In Place of Home
In place of home
I hold the metamorphoses of the world—
—Nelly Sachs
The earliest literary texts explore themes of homeland and exile, usually when capricious authorities make a stable home life untenable. In the 詩經 or Classic of Poetry (11th-7th centuries BCE), giant rats—actually avaricious local officials—disturb the peace so profoundly that the poet yearns “to move away to some decent border town” where he can “make an end to this endless moan.” In the Tale of Sinuhe (c. 19th century BCE), a king’s assassination forces a man to flee Egypt for Canaan. After a circuitous journey, he returns home, now aged but still terrified about the repercussions from his exile, telling the new king: “This flight which your humble servant made— / I had not planned it. It was not in my heart.” The impassioned testimonies of those who leave their homes are among the first exemplars of the literary imperative that seeks to dignify individual experience over the tyranny of power and fate.
Once my father mentioned that, as a youth, he witnessed an atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers: a Chinese baby being thrown into the air and impaled on one of their bayonets. But I was skeptical of this late confession—he was 88 years old—so I made no comment, looking away with embarrassment. He was sitting in the dining room of the memory care section at his nursing home in Phoenix. We were surrounded by other patients in varying stages of dementia. By then, what my father had forgotten was indistinguishable from what he thought he knew. He said all sorts of wild things—in part, to please me. He knew that I was a writer who sought vivid anecdotes about his Chinese homeland.
Even before the great disruptions that characterize the modern era—the cataclysmic armaments that uprooted cities and decimated populations, the assembly-line genocides—exile had become a metaphor for psychological alienation in the minds of those who created the styles of expression that we consider modern. I think of the passage in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (written ca. 1913-1935) in which the speaker and another person—a stranger, friend, or relative, it’s unclear— “were walking, together and separate, along forest paths that kept abruptly changing direction.” It becomes apparent that these walkers are refugees, but it’s uncertain what they are fleeing from or why: “Even we could not have said what houses, duties or loves we had left behind us. At that moment, we were merely travelers walking between what we had forgotten and what we did not know…”
My mother told me that, as a small child fleeing the Japanese invasion of southern China, she saw bombers strafing the fields along the road to Hong Kong from her village near Hoiping. As she spoke, her face reflected her childhood terror: eyes tightening, voice plummeting to a hush. This is my truth, her expression said. In college I looked up the history of the era and found my mother’s memory insubstantiable. The location and timeline weren’t quite right, perhaps a child’s conflation of other people’s recollections or our peasant family’s lax relationship with western markers of time. Even my mother’s birth year was uncertain. My grandmother had forgotten when she was born.
To be exiled is to begin to forget one’s home. Exile is the loss of memories and the creation of a new life in a place whose boundaries—of culture and custom, even of physical location—remain uncertain. A homeland, on the other hand, is the place in whose customs and meanings one is subsumed. Because the exiled are trying to survive day by day, they are constantly interpreting the meaning of their exile, finding clues about how to live better tomorrow, whereas those at home simply exist in their homeland, often in a state of thoughtless equilibrium. There is always a hermeneutics of exile, but—for long stretches of time, such as childhood—no hermeneutics of homeland, no conscious awareness of its meaning. Home is simply home.
The American side of Nogales, population 20,000, is devoid of street life. With its humdrum fast-food restaurants, it differs from the rest of Arizona only in the traffic signs that show distances in kilometers and the cars that readily stop for pedestrians. (In my hometown of Phoenix, tetchy drivers are liable to speed up if they see a jaywalker crossing ahead of them.) The Mexican side of Nogales is a city of a quarter million, crowded with shoppers, panhandlers, and street venders hawking elote and plastic trinkets. The district next to the border bustles with storefronts catering to Americans seeking cheap dental implants and prescription drugs. A scantily clad woman solicits us with a murmured “Chica?” as my male partner and I walk by. A beggar asks me which country I come from: “Korea? Japan?” I answer, “The United States.” Around the corner a sign on the border wall reads: “Limite de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.” Boundary of the United Mexican States.
Home is simply home. For some people this never changes. For others it changes with the questioning, Socratic consciousness imparted by dint of native wit or formal education. When you choose to leave your homeland because your restlessness makes it alien to you, when it becomes so detrimental to your well-being that you exile yourself from it, when you have nothing but questions to ask about your place in the world, that is when your interpretation of home begins. But by then “homeland” has already become another locus of exile, the home from which you have exiled yourself.
I was a restless child. I didn’t appreciate the bourgeois comforts of suburban Phoenix where I grew up, not far from where Steven Spielberg once lived. I was bored by the shopping malls and sleepy neighborhoods where my childhood friends and I rode our Stingrays for miles. I couldn’t see the “alien beauty” that the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s 2022 novel Dinosaurs finds after walking all the way from New York to Arizona. The desert was just a familiar aridity, the promise of thorns and fangs, a cultural sequestration anathema to any would-be writer and cosmopolite. It had become what Millet’s New Yorker considers Manhattan to be, a place to leave. “He went to new places because they weren’t the same as the old ones,” she writes. As Americans, her protagonist and I have the freedom to appease our wanderlust, and we can choose to exercise this freedom as we like, senselessly or mindfully, with the profligacy of choices that we take for granted.
For many of us who have no experience of exile to forget, the waves of migrants fleeing war, oppression, and now the ravages of climate change only become concrete in those flickering moments when a wounded refugee or orphaned child appears on our screens. These exemplars of distant, alien loss confront us with their stark contrast to our own creature comforts. That the migrants would aspire to possess the same comforts—the cozy dwelling, the abundant food and clothing, the greedy surfeit of consumer goods—doesn’t alleviate the guilt of our own affluence. One lovely November day in 2022, two weeks after returning from a trip to the borderlands of Poland, my partner and I drove 180 miles south to see for ourselves the infamous border wall and the faces of the people who reside on the other side of it. I wanted to make concrete the abstraction of home and homeland.
At the age of 14, I was the only person in the Phoenix theater showing Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, whose “bourgeois” characters seemed aristocratic compared to the bland, middle-class Arizonans that surrounded me. I remember my feeling of self-importance as I watched my “private screening” of something sophisticated and adult that I couldn’t understand. With the serious intensity I reserved for High Art, I didn’t laugh or smile during what Pauline Kael called Buñuel’s “most frivolously witty movie.” The great Spanish-Mexican filmmaker’s irony and surrealism escaped me totally, but I was unashamed, since I knew my ignorance would soon be allayed by the promised land that—fingers crossed—would go by the name of Harvard. As far as I could determine, culture and art lay elsewhere, in France and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I lacked the compassion and amour propre of a popular artist like Spielberg, who would go on to transform his family and ordinary, suburban surroundings into some of his best movies, like the one set partly in Phoenix, The Fabelmans, which meticulously re-creates a section of Scottsdale Road as I remember it from my own childhood. At the now-demolished theater, the Kachina, that he depicts in passing, I once went with my mother to see the R-rated Deliverance, with its notorious scene of backwoods, homosexual rape. My mother said nothing, but I was mortified as I watched it with her.
Not only was my ignorant hick town unworthy of attention, I couldn’t imagine anyone ever being interested in my parents. They were Cantonese peasants whose parents purchased forged papers to enter the United States because of the overtly racist law called the Chinese Exclusion Act. In the contemptuous parlance of our time, they were “illegal immigrants.” During my childhood, each appearance by Asians in movies or television was the source of excitement and pride (Flower Drum Song, The Sand Pebbles, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father), but the rarity of our faces on the screen inscribed on our hearts, as with a tattoo pen, the mark of our estrangement from American culture. Since we were also Americans, we sometimes loathed those faces, which possessed the otherness of an unasked-for tattoo discovered on our own bodies. Many years would pass before it even crossed my mind to yearn for what Teju Cole calls, in an essay on the film Black Panther, “a civilization of my own making, bizarre, contrary, as vain as the whites, exterior to their logic.”
In Nogales, razor-sharp coils of concertina wire cover the bollards and metal grating that constitute the border wall. The purpose is to rip the flesh of illegal immigrants who attempt to scale the fence. A surveillance blimp and towers of long-distance security cameras—zoom lenses in long white tubes—hover over dilapidated casitas, recording those trying to sneak in as well as ordinary citizens and passersby. The number of border-related patrol officers is so large that the area has one of the highest per-capita levels of police in the nation. The effect is fearful, militarized, with intimations of impending violence. It’s no surprise that the patrol officers in this setting, trained in the paranoid, combative culture of American police forces, would shoot across the border at unarmed people, hit migrants with their vehicles, and refuse treatment to migrants with heatstroke. The Southern Border Communities Coalition have documented 245 deaths due to border police actions since 2010.
The only fake immigration documents that my mother’s father, Sarn Tom, could purchase indicated that he had an extra son in addition to my mother, my uncle Ken, and my aunt Lilli. He ended up buying an infant boy from an impoverished family in his village. Luckily, the boy’s family had relatives in the United States with whom he could be safely deposited. Often my mother would mention the little boy that my grandpa once “bought,” usually to show how backward and impoverished China was at the time. It didn’t occur to her to blame the United States for forcing immigrants to take extreme measures in order to escape the famine and war that were ravaging their homeland.
On the Mexican side, the wall area is graced with art work, cut-out metal figures of refugee scenes, variegated casts of faces that could be death masks, and a large, blue-tinted, elegiacal portrait of the 16-year-old boy—José Antonio Elena Rodríguez—shot in the back ten times by an American border guard, who was acquitted of all charges in the murder. Graffiti in white paint cover the slender, vertical slats of the rust-brown bollards: nuestros sueños de justicia no los detiene ningun muro (no wall detains our dreams of justice), México es la otra frontera (Mexico is the other border), chinga la migra (fuck ICE), migrando a la libertad (migrating to freedom).
My father migrated to the United States with his own fake documents in 1949. He married my mother and raised a family of three children and became a successful grocer in Cashion, Arizona, where he was well-liked among the Mexican laborers who toiled in the fields of what was then a farming community ten miles west of Phoenix. For those customers who couldn’t pay for groceries, he kept a little recipe box with 3 x 5 index cards that recorded their names and the amounts they owed, which they sometimes failed to pay back fully. In the 1960s, the American government discovered that my father’s immigration papers weren’t real. It didn’t matter that their original policy was racist, excluding Chinese immigrants only because of nineteenth-century xenophobia about Chinese railway workers, who were often driven away or massacred in what amounted to pogroms. It didn’t matter that my father had been a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen whose children were fully American. He was stripped of his citizenship and was forced to undergo a lengthy legal process to win it back. A conservative Republican, like most of the Cantonese peasants who fled the Communist revolution and migrated to Phoenix to open grocery stores during the 1940s and 50s, he was always ashamed of his loss of American nationality, never mentioning it to his children. But I overheard him and my mother talking about it late at night and, after he died, I found a notice from the 1970s that mentioned the date for a hearing about his request for citizenship.
He smiled. “Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.” He played with my thumb and grinned. “N’est-ce pas?”
“Beautiful logic,” I said. “You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?”
He laughed. “Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
—James Baldwin
When I was 16, my father broke open my bedroom door when I refused to go to the local church. My parents were not Christians, although they paid lip service to the faith expected of “real Americans.” They believed most passionately in the Chinese folk religion of their village, which guided what they ate, where they traveled, how they situated their houses, even when they dried their hair. When my father splintered my door jamb, he wasn’t really interested in my belief in God but in my future as a respectable progenitor of the family genes. The church was the Chinese Southern Baptist Church of Phoenix, and the point of scaring me into submission was so that I knew, since it was already clear how uninterested I was, the importance of marrying a Chinese girl. I wasn’t open about my sexuality, but I also refused to obfuscate by dating girls or even mentioning ones I found attractive, much less the future woman I intended to marry. I presented a Jekyll-and-Hyde self to the world: at school a perfect student doing everything necessary to ensure his ultimate escape to college; at home a sullen, withdrawn teenager who said little to his parents about anything. For a gay boy who admired Buñuel and read Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room for its high-camp, tragic tenderness, the Chinese Southern Baptist Church was the last place he would go to find spiritual sustenance.
The White Synagogue at Sejny, Poland, gutted and used during the Nazi era as a fire station and during the Communist period as a fertilizer warehouse, glows in the crisp November darkness, nine months after the Russians invaded neighboring Ukraine. The interior is renovated and modern, now turned into a memorial and cultural center to promote the reconciliation of borderland cultures in central Europe, an area still unsettled by the memory of neighbors killing neighbors, of genocidal pogroms and imperialist invasions. On the day I arrived in Poland a missile defending against the Russian onslaught strayed into a Polish village, killing two farmers. Traces of past conflicts linger in the Jewish names inscribed on the synagogue walls, in the smoky granularity of the shadows along the Baroque pillars and Gothic vaults, and in the almost bare lamps—modern yet evocative of the pre-war era—that illuminate the photographs of the now-decimated Jewish presence in the town and the faces of visitors, including the five Ukrainian writers who have crossed from the war zone to join us for a symposium on exile, borders, and homeland.
If I acquiesced, it was because I had no choice. The notion of home I had known until then—my parents’ home, their understanding of family—was slipping away from me forever, and the splintering of my door and the screaming that ensued began the process of exile even before I left home. I went to the Chinese Southern Baptist church that day, and I kept going to the church, despite finding the relationship between the Chinese congregation and its middle-aged white pastor racially subservient and embarrassing. I remember standing in the back of the church as he led us in the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and feeling an urge to laugh so strong that I had to duck out for a moment. I befriended a Chinese American girl, who was an equally alienated poet with an alcoholic, working-class father, one of the few Chinese families in Phoenix that my parents wanted me to have nothing to do with. I even got baptized, if only for the look that I saw on my parents’ faces as I was dunked in the water before the congregation. It was a look of disappointment, even of shame. They understood my passive-aggressive assault on their control over my life. They knew I was punishing them by taking literally my enforced attendance at church, preferring the pretense of unreal faith to the pretense of false sexuality. How terribly I had missed the point of going there! In the glass-faced tub on a raised platform before them and the rest of the congregation, the pastor dunked me in the warm, chlorinated water with his soft, pink hands. A portrait of Jesus—bearded, blue-eyed, northern European—hung on the wall behind us. I was attired in an angelic white robe, but I felt nothing metaphysical, except the stray thought that I didn’t have to wait two years for college: I was already gone. It was my baptism of exile.
Theodor Adorno believed the thought process that led to exile and genocide began with a dying animal. He wrote: “The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—‘after all, it’s only an animal’—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal’, because they could never fully believe this even of animals.” Stumbling on the wounded animal, those who will someday perpetrate a pogrom restrain themselves from feeling the kind of sympathy that would force them to become more intimately implicated in the animal’s fate. This perception about the genocidal mind offers a startling irony about human nature and what Emmanuel Levinas calls “the Other as Other”: even the non-human, the animal, summons fellow-feeling in human beings. To avoid a sense of guilt, the genocidal mind must repeat its circumlocutory mantras of otherness (“it’s only an animal”), arranging mental images of despised groups in ways that make them even more “animal” than an actual animal.
I think of the relentless media campaign against illegal immigrants during the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona, which vilified them as “drug dealers, sex traffickers, and violent predators.” One ad showed a mass of Latino and other migrants crossing the Mexican border and asked the question, “A Third World country? No, Arizona.” These human beings, some of whom traveled thousands of miles in horrendous conditions because they saw no alternative for survival, were never individuated or lingered over. Many of the faces were pixelated, ostensibly because the makers of the commercials didn’t receive legal permission to use them, but really because the blurred heads served a political purpose, too. A sense of abstraction, of facelessness, is a pre-requisite for hatred.
I’ll always remember the five faces in the White Synagogue. During the course of our meetings at Krasnogruda, each were memorably individuated in person, one by one, but I also recall them in the muted light as a group, becoming what I’ll always think of as the essence of “Ukrainian,” youthful, happy, anguished, lighthearted, shy, gregarious, brave. The distance between their experience of borderlands and mine is the distance between our countries—between the mortal battles that are determining the future of their батьківщина and the elective understandings of homeland that American affluence and privilege bring. In this place sacred now only to the ghosts of people murdered for the crime of being what they were, in this preserved shell of a synagogue covered in the names of the Jewish dead, the light bestows an indelible luster on the eyes and skin of my new friends. The synagogue, decimated yet restored, now serves as a place of respite for people enduring another war of the borderlands. Under a cloth canopy affixed to the ceiling, I see the hands of one of them dipping from sepia-colored radiance into the darkest of shadows, and for a moment it is the diminution of the light of history.
While the 2016 election, which kicked off with the racist assertion that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and “criminals,” sometimes feels like an especially aberrant ray veering off from another, truer timeline of American history, I’ve witnessed the gradual decline of our democracy since at least the start of my adult life, when a reactionary, B-movie actor led the country to accept the still-resilient paradigm of increasing inequality, rampant materialism, and shameless self-aggrandizement that has decimated much of our civic culture. By now I wonder how many turns of history it would take—one more bad election, one more narcissistic billionaire, one more season of election demagoguery, one more insurrection—for the fascism that has taken root in a large minority of the American citizenry to pull the entire country into unrest, fragmentation, and oblivion. Are we witnessing the beginning of the kind of long-term tribal unrest for which the White Synagogue is a timeless symbol and now a vehicle for healing?
Eventually, despite the shelling and the threat of mines and other booby traps, Hanna’s eldest son did visit the family home. As it turned out, there was no tank in the yard. There was, however, a hole in the red tile roof, a piece of a shell lay on the doorstep, and a small, abandoned trench had been cut into the garden. All was quiet, so he stood there, looked around, and tried to memorize it all.
—Victoria Amelina, “Homo Oblivious”
She stands beneath the canopy in the nave of the synagogue. It’s a tapestry of the firmament with crescent moon and stars, like a window through the roof peering into the cosmos. She’s a person of good humor and lightness of spirit, a writer who has devoted her life, for the duration of the war, to documenting the atrocities committed by the Russians against her people. In October Russian missiles targeted cultural artifacts and institutions, a scientific library, the National Philharmonic, the National University, museums and galleries, a beautiful mural, even a monument to a Ukrainian poet. A PEN report, “Ukrainian Culture Under Attack: Erasure of Ukrainian Culture in Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” quotes her as saying, “I know they want us, Ukrainian writers, to disappear.” And yet the gift of her presence, intact, courageous, is arrayed before me in the synagogue. Only the shadow seems to cover her hands, which I know to be the same shadow that covered them a month before, when she dug into “black Ukrainian soil” to find the diary that a celebrated Ukrainian writer hid before being abducted and killed by the Russians. The shadow is palpable to me, the same shadow that covered Volodymyr Vakulenko’s hands as he pressed the plastic-covered manuscript into the ground before he was killed. Like Victoria, I refuse to forget it.
In the late-autumn dusk, the soil of the semi-desert grassland near Nogales has a slightly reddish tint, and I can’t help but think of the blood of hundreds of migrants who have died here of thirst, sunstroke, and exposure, mostly during the long summer months. Now it’s a cool, serene place, marred only by the long line of trucks and cars that wait at a U. S. Border Patrol checkpoint almost thirty miles north of the border. Creosote and ocotillo, juniper and blue grama, dot the rolling hills as an officer waves us through. Today I won’t be stopped, as I have at another checkpoint, for looking like an illegal immigrant. In Green Valley south of Tucson, a new subdivision for retirees crowds the hills with pristine red-tiled roofs and beige-pink adobe. Driving by, my partner and I talk about how subdivisions like this one, freshly constructed in tight spaces for maximum profit, have made Arizona, despite its wide-open spaces, one of the states with the smallest acreage per house. We return home to the ranch house in Phoenix that my parents built in a more sprawling era, with yards so large that they form a buffer against neighbors we’ve never met.
The dwellings we build, the people we love, the shops we frequent, the sidewalks we walk our dogs on, the landscapes on which we blaze invisible trails of affectionate familiarity—all of this and none of this is home. We carry our homes within us, of course. We carry our sense of what we belong to, an understanding cobbled from glimmers of experience and affinity, which is no guarantee that the real house we create will not blaze up in a conflagration, wash away in a flood, or decay into a shell of the proud habitation we thought we were constructing. We may move to a city that “doesn’t exist on any map,” in Zbigniew Herbert’s words, and eat bread that is as “black as an exile’s fate,” or we may never reach the city at all: a life raft may sink in a tempest, an occupying army may detonate a missile in the school we take shelter at. Like Elizabeth Bishop’s Prodigal, we may stay in a place for years and realize that home was the place we left behind. It may take us “a long time finally” to make our minds up to go home.
I inherited my childhood home after my parents’ deaths and discovered that the exile I longed for as a child led me back to the place I thought I loathed. My parents’ 1966 house turned out to be two homes, the one that they made (and that I grew up in) and the one that I’m making now with my partner, the spaces luminous with new associations that have vanquished the estrangement I felt as a child there. But already the effects of climate change have made the Arizona summers so long and miserable—strings of 115° days and 90° nights, exorbitant air conditioning bills, steering wheels that burn your hands—that we’ve been dreaming about a summer cottage in New England.
Home is both a metaphor and a reality, which can be overwhelmed by sudden registers of feeling or the heat of the desert sun. With time all lives exit the homes they inhabited, and all homes exit the lives for which they were a habitation. The physical building eventually crumbles to its pebbled foundation, which a future archeologist may dig up and study to ascertain some quavering truth about origins. Someday, too, archaeology itself will be gone, along with all human concerns and excruciations, including the notion of a homeland and the agonies of exile and migration. Everything transforms itself because the universe itself is endless metamorphosis. Meanwhile, we live out our inescapable spans, and the only practical wisdom we learn about death may be the realization that the living don’t have time for infinity. Is the dream of a borderless world nothing but another dream of an infinite afterlife, the hereafter made sweet by the absence of the human, where conflict doesn’t exist because people don’t exist? Or is it the ideal to which all of civilization would aspire if only we had the wisdom to imagine a place that everyone could call home?
David WOO is an American poet and writer, the son of immigrants from China. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Divine Fire, selected by the Washington Post Book Club as one of the best poetry books of 2021, and The Eclipses, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. His poetry and criticism have appeared at the Poetry Foundation website and in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry London, The Threepenny Review, and The Georgia Review. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona. davidwoo.info