Last year
about this time I started writing an outline for a short story about a trip I
took with my friends in late 2005. That
trip was sort of my swan song for living in the US. A group of about seven of us had been out of
college for a year or so and were still in relatively dead-end jobs at that
point, and our vacation/unemployment situations all worked out for a trip in
late August. We rented a car and drove
to New York City, Philadelphia, and then a few of us onward to Raleigh, North
Carolina. The weather was still really
hot, and Chicago was getting over one of its worst droughts in recent
memory. I’m not going to go into detail
here as to our itinerary, but basically we had an amazing time hanging out,
seeing sights, shooting the breeze, and even arguing. In retrospect, it felt like the last taste of
the pre-adult relative leisure that we’d been enjoying for a good part of high
school and through college. Following
that trip each would go on his way to more long-term, professional
employment. For many of us this meant
leaving Chicago indefinitely. In this
sense the trip felt melancholy, or at least I see it that way now (though at
the time few of us knew we’d be leaving our hometown). This melancholy is compounded by the fact
that Hurricane Katrina hit while we were travelling (which, combined with the
concurrent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in many respects at their most dire point
in that moment, marked for me the worst, saddest, ugliest, most hopeless face
the US has presented to the world in a long time). Also, upon returning to Chicago, I found the
urban garden I’d been tending all year for my job totally withered and dead. Internecine conflicts at the organization I
worked for meant that my colleague wasn’t allowed in to water, so everything
just dried up and died. This last event
was perhaps the final catalyst for my deciding to leave the US. There just wasn’t much of a place for me,
neither professionally nor socially.
I never
ended up writing the story, but I do think a lot about what that moment, and
especially that trip, meant for me. I
think about growing up in the same house in Chicago all my life, being friends
with the same people since pre-school or grammar school, sharing all sorts of
referents with them. On the one hand, we
shared a city and its physical and social landscape (we even shared the myriad
changes Chicago suffered in the 1990s), but we also shared all the experiences
and stories accumulated over years and years of friendship. Looking back on it, I recall a coziness that
was so pervasive we never noticed it until now, when it’s gone. If we did feel it, that coziness felt like a
stricture, the boringness of everyday life and routines and the
all-encompassing “here”-ness that you chafe under when you’re a teenager
dreaming of many prospective “theres”.
Even in college, when most of us went downstate to U of Illinois, and
some went farther afield to places like California, there were frequent
weekends and especially summer nights when, as we did in high school, we’d sit
on my back porch underneath the El tracks (that’s the elevated metro line, for
non-Chicagoans) and talk about girls and stories and long-ago childhood
memories. In high school this was the
default option, as we couldn’t go much anywhere else. But by college, when we could have gone to
bars or clubs, we still preferred the old back porch, and one another’s
company. I think a lot of what we were
doing there was dreaming of the future, dreaming of doing something with our
lives, even as in our reminiscences perhaps we were preparing to let go of the
past (and maybe even recognizing that “doing something” elsewhere wasn’t
entirely preferable to “doing nothing” there where we were). At any rate, now I am doing things with my
life—I’m married, I have a kid, I take care of many other kids, I work in an
interesting field, I think, I cook, I write…
I’m happy with this adult life of mine, and often shocked and thrilled
that I am finally in the future I’ve always dreamed of. But sometimes that slow, stuck time as
teenagers on my back porch also appeals to me.
Around when
I was outlining my aborted short story last year, I was also enjoying a fair
number of cultural inputs from the US, and really appreciating certain aspects
of our shared identity. I got into an
online TV show called the Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, and I saw Garden
State again (thanks to my Colombian father-in-law’s massive film
collection). These and many of our
popular culture artifacts in the US are notable for their consciousness of
race, their US culture in-jokes, and especially the nervous tension of everyday
life. My wife is more familiar with US
culture than most foreigners I know, but even she is often unaffected or
uninterested by our humor. Even for
films she likes, such as Cyril or What about Bob?, she finds it hard to sit
through all the tension. She
squirms.
Above all I
have been recalling, impressed, how at least the educated middle class in the
US is really a society of cultural consumers.
Most of my family friends are voracious movie watchers, book readers,
playgoers, magazine readers. An
important part of their shared identity comes from classic movies they love, or
new articles they can discuss, or books they read in their book clubs. I have been at many a family gathering where
we spend hours recalling favorite scenes from movies
we’ve all seen. In this respect, our culture in the US is
almost like a pre-literate tribal culture in that we share and repeat stories
that everyone knows about. It’s just that
these stories come from a post-literate canon of mass culture, and not simply
oral tradition.
Seeing a
movie like Garden State, I also missed the frankness and rawness of regular
life in the US. People seem to think
about and show their emotions more, to cover up and conform less than in other
places I’ve been to. I also feel like
people go through life more aware of the larger implications of what they’re
doing. In the US, even litterers,
racists, or anyone else doing something that seems thoughtless, are usually
aware of the arguments against what they’re doing. They have in fact thought about it, and come
to a conscious (though perhaps incorrect or flawed) decision. In Colombia and other developing countries
I’ve been to, people often don’t look beyond their immediate wants and impulses. They don’t tend to ask themselves if something
is correct, or advisable, or coherent.
Maybe the thoughtfulness I perceive in the US is because much of our
daily life is relatively undramatic—we’ve got washing machines, cars, automatic
furnaces, and even many jobs are automated and uneventful these days. So maybe people in the US have stripped away
some of the day-to-day busyness and drama of just living and getting things
done, and this gives them more time to explore themselves as mental beings and
not simply physical task-doers.
Of course
the flipside of this is that a lot of people spend so much time thinking about
their emotions that they don’t do anything else, and we end up with a certain
degree of collective neuroticism in our culture. At least that's the media image, especially
in a movie like Garden State. Perhaps if
I weren’t feeling so nostalgic when I saw the movie, I wouldn’t be thinking of
the constant emotionalizing as a good thing, but rather asking, “Why do they
have to be so damn quirky?” Furthermore,
why can’t we recognize our emotions and explore our inner self while working on
something worthwhile, and not just being complacent in jobs we don’t believe
in? This is similar to what I thought
with the movie The Namesake. This film explores the relationships among members of an Indian-American
family. There is lots of love and emotion, but the
setting is always bland suburbia, and we never get the sense that the parents’
jobs matter much to them. They never
talk about their work or their beliefs as to how to live in and change the world
around them. So as much as I like The
Namesake, I again wonder why people can’t combine the daily challenges and joys
of raising a family with work that they can believe in, and a mission to change
the world for the better. And this
brings me full circle to why I left the US in the first place: a sense that many aspects of daily life were
frivolous and not at all important or transcendental. Perhaps we’re so focused on our own emotions
that we allow (or promote) the stripping of all character from our collective
spaces. Hello faceless malls, cars to
take us everywhere, soulless lawns.
Hell, even the Awkward Black Girl show, which I like a lot, has everyone
driving in cars instead of walking, and working at jobs they don’t care about.
Of course the
unfruitful navel-gazing I decry in the US is not exclusive to our culture or
even our time. I recently read The
Country of Carnival by Jorge Amado, written and set in 1930s Brazil, in which
all the characters are basically effete nihilists that scorn happiness or
meaning or striving or even concern. It
is a good read, especially considering the author wrote it when he was 18, but
it sure is a downer. And a reminder that
the well-off and those with lots of time on their hands have probably always
tended to endless self-analysis, moroseness, and neuroses.
At the time
I was intensely pondering all these questions about culture, it also was
looking as if we’d be moving to Chicago in the next year or two, and I had
visions of my son Sam attending my same pre-school and grammar school. I asked myself if he too would experience
many of the things I loved and hated in Chicago. Would he feel the comfort of long-lasting
friendships and a familiar neighborhood?
Would he learn hard, ugly lessons about race and class?
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