Read Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Online

Authors: Andrew Solomon

Tags: #Literary Collections, #Essays, #Social Science, #Sociology, #Marriage & Family, #Urban

Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

BOOK: Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change
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Zambia, 1997
(Photograph by Luca Trovato)

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Contents

Epigraph

Dispatches from Everywhere

USSR
  The Winter Palettes

USSR
  Three Days in August

RUSSIA
  Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence

CHINA
  Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China

SOUTH AFRICA
  The Artists of South Africa: Separate, and Equal

USA
  Vlady’s Conquests

TAIWAN
  “Don’t Mess with Our Cultural Patrimony!”

TAIWAN
  On Each Palette, a Choice of Political Colors

TURKEY
  Sailing to Byzantium

ZAMBIA
  Enchanting Zambia

CAMBODIA
  Phaly Nuon’s Three Steps

MONGOLIA
  The Open Spaces of Mongolia

GREENLAND
  Inventing the Conversation

SENEGAL
  Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good

AFGHANISTAN
  An Awakening after the Taliban

JAPAN
  Museum without Walls

SOLOMON ISLANDS
  Song of Solomons

RWANDA
  Children of Bad Memories

LIBYA
  Circle of Fire: Letter from Libya

CHINA
  All the Food in China

CHINA
  Outward Opulence for Inner Peace: The Qianlong Garden of Retirement

ANTARCTICA
  Adventures in Antarctica

INDONESIA
  When Everyone Signs

BRAZIL
  Rio, City of Hope

GHANA
  In Bed with the President of Ghana?

ROMANIA
  Gay, Jewish, Mentally Ill, and a Sponsor of Gypsies in Romania

MYANMAR
  Myanmar’s Moment

AUSTRALIA
  Lost at the Surface

Acknowledgments

About Andrew Solomon

Notes

Bibliography

Index

for Oliver, Lucy, Blaine, and George, who have given me a reason to stay home

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

. . .

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

Dispatches from Everywhere

W
hen I was about seven, my father told me about the Holocaust. We were in the yellow Buick on New York State route 9A, and I had been asking him whether Pleasantville was actually pleasant. I cannot remember why the Nazis came up a mile or two later, but I do remember that he thought I already knew about the Final Solution, and so didn’t have any rehearsed way to present the camps. He said that this had happened to people because they were Jewish. I knew that we were Jewish, and I gathered that if we’d been there at the time, it would have happened to us, too. I insisted that my father explain it at least four times, because I kept thinking I must be missing some piece of the story that would make it make sense. He finally told me, with an emphasis that nearly ended the conversation, that it was “pure evil.” But I had one more question: “Why didn’t those Jews just leave when things got bad?”

“They had nowhere to go,” he said.

At that instant, I decided that I would always have somewhere to go. I would not be helpless, dependent, or credulous; I would never suppose that just because things had always been fine, they would continue to be fine. My notion of absolute safety at home crumbled then and there. I would leave before the walls closed around the ghetto, before the train tracks were completed, before the borders were sealed. If genocide ever threatened midtown Manhattan, I would be all set to gather up my passport and head for some place where they’d
be glad to have me. My father had said that some Jews were helped by non-Jewish friends, and I concluded that I would always have friends who were different from me, the kind who could take me in or get me out. That first talk with my father was mostly about horror, of course, but it was also in this regard a conversation about love, and over time, I came to understand that you could save yourself by broad affections. People had died because their paradigms were too local. I was not going to have that problem.

A few months later, when I was at a shoe store with my mother, the salesman commented that I had flat feet and ventured that I would have back problems in later life (true, alas), but also that I might be disqualified from the draft. The Vietnam War was dominating the headlines, and I had taken on board the idea that when I finished high school, I’d have to go fight. I wasn’t good even at scuffles in the sandbox, and the idea of being dropped into a jungle with a gun petrified me. My mother considered the Vietnam War a waste of young lives. World War II, on the other hand, had been worth fighting, and every good American boy had done his part, flat feet or otherwise. I wanted to understand the comparative standard whereby some wars were so righteous that my own mother thought they warranted my facing death, while others were somehow none of our business. Wars didn’t happen in America, but America could send you off to war anyplace else in the world, rightly or wrongly. Flat feet or not, I wanted to know those places, so I could make my own decisions about them.

I was afraid of the world. Even if I was spared the draft and fascism failed to establish a foothold in the Nixon years, a nuclear attack was always possible. I had nightmares about the Soviets detonating a bomb in Manhattan. Although not yet acquainted with the legend of the Wandering Jew, I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port. I thought I might be kidnapped; when my parents were being particularly annoying, I imagined I had already been kidnapped, taken away from nicer people in some more benign country to be consigned to this nest of American madness. I was precociously laying the groundwork for an anxiety disorder in early adulthood.

Running in counterpoint to my reckonings with destruction was my growing affection for England, a place I had never visited.
My Anglophilia set in about the time my father started reading me
Winnie-the-Pooh
when I was two. Later, it was
Alice in Wonderland
, then
The Five Children and It
, then
The Chronicles of Narnia.
For me, the magic in these stories had to do as much with England as with the authors’ flights of fancy. I developed a strong taste for marmalade and for the longer sweep of history. In response to my various self-indulgences, my parents’ usual reprimand was to remind me that I was not the Prince of Wales. I conceived the vague idea that if I could only get to the UK, I would receive entitlements (someone to pick up my toys, the most expensive item on the menu) that I associated more with location than with an accident of birth. Like all fantasies of escape, this one pertained not only to the destination, but also to what was left behind. I was a pre-gay kid who had not yet reckoned with the nature of my difference and therefore didn’t have a vocabulary with which to parse it. I felt foreign even at home; though I couldn’t yet have formulated the idea, I understood that going where I would actually
be
foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my otherness.

My incipient Anglophilia was nourished by a childhood babysitter. I was a colicky infant, so my mother had sought a helper who could give her a bit of a break one day a week. She advertised the position and set up interviews with likely prospects. One day the bell rang when no one was expected. My mother was surprised to find at the door a middle-aged Scottish woman as wide as she was tall, who announced, “I’m the nanny. I’ve come to take care of the baby.” My mother, presuming she had forgotten an appointment, led Bebe back to my room, where I grew calm in seconds and ate my best meal yet. Bebe was hired on the spot; only later did it materialize that she had gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor and was supposed to be going to the family in 14E rather than to us in 11E. By then, it was too late. For the next decade, Bebe came on Thursdays and made us sherry trifle and told us stories about growing up on the Isle of Mull. As a little girl she had had a purse with three patches on it that read
Paris
,
London
, and
New York
and had told her grandmother that someday she would visit all those places. Her grandmother had laughed—but Bebe did visit them all; indeed, she lived in them all.

Like the characters in my beloved British books, Bebe was eccentric and magical—childlike herself, and incapable of exasperation, disappointment, or anger. She taught me how to roll my
r
’s. Her sharpest reprimand was the occasional “Gently, Bentley!” when my brother or I grew raucous. I imagined that everyone in Britain would be similarly delighted by me almost all the time, and that over there, children were served second helpings of dessert at every meal, even if they hadn’t finished their vegetables or done their homework.

I was likewise moved by a story of another England, one that reassured me as I thought of those who had perished because they had nowhere to go. Our next-door neighbors, Erika Urbach and her mother, Mrs. Offenbacher, were Czech Jews who had secured English entry visas as the Nazis closed in. But their transit visas for crossing Europe did not materialize until after their English papers had expired. They nonetheless boarded the train in Prague. In the Netherlands, an officer tried to eject them, arguing that they would not be admitted in England, but Mrs. Offenbacher insisted that they could not be removed because their transit visas were valid. When their ferry landed in Dover, they disembarked and Mrs. Offenbacher stood for a full hour watching people proceed through border control, trying to decide which official seemed kindest. Finally, Mrs. Offenbacher (who was a beautiful woman, as Erika was a beautiful child) carefully selected a queue. The customs officer noted, “Your entry permit for the United Kingdom has expired.” Mrs. Offenbacher calmly replied, “Yes. But if you send us back, we will be killed.” There was a long pause while they looked each other in the eye, and then he stamped both passports and said, “Welcome to England.”

My preoccupation with discovering a foreign refuge was matched by an intense curiosity about the same world I found so threatening. Although England lay at the forefront of my imaginings, I also wanted to know what Chinese people ate for breakfast, how Africans styled their hair, why people played so much polo in Argentina. I read voraciously, immersing myself in Indian fairy tales, Russian folk stories, and
Tales of a Korean Grandmother
. My mother brought home a Kleenex box illustrated with people in their native costumes. Believing that everyone in Holland clunked around in wooden shoes
and all Peruvians wore jaunty bowler hats, I imagined meeting them all and kept the box after the tissues had been used up. I wanted to visit every country in the world at least once—as though having set foot in China or India met the same checklist parameters as touching down in Gambia or Monaco or connecting through the Bahamas.

BOOK: Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change
10.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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