How a lost-and-found neon dragon on Ogden, Utah’s main drag shaped one family’s mythology—and captured a community’s heart.
Growing up, I was told my family’s surname, Ryujin, meant “dragon” in Japanese. Like so many things we were told as children, I held onto this as an absolute truth and it became a part of my personal mythology.
Coincidently, this familial, symbolic dragon became a physical manifestation. “The Dragon,” as it is lovingly known in my city, is a monstrous neon sign that proudly protruded out of the second story of a building that was formerly a movie house, a convenience store, and then our Chinese restaurant for nearly sixty years.
And yes, we were a Japanese American family who ran a Chinese restaurant. Ogden, Utah, was not ready for a good sushi restaurant yet. Houses were still affordable and our mountains were still a secret. Gentrification came much later for Ogden: a once-rowdy, scrappy town, famous for its railroad junction, bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and secret opium den tunnels that run below the entire length of our historic 25th Street; now a religious epicenter, a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts, a thriving creative district and arts scene, and a place where a quiet, resilient counterculture not only exists, but thrives.
There were a few years when The Dragon went missing, misplaced, sitting in a scrapyard.
Today, The Dragon has been immaculately restored and now houses six retail spaces. Its iconic image can be seen on t-shirts, calendars, prints, and travel brochures. When the sign was in our possession, the words “Star Noodle” were scrawled under the claw, with a few letters endearingly burnt out. The Dragon now cheerfully reads “Historic 25th Street.”
For me, The Dragon still lives and breathes. With its inhale: sleeping on sticky booths as my parents worked late into the weeknights, racial slurs and hot mustard powder that burned my eyes, taking plates from men who grabbed my arms to stop me, as if I were trying to take a piece of them, castrate them. And its exhale: the cruel physics of stale cups of coffee that once stirred could not be unstirred, like the ways we disturb each other that cannot be undone; filling salt and pepper shakers with shaky hands, watching the small grains falling like time running out in an hourglass; fighting and laughing at the waitressing table with my three little sisters, the smell of cooked onions lingering in our hair.
Owatatsumi, Dragon God of the Sea, the translation of my name in Japanese mythology, is a colorful, tutelary deity that represents both the perils and the bounties of the ocean. The juxtaposition of what is gained and taken away. What is old and made new again, what is lost and found. There were a few years when The Dragon went missing, misplaced, sitting in a scrapyard, before our enigmatic neon guardian of Ogden was rescued and returned to its rightful place. The Dragon, emotionally embedded, is now ceremoniously lit up at dusk every night for all to bask under its hot, nostalgic glow.
