Changi memories
Beside me on the desk is a copy of Ariel Dorfman’s Desert Memories. It’s a book that demands to be written about, especially as a self-identified perpetually itinerant émigré, lost always on what is ostensibly home soil. After 11 years (12?) in the sunward city of Seattle, I am learning that being lost in this world is not so much a matter of your home ground not recognizing you as it is a matter of having no emotional capacity to relate to the soil at all. All dried up. Desert stuff. Dry memories, in Chile or elsewhere. Except that where Ariel is able (like Ezekiel) to breathe flesh on the bones with inspiration, I’m left with a sense that I left my own land too early to have such a life-giving homecoming in the offing.
This is a meandering way of suggesting that there is a sense of home most of us take for granted that is lost when you feel most at home in airports, as I do. I haven’t been in an airport for over a year now. And even then the San Diego airport barely counted. At risk of maudlin sentimentality, I suggest there are no airports since La Guardia and CDG in the 60’s to match the mad-dashed encapsulation of an age that Changi managed in the 90’s and 00’s. Pre-’08, Asian airports were unquestionably the place to be, and everyone who was anyone was shoving them up like mushrooms, breathing life into steel and glass pavilions flung hastily over cursed burial grounds (Bangkok), on the water itself (Singapore and Hong Kong), to celebrate Olympic Games (Beijing), a World’s Fair (Shanghai), or simply to celebrate the acquired wealth of the 90’s and mark the dawn of the so-called Pacific Century (Seoul).
You have not been home if you cannot call these steel and glass monstrosities with their steaming noodle bars, exquisite espresso, 24 hour massage (not that kind), and butterfly gardens the place the breath comes to rest when it leaves your chest. They even leave you in laughter, as with Manila’s perennial, ludicrously expensive terminal construction which was shelved before passengers ever dragged innumerable tied cardboard boxes through her concourse (you could literally tell a Manila flight in the 90’s and 00’s by the prevalence of cardboard on the slow-heaving conveyor belts under flickering fluorescent lights).
All this is home to me, home with the same evocation of a tightening in the chest that Ariel manages when talking of the bloody legacy of one of the driest places on earth, and the origin of the fertilizer that built the modern world. Where his stories trace the untold influence of the Chilean desert across everything from telecommunications to the evolution of pension funds under Pinochet, mine is an inverted house, a house built not for weathering in place—staying, above all—but for leaving, for flying away. Mine is a house that does not wish to stay on the ground. And doubly-inverted, my houses also fall down, like Ozymandias, or like the bones of Ezekiel all tricked out with no breath to move them. “Can these bones live,” mutters the prophet, and one wonders the same thing contemplating the hubristic, wrecked legacy of these airports in the wake of a global tourism and travel collapse.
I am exiled, then, from a house of old bones un-lived, a place built on the lies of Asian autocracy and easy money. A place that is not even a place but a series of interconnected and liminal nodes, all endangered hunks of steel and glass now. Is it still a Pacific Century? Does Seoul yet face the dawn? Why do I feel more at home in Seoul’s airport (in a country where I’ve never lived) than in Seattle, where I’m raising two daughters?
My home, my body suggests, is profound dislocation. My home is with the wolves in the cracks in the walls. Ariel travels home by plane and sees the desert of memory spread out below him. I contemplate the same thing in the endlessly thin plastic cup given me by the stewardess. A cup of liberation, to be sure, but they keep making the plastic thinner every decade.
Like Odysseus, perhaps, my home is the wine-dark sea, the clouds at 30,000 feet, the anticipation of moonset on the wing and a new home in six hours and thirty-three minutes. The memory of the DC-10 overhead, when I was about six…the lights coming like angels flying out of the hot tropical dark.
Home.
