The local convenience store may carry the Investor's Business Daily, but Martha's Vineyard isn't really a place to make or hoard wealth--merely to savor it the way one inhales the scent of a cigar rather than actually smokes it. And it is here where my mother, my sister and I have come to unwind for the day, biking on the narrow path along the beach, with the scent of amethyst-complexioned lilacs in our nostrils. My mother swerves to avoid a patch of sand the breeze has abandoned in a dimple in the road, and my sister quickens her pedaling for the hill ahead.

This is only our second time on Martha's Vineyard for we are, after all, racial minorities (Vietnamese). We admire the island's understated affluence. Folks here--even teenage narcissists--wear the local Black Dog T-shirt, not its brand-name-chain-store equivalent. Instead of SUVs (too stridently upper-middle-class), they drive older cars (you know, ones with "Mopeds are Dangerous" bumper stickers--the work of a New Yorker cartoonist, no doubt). And instead of living in neighborhoods marred by the gaudiness of West Palm Beach, the gluttony of Silicon Valley or the glibness of the aristocratic South, they sip Mimosas or read on the porches of their modest-looking gingerbread houses or custom-built cedar Cape-style homes. Wealth doesn't seem like a big deal at all on this island, partly because of this relative temperance. But mostly, it's because everyone here seems to have it already: That one goes to Harvard may be a big deal anywhere in the world--except at Harvard itself. So if, on the mainland, a sailboat in the back yard seemed like a conspicuous indulgence, here, it is simply a poised, albeit common, expression of the confidently rich.

Not everyone here is affluent, of course. However, they (we) will mostly stay for only a day, sitting on the public beach the size of the curvy part of an Olympic track and riding identical bicycles--a sign that we rented them from a local store and will return them by six o'clock, in time to catch the ferry back to the mainland. The winter population on Martha's Vineyard hovers at 14,000 but soars to more than 100,000 during the summer, so this is not a real community in the traditional sense. My mother, my sister and I are tourists here (map, Minolta); but strangely, we are also complete outsiders to this imagined community of people who are themselves vacationers.

A sense of entitlement

Noblesse sans oblige

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