 | |
 |
 |
The Mobile Age, Part I: Modernism
Nomads wander by choice, while the refugee is cast adrift in the world. Settlers happily put down roots, while prisoners (of the law or of circumstance) are restrained unwillingly. Treated as distinct ways that mobility may be experienced, these archetypes characterize the world in which my mother and father were travelling. But the tensions between the quadrants, the yearning of one type to become another, were also critical in defining that “modern” era of mobility. I can illustrate this idea with two events from my parents’ respective journeys. I play them simultaneously in memory since they both happened in 1948, although on directly opposite sides of the globe (17,105 kilometres apart, to be precise, which is about 43 percent of the circumference of the Earth). In the first, my mother (with her mother and sister) is about to be reunited with her father in Guayaquil after eight years of living through bombing raids, persecution and hiding and, finally, as a postwar refugee. After delays in Paris and Genoa, she’s finally completed the Atlantic crossing, during which she sat on a coiled rope on the afterdeck and watched her European life evaporate with the foam of the wake. She’s seen Caracas and Curaçao, felt her first tropical nights, the air rich and velvety on the skin. And now she stands at the rail of the aptly named Marco Polo, staring up the hillside of this unknown city, this unknown continent, this unknown personal future. She has just glimpsed her father bobbing toward them in the launch, and as the birds rise over the Isla Puná, she asks herself, What will become of me here? Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, my father is aboard his own ship, a naval surplus minesweeper he’s purchased at Subic Bay for sale to a Hong Kong businessman he’s agreed to meet in Manila. The short trip south, however, has been a problem from the start. They nearly lost the ship in a typhoon at anchor. Leaving Subic, they’d been stopped by the coast guard looking for exit papers, which they didn’t have. (My dad presented a gas receipt, which seemed to do the trick.) They’d had tiller and engine problems en route, putting them into Manila much later than expected. Entering the top of the harbour – slipping in past the Bataan Peninsula, where 75,000 Filipino and American soldiers had surrendered to the Japanese just six years before – they find a harbour full of sunken wreckage. And so my father’s voyage ends with him also at the ship’s rail, staring into the dark waters, watching the masts and superstructures of sunken ships below, calling back instructions to his friend at the wheel: Starboard, port, “Okay, forward – Stop!” Slowly creeping through. Times of anticipation for both parties. But what these meshed stories illustrate are the tensions and yearnings at work between those mobility archetypes. The prisoner of Nazi Germany, freed to become a refugee, now contemplates settlement as a matter of core disposition. Likewise, the former prisoner of a provincial birthplace fights his way over any challenge to his freedom, ever conscious that a new home might be unexpectedly found in the process. These are mirroring forces, which may be shown on our four-quadrant diagram as the graphic on the previous page shows. |
