way into frames yet. Those heart-to-hearts with my parents now happen over Facetime, and I go to an art school where I don’t have to deal with the social hierarchy and everyone is just there to do what they love. It’s exciting to see that I still have that independence all those characters had, and what I yearned for. Even if my life isn’t as picturesque as they made it out to be, I can always escape back into it with the click of a button.