Coming (Home) to America

I wasn't sure if we were going to make it around the world. After four hours of sleeping in Saigon airport and another eight hours on a plane, I found out. A Jewish guy from New York interrupted his ramblings about his suicidal children to answer my question. “Are we flying east or west?”

“North,”he answered. “North and east. Over Alaska.” And so the success of our year-long trip around the world rested on the flight path of a China Eastern Airlines 737. And the parent who didn't seem to feel any responsibility for both of his teenage children attempting suicide confirmed it.

Despite spending nights and days on buses this past year, I found myself quickly growing restless on the plane. Even the buses stop every few hours for bathrooms and food. On those buses, we are buoyed by the excitement of a new place at the end of the ride. This plane was taking us back to where we started. Back to JFK airport, where the international leg of our trip started on a July 6 Iceland Air flight to Paris via Reykjavik. But also back to the comforts of family, reunions with friends, and all the things we learned to love and miss about our lives in the United States. Things like my dad's steaks, baked potatoes, North Mississippi blues, Miss Annie's barbecue pulled pork sandwiches, Tuesday night Kermit Ruffins performances at Bullet's in New Orleans. The list goes on.

We are greeted by the impatience and complaints of New Yorkers in the customs line. It doesn't seem to matter to them that, as U.S. Passport holders, we get our own line. Our taxi driver is from Delhi. He owns multiple properties in India and manages to spend at least two months a year there. I understand how he has the means as I watch the meter creep up incrementally to $57. And we barely crossed one borough. The two of us rode across three states of India in a sleeper train for half that price. Welcome to America.

We sleep intermittently in the comfort of my sister's family. I wake at 4 a.m to walk the empty streets of Bay Ridge. Robins hop around slowly under their fat rusty winter coats. Water beads on the tips of maple buds. Dryers vent into driveways with the scent of fabric softener and a puff of steam in the cool air. Trees paint the sidewalks with white and yellow and pink blossoms. Tulips neatly garnish front walkways. I walk past the monstrosity of Fort Hamilton High School, where I can smell the moisture of the pool. I look over its shoulder into the chilly wind that blows steadily from the river as it descends past the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island, and the edge of New Jersey before it meets the Atlantic Ocean. I wander on in no particular direction. I notice the house next to the school. It reminds me of Gaudi's Hansel and Gretel house in Parc Guiell in Barcelona. I half-expect a hobbit to wander out of it. But it is 5 o'clock Saturday morning. New York and its hobbits are still asleep. I walk on where I recognize the park where I went sledding with my brother-in-law and nieces after a huge New Year's snow storm. The park came to life as children rejoiced in the snow and New York parents relished the opportunity to introduce their children to the wonders of the winter outdoors. I realize now the memory will stay with Uncle Ham long after my cute little nieces grow up to become worried adults.

As I walk, I reflect on our last stops in Cambodia and Vietnam. Mostly, I think about the atrocities. Atrocities that merit far more than a blog entry and end up being far less. Pol Pot killing one fourth of his nation's population in four years with crude farming instruments in the name of claiming power for the peasants. And the atrocity of the international community recognizing Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as the official government of Cambodia long after they had been thrown from power and retreated to the hills. I think of the stately tree in the Killing Fields against which babies' heads were smashed. And how peaceful the place feels today, despite the bone shards, teeth and pieces of clothing the ground secretes like tears struggling to express a pain that is beyond words.

I think of the school in Phnom Penh. The school that looked so much like so many schools whose exterior halls I have walked in New Orleans. As I walked those hallways in New Orleans, I was struck by the atrocities of a failed education system built as ramparts against the crumbling of Southern legal segregation before it gave way to a newer, more modern era of school segregation. There in Phnom Penh, the school became a torture center. It's classrooms are empty except thousands of photos. Photos of emaciated bodies strapped to iron bed frames. Thousands of faces, some as young as four years old, as they were checked into the S-21 torture camp. Some were smiling. I wondered if they smiled because they didn't know what was going to happen to them. Or did those smiles signify rebellion, or resolute faith? Or was it simply years of training that you smile for photos, almost unconsciously, in their last days of consciousness?

I think about the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. What I grew up calling “The Vietnam War” there is known as “The American War.” I quickly recognized familiar names like Dow and Monsanto beside horrifying images of the impacts of napalm, and a rainbow of chemical agents, of which orange is only the most famous. Most striking were the images of children born in the last decade with major birth defects, four generations after Vietnam was sprayed with chemicals to remove the very jungles that appeared to be defeating the Americans. I cried at a well-crafted letter to President Obama from a young crippled woman referencing his letter to his own children. She was appealing for compensation from the American chemical companies for these persistent health problems, an appeal the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Vietnamese people as they wrestled with the results of these untested chemicals half a century later. I remembered my former life, wondering what non-profit communications person helped her craft her appeal.

After two hours of walking, the combination of the damp cold and reflections on humanity's transgressions have chilled me. I hasten back to my sister's for much anticipated New York bagels and lox.

My sister and brother-in-law made a year-long around-the-world trip of their own more than fifteen years ago. We welcome their advice about what to expect upon our return. We welcome their cooking, their two beautiful girls. My brother-in-law, Rob, even helps me identify a song I heard at the end of a rainy night in Amsterdam at a warm pub with a cat in the window. There we ate old cheese and sausage while drinking Belgian beer and welcomed the wind down from a long night. It's Eddie Harris and Les McCann, “Compared to What.” The song's rhythm had been meandering along just below my consciousness for the better part of the past year. I had come to feel like that song was a stately entrance way to some place special within me. Rob identified it with a few mumbles hinting at the rhythm of the lyrics and my belief that it was a live recording.

We soon discover that not much changes in adults in a year. A year is better measured in the lives of children, who are noticeably taller. Little girls that loved Justin Beiber now hate him. My nieces who never wore anything but dresses now only wear pants. My nephews who were boys when we left are now clearly young men. Apparently, puberty happens in a year. And swaddled babies now walk. Babies who uttered a few words are now toddlers who speak in full sentences. But mostly, my American friends and families are as busy as ever, bound up in their own lives. Surely, it won't be long before we join them in a tightly scheduled world of our own.