A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”
I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.
But I kept on walking. No time for debate.
I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Banos, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.
Perhaps he is still waiting there.
The man said that San Diego de los Banos was a long way off — 15 kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.
It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.
So I began walking. And I walked and walked.
And not a single car came by.
The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.
Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.
Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.
My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.
I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.
I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.
“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Banos was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.
I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.
There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.
And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.
It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “si,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”
And so began our 12-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Banos, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.
We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.
A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.
Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.
“Musica,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.
As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”
I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.
I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.
This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.
When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?
“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.
I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.
Jennifer Cerami garnered a flirty smile from the guard at the Colombian consulate in midtown Manhattan. She was 27, with dark eyes and curtain of long hair. Around her in the waiting room sat a scattering of Colombians with official business back home. It was her first visit, in August of 2005, and Cerami looked uncertain, but not out of place. She cradled a stack of old papers and photographs.
When her number was called, Cerami leaned in to the window, whispering.
“I was adopted in Colombia.”
“Don’t worry,” the consular officer told her, leaning in from the other side. “We all have secrets.”
Like many adoptees, Cerami’s story has several beginnings. One of these is with Linda and Michael Cerami, a young couple from Lindenhurst, Long Island, a blue-collar community of single-family homes and above-ground pools. A high fever had damaged Linda’s fallopian tubes. Michael had lupus, which made domestic adoption difficult. So Linda began to look for a newborn overseas.
Since then, every April, on Jennifer’s birthday, Linda told her daughter this story.
“We wanted a baby very badly,” Linda would say. “And we had to go very far to find you, all the way to a country in South America. I put in the papers, and nine months later, the call came telling us that a beautiful baby girl was waiting for us in Bogotá. You had been left on the doorsteps of the orphanage. Your father and I flew down. No, we never met your mother. But we met the woman who took you in. She led us in to a room with rows and rows of bassinets, and said, ‘Guess who your daughter is?’ Well I walked down the row right past you. But your father stopped there in front of your crib and started crying. And that’s how we were blessed with a wonderful daughter, who is you.”
Jennifer’s adoption was a big event in the closely-knit neighborhood. The Heinzes and the Duffys brought their children to the Cerami front yard for the baby’s arrival, and their daughters — Teresa, Sabrina and Rebekah — became Jennifer’s life-long friends. Summers were games of hide-and-seek and Red Rover, lemonade stands, collecting fireflies. “You wouldn’t have found anything Colombian in our house,” Cerami says. “Nothing.”
Cerami thought of herself as white but there were things every now and then that didn’t jibe. When in second grade other children wrote “basketball” and “butterfly” for words that begin with B, she chose “Bogotá.” While they burnt to red in the sun, Cerami merely darkened. By the time she was ready for prom, Cerami could see the irony of choosing Rodrigo, the only other Latino she knew, for a date.
At Boston College things began to get perplexing for Cerami. She was recruited to the Latino student union, OLAA, though she spoke no Spanish. At a meeting of AHANA, a campus minority group for Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans, the leader played “I Believe I Can Fly,” then gave a speech Cerami calls “don’t let the white man bring me down.”
“What was I supposed to do?” Cerami says about storming out of the meeting. “The white man raised me.”
During her second year she moved into the romance language dorm on campus, and studied some Spanish. For a school publication, she wrote an article called “What kind of Latina am I?” “I love my mother dearly,” it reads, “but she raised me as she was raised — Italian.”
Taking the country out of the children
Last year, the U.S. State Department issued immigrant visas to over 20,000 foreign-born orphans, up from roughly 2,000 in 1969. Nearly 200,000 of the 1.6 million adopted minors living in the U.S. are foreign born. Today, exchanging children is a $1.4 billion industry, with travel and adoption agencies, visa wallahs and psychologists to fill every available economic niche.
Inter-country adoption flows in the wake of foreign war and poverty. Developed nations sheltered Koreans after the Korean war. Romanians and Russians followed the fall of Ceausescu and Communism in the early nineties. China’s one-child policy bolstered its top ranking among donor countries in the last decade. But as China’s supply levels off, Ethiopia, Liberia and other African nations are now opening up. In Latin America, and Colombia in particular, the orphan boom came in the wake of civil conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s, which means the largest group of Latino adoptees like Cerami is currently coming of age.
Still, modern international adoption has only been going on for 50 years. It remains an unfinished social experiment, bred from compassion, infertility and post-war economic divides. The legality, propriety and ethics of transnational adoption — its effect on parents, children and societies — is still hotly contested. What began as an idea about “saving kids” has turned into an acute expression of a global society. New laws, such as the Hague Adoption Convention, designed to protect children from trafficking, are allowing transnational adoptees greater access to their pasts. Both cosmopolitan and provincial, adoptees magnify the broader changes in the way we answer the basic question of where we come from.
The biggest development in the history of transnational adoption, though, is the death of the myth of a “clean break” from biological and cultural roots. Today, agencies encourage adoptive parents to foster multiple identities, through organized “culture camps” or sponsored trips home. “Cultural citizenship” spurs South American-themed wallpaper, dress-up clothes, and peculiar show-and-tell moments. As cultural anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman describes in the academic journal Social Text, transnational adoption “forges new, even fluid, kinds of kinship and affiliation on a global stage.” In other words, transnational adoptees, with their socially-constructed identities, are the avant-garde of the present global age.
Jerri Wegner, who has three adopted Colombians of her own, helps educate new families on managing their children’s identity. “I tell parents,” she says, “that we have to take our children out of Colombia in order to bring them home, but we never have to take Colombia out of our children.” Her agency, Friends of FANA, organizes Spanish-language camps in Colombia, and country-themed gatherings in upstate New York, where kids are fed Colombian food and encouraged to play soccer wearing Colombia’s yellow national team jersey.
Hollee McGinnis, a sociologist at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute who studies identity in adoptees, wonders whether this is the best approach. She argues that “culture camp” may unnecessarily complicate the development of a healthy identity. Her research describes two layers of culture that every adoptee has. The first is an “external” layer of food, attire, language and history — things anyone with a little curiosity can pick up. But the second layer of culture is more elusive: “the culture of being,” which can only be acquired by living it. “It’s how you walk, interpret the world, your internal values,” McGinnis says. “Most adoptees lose that.”
A shifting sense of home
The Colombian in Cerami’s face is visible, but she moves like a girl from Long Island, with a wide, forward-pressing gait. These days, Cerami works as an analyst at Ann Taylor’s online marketing division, in Midtown. Before that, she did a stint on the floor for Sephora. She squeezes appointments in before racing off to the New York Sports Club, then heads home to a Lower East Side one-bedroom where her open laptop chirps with instant messages. She talks to her mother every day. “I had fights with my mother just like any teenager,” she says, “but now she’s my best friend.” And still, Cerami holds on to a desire “to be from some place.”
Like for many adoptees, Cerami’s search began with documents. Her first came in a DHL envelope, just a week after her visit to the consulate: a birth certificate. “Not a mystery solved,” she says, “but more like answers to questions I didn’t realize I had.” Her own name is Constanza Cruz. She had not been left on a doorstep.
That winter, Cerami got in touch with her orphanage in Colombia. A friend’s wedding in South America had given her an excuse to stop off in Bogotá, the first time any Cerami had returned to Colombia since Jennifer was three months old. Through a contact at the consulate, Cerami sent out an announcement on Colombian radio asking Constanza Cruz’s mother to call, but nobody responded. Colleagues at Cerami’s office, who had been following her revelations, offered donations for the orphanage, which Cerami planned to visit. Come Christmas, Linda drove her adopted daughter to the airport.
“I’m afraid I’m not going to feel,” Cerami told her mother in the car. “I’m afraid I’m going to go down to this country and be completely not affected by what I see. My life is not going to change. This isn’t going to have a connection with me, and what does that mean then?”
A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”
I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.
But I kept on walking. No time for debate.
I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Baños, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.
Perhaps he is still waiting there.
The man said that San Diego de los Baños was a long way off — fifteen kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.
It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.
So I began walking. And I walked and walked.
And not a single car came by.
The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.
Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.
Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.
My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.
I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.
I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.
“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “Hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Baños was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “Twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.
I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.
There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.
And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.
It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “Sí,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”
And so began our twelve-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Baños, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.
We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.
A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.
Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.
“Música,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.
As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”
I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.
I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.
This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.
When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?
“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.
I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.
“No man is an island,” the poet John Donne assures us. But on October 5, 1998, I had a hard time sharing his optimism. That was the day I found out I had LMS — leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of soft muscle tissue that strikes fewer than four people out of a million.
But despite those numbers, I never really felt alone. Today, people with extremely rare medical conditions around the world are banding together via email groups. It is, in every sense, a revolution in terms of patient empowerment, one that has quickly spread in the past couple of years.
Cancers like LMS are among the loneliest of illnesses. While those with more common cancers can usually find a network of others in the same city who have the same condition and who are going through the same thing, my chances of ever meeting another LMS patient seemed slim.
Only a few years ago, that isolation would have been my new reality. It certainly was for Orland Hetherington, a native of Ontario, Canada, who had LMS diagnosed in 1994. “I spent two years trying desperately to find another living soul with LMS,” Hetherington said. “I was alone with this and scared. I became somewhat obsessed with finding someone else on the planet with LMS and searching harder for more and more information.”
In March 1997, LaDonna Backmeyer, an LMS patient in Rock Island, Illinois, found Hetherington on a cancer online support list. She asked him to help her start an online discussion group specifically for LMS patients and their families and friends. From just four members then, that email group has grown to more than 560 subscribers.
For a while, I was one of them. The group instantly welcomed me to its ranks with both personal notes of understanding and a barrage of advice on treatment options and research information that helped me know more about what lay ahead during my recovery.
The group “has given information to several hundred patients since its founding,” Backmeyer said. “Some of the patients check in for a small amount of time in order to get the information they need; others find a group of welcoming friends, and they stay.”
All this from a machine
In my case, the group helped me learn about a then-experimental surgical technique developed by Dr. Steven Curley at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I flew to Houston and underwent Curley's surgery, which removed all traces of tumor from my liver in December 1998. As of my last trimonthly check up, I remain cancer-free without having had to undergo chemotherapy.
In October 2000, Curley was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report article about a successful new generation of cancer-fighting techniques; because of the help of the LMS group, I found him two years before the general public learned of his existence.
There are similar email lists for about sixty other cancers. All are the offspring of a single group list started three years ago by the not-for-profit Association of Cancer Online Resources, founded by Gilles Frydman, a New York City computer entrepreneur. Frydman's wife was stricken with breast cancer and found information through an email list that helped her avoid a mastectomy.
"I started to look at how cancer patientsuse the Internet," Frydman said. He found that people with a variety of cancers all seemed to end up on a single, general-cancer email list. "I thought it was outrageous that only people suffering from very common forms, like breast and prostate cancer, got their own specific mailing list. So it seemed to me that what we should do was create a mailing list for every known type of cancer." Today, there are more than 125 email groups, with a total enrollment in the tens of thousands.
"Everyone comes to this support group with no idea of the vast information that is going to be shared with them," said one LMS group member, Cynthia Whitson of LaGrange, Georgia. "We all just come to selfishly help ourselves find the way through the maze of doctors, facilities, treatments, and side effects. We find that we become a part of an emotional movement to collectively find the answer to each one's question."
For many, helping others on the list find answers becomes a way to cope themselves. "I had every intention of getting off the group during this three-month break between treatments while I waited for the next scan date," Whitson said. "But you can't leave it. It becomes a part of your life, just as cancer will forever be a part of your everyday life."
Many members of these rare-cancer communities attest to this sense of involvement–becoming, in the words of Donne’s poem, not an island but a “part of the main … involved in Mankind.”
“The list, for me, has meant longer time here on Earth and incredible satisfaction in trying to help others with LMS,” In The Fray Contributor
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A catch in Amilcar Arroyo’s Spanish-accented voice conveyed his shock and hurt as much as his words. The slender, bright-eyed legal immigrant told a mix of Latinos and Anglos in the common room of a city church that, after 18 years of living in his adopted country, he recently felt as though he were an outsider once again. While covering a press conference at which Mayor Louis Barletta announced he would run for a third term, Arroyo, president of a Latino media company, found the silent animosity among his fellow U.S. citizens nearly palpable.
“I felt the atmosphere there. People there looked at me like a leper,” Arroyo said.
Arroyo would discover that feeling shunned was only the beginning. Asked if he would renew his support for Barletta, Arroyo said no. Arroyo had endorsed the mayor in a previous campaign but a pair of anti-illegal immigration ordinances Barletta spearheaded led Arroyo to withdraw his support. The day after the press conference Arroyo heard from a dozen callers criticizing his change of heart. Some said they had previously considered him an honest man and a respected community figure, but that his comments about the mayor had changed their views. Other calls were more ominous. “You’d better watch out. You’d better take care of yourself because you’re going to get hurt,” Arroyo said one caller warned.
Arroyo spoke at a January 22 meeting convened in the common room of Faith United Church of Christ by the Greater Hazleton Ministerium, an interfaith clergy association. The Ministerium does not take an official position on the ordinance and is seeking common ground between those on both sides of the issue. Attendees included residents, clergy, city Latino leaders, a representative of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and a Luzerne county commissioner. A big-eyed baby watched the discussions from an infant carrier slung over his mother’s shoulder.
One of the ordinances would have prohibited renting to undocumented immigrants and called for a $1,000 per day fine for landlords who did so. Of the 4,216 rental units in the city, 236 are Latino-occupied, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Another ordinance would have revoked the business permits of establishments which employed illegal immigrants.
Legal challenges have prevented the ordinances from being enforced although their original versions were passed in July. In response to a lawsuit by advocacy organizations, landlords and residents, U.S. District Court Judge James Munley in October deemed the ordinances temporarily unenforceable and is slated to determine the long-term fate of the laws this month. If enforced, the laws could disrupt the education of child citizens who must leave the country with their deported parents, force a plaintiff who is a legal immigrant to be evicted because she is waiting for documentation of her status, and hurt the profits of business owners and landlords, Judge Munley stated in court papers explaining his decision.
Although the ordinances are intended to curb crime, city officials did not offer statistical evidence that increasing immigration has caused an increase in crime, Judge Munley said. The city has passed revised versions of the ordinances, which critics say have harmed the Latino community even though the laws are not in effect.
“It sort of became open season on a lot of Latinos, regardless of their status,” said Fabricio Rodriguez, executive director of Philadelphia Area Jobs With Justice, which organized a September rally opposing the ordinances. Racist graffiti, vandalism and fights in school are some of the problems local Latinos reported when Rodriguez surveyed them on the impact of the ordinances.
The ordinances address only illegal immigration, but xenophobic hecklers have taken them as a cue to publicly harass legal immigrants along with those who lack papers because it is impossible to differentiate the two groups based only on appearance, said Agapito Lopez, vice president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, in a telephone interview. Cultural differences make innocent Latinos seem suspect to their Anglo neighbors and the ordinances embolden residents to express their suspicion, Lopez said. Latinos frequently meet outdoors to share jokes and stories as they do in their native countries, Lopez said.
“When they see people gathering outside and speaking a different language, they think it’s a gang,” Lopez said. Far from being meetings of criminal cabals, the outside gatherings merely reflect how many Latinos’ sensibilities differ from those of many Anglos, Lopez said. “We don’t like to be inside because we come from tropical countries,” he said. Some Anglos’ misperceptions have led them to lash out at their Latino neighbors, Lopez said.
“There are people who are being called names in the street,” Lopez said.
Struggles to cross a racial divide
On a frigid January day shortly after the Ministerium meeting, people did not appear to linger in the street long enough to insult or be insulted. On Broad Street, the Roads End Pub and Club was dark inside and below the Blues Brothers statues on its facade a sign stated “All Legals Served.” A hat-snatching wind rushed down Wyoming Street, where well-kept older model cars lined the curbs. The vivid yellow clapboard walls of Lechuga’s market offered the eye a welcome change from the gray-stained gobs of old snow piled along the icy sidewalks. Latino grocery stores chock-a-block with sundries and tropical products, money transfer bureaus and travel agencies shared the street with employment agencies and Italian restaurants. A handful of stores stood empty; some had permits taped to their plate glass windows suggesting that new occupants were preparing to move in.
Those who work on Wyoming Street, noted for its concentration of Latino businesses, said that the consequences of the ordinances are economic as well as interpersonal. Owners of establishments that primarily serve Latinos have seen a drop in business which they trace to the ordinances. One grocery store employee said business had declined by about five percent since the ordinances passed because many immigrants have left town after raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Immigration came down here and took people away,” said Julian Figueroa, an employee of Jazmin’s Grocery on Wyoming Street. Immigration officials did not target Jazmin’s, but did visit businesses on Wyoming Street, Figueroa said one recent afternoon after waiting on a young customer whom he advised about keeping track of her small bills. Other business owners also noticed a decline in customers.
“A lot of people just left town. You notice the drop at least as far as the money transfers that you do, calling card sales which is more of what the immigrant population buys,” said Chris Rubio, an employee of Isabel’s Gifts on Wyoming Street while staffing the counter at the shop one recent weekday. Some businesses have closed due to lack of customers. Rosa and Jose Luis Lechuga, plaintiffs in the lawsuit, closed their restaurant due to a decline in business, according to court papers. The restaurant served 45 to 130 customers before a previous version of the ordinances passed, but had only six or seven patrons daily afterward. The Lechugas’ Latino grocery store served 95 to130 customers a day before the ordinances passed, but had 20 to 23 patrons daily afterward. Jose Lechuga said by phone on January 30 that he was moving to Texas and had sold the store. The city does not keep statistics on business owners’ nationality so municipal employees do not know how many Latino-owned businesses have closed or how many new immigrant-owned establishments have opened since the ordinances passed.
City officials said the ordinances were intended to protect city residents from crime, not to harm Latinos socially or economically. Shootings committed by undocumented immigrants inspired the ordinances, said Joe Yannuzzi, council president, who supported the ordinances. Municipal law did not provide for punishing crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said by phone.
Shootings are rare occurrences in the city which had about 23,000 people as of the 2000 Census. Latino advocates have said that the population has increased by about 10,000 people since 2000. Mayor Barletta has said in published reports that the population had increased by at least 7,000 since the last census. “The only thing we could do is punish the people who are here legally,” Yannuzzi said. City officials began by exploring the appropriate response to several recent shootings, and later noticed a connection between the crimes and undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said.
“The violent crimes were being committed by illegal aliens,” Yannuzzi said. The ordinances allow the city to protect all residents, including Latinos, Yannuzzi said. “They live here the same as we do. They don’t want to see shootings either,” he said. Yannuzzi said that Latino residents’ departures should not cause concern that Hazleton’s population has nose-dived. Those who left were quickly replaced by other Latinos, he said. “The place is still booming and there’s a lot of Latinos still living here attending the schools and getting along with everybody,” Yannuzzi said.
A fellow council member echoed Yannuzzi’s concern with crime but had voted against the ordinances. “The rationale should have been to combat crime,” said councilman Bob Nilles in a telephone interview. Nilles opposes tying anti-crime ordinances to immigration issues because doing so creates legal problems for the city.
Those who attended the Ministerium meeting also expressed concern with violent crime and said that opposing it could be a common cause for those who might disagree about the immigration ordinances. “We know violence has gone up. We know that violence is connected to the drugs,” said the Rev. Tom Cvammen of Trinity Lutheran Church in West Hazleton, who facilitated the meeting.
With a calm voice and demeanor, the Rev. Cvammen appeared ready to help attendees stay focused on the goal of reconciliation should the conversation become overheated. Some who attended the Ministerium meeting said that focusing on crimes committed by illegal immigrants obscures a general increase in crime related to drug sales in the city. One attendee objected to the Mayor’s emphasis on illegal Latino immigrants when he endorsed the ordinances and touted them a means of stemming crime.
“He failed to mention that a non-Hispanic killed my cousin,” Anna Arias, president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, said sharply. Mayor Barletta did not return calls. Arias said that the person who killed her cousin had sold drugs and that he committed suicide after the crime. The room was silent.
Attendees defined reducing drug sales and other crimes as a primary goal of one of the three working groups that formed at the meeting. Members of each working group gathered around a folding table in the common room to brainstorm and develop action plans. The working groups included Latinos and Anglos who were Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers and those who did not state a religious affiliation. Almost all appeared to be in their forties or older. Members of the working group on crime planned to invite David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, an international Christian-based drug rehabilitation and education program, to speak to members of church youth groups throughout the city. The crime working group also planned to invite members of Unidos, a diversity group at Hazleton Area High School, to the next Ministerium meeting on February 27.
Members of the working group dedicated to addressing public fears of Latinos said they sought to reduce fear by replacing it with the truth about people of whom others might be afraid. “A lot of the fear is based on untruth or exaggerations,” said the Rev. Jane Hess of Faith UCC. Group members considered creating a public forum in which immigrants would share their memories of becoming citizens. “At that moment, you have to put aside the country where you were born. You have to love this country a lot to do that,” Arroyo said.
To help community members get to know each other across ethnic divides, a third working group planned a series of cross-cultural activities. The working group planned to connect events for the May 3 National Day of Prayer to the Cinco de Mayo (Mexican Independence Day) celebrations and to dedicate the day to appreciating diversity. Working group members also planned to ask organizers to dedicate this year’s Fun Fest to celebrating diversity and to ask Wyoming Street merchants to hold a block party to coincide with the annual festival of music, food and crafts. The working group intended to start an inter-ethnic hiking and biking club for young people.
An age-old debate
Attendees have reason to hope for greater inter-cultural understanding, the Rev. Cvammen said. Catholics and Protestants once divided the city into sections along religious lines and used to attack each other on the streets of Hazleton but have long since ceased segregating themselves and brawling. Discrimination against Italians, Irish and Poles also used to be common in the city, Lopez and Arias said. “It’s something that was worked on before,” the Rev. Cvammen said.
The ebbing of historic inter-group tensions in Hazleton makes the city representative of a national trend. A century ago, public immigration debate centered on determining if Greeks and Poles could fit into U.S. society, said Randy Capps, senior research associate at the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, a non-partisan research organization. Historic immigration debates have subsided nationwide only to be replaced by new ones.
“Now we’re debating whether or not immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are going to fit in,” Capps said. Attitudes of those participating in current debates are shaped by a different set of experiences than their early 20th century predecessors. Although the U.S. has historically been a nation of immigrants, many politicians now in office came of age during a 40-year period of relatively low immigration, Capps said. Immigration slowed between the 1920s and the 1960s due in part to ceilings on the number of people who could enter the U.S. from each country. The Great Depression also made the U.S. less attractive to immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their native lands. “We went through a period when we weren’t country of immigration, so it seems new and out of control,” Capps said.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have also changed attitudes toward immigration. The hijackers who crashed airliners into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and the Pennsylvania countryside were legal immigrants, but their actions have shaped attitudes toward those who enter the country with or without documents. Some U.S. citizens believe that cracking down on illegal immigration ensures national security.
“People feel they are acting against terrorism,” said Myriam Torres, director of the Arnold School of Public Health Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies at the University of South Carolina. Latino immigrants who enter the country intending to do harm are rare, Torres said. “The majority of immigrants from Latin America, they are not coming to commit crimes, they are coming to work,” Torres said. Immigrants who do not have enough money to qualify for visas often enter the country illegally to assist their families by taking jobs rejected by U.S. citizens, Torres said.
“They will do anything they are asked to do, because they know whatever they are earning here, even if it is a low wage, it is much higher than they would be earning at home,” Torres said. Policymakers seeking to control illegal immigration should address the human costs of a global economy in which developing countries fare poorly, Torres said. “I do think that there is a need to work with the countries who are sending people here,” Torres said.
In 1980, I took a semester off from college to live in Summertown, Tennessee, in a spiritual community/social experiment known as The Farm. It was founded by a man named Steven Gaskin and a group of dissatisfied, creative, expatriate Berkeley intellectuals with a taste for anarchy and a penchant for mind-altering chemicals. The Farm tried to create that elusive creature in American culture — a society based on the free exchange of goods and services.
As happens with many such experiments, the inclusion, sharing, and freedom that the Farm embraced eventually led to its morphing into a microcosm of the society from which it was hatched: co-opted, subtly capitalistic, justifiably paranoid, and full of loonies. I’ve always been proud of my Farm experience, though. Despite its flaws, its existence and my part in it represented, for me, an important part of our national identity: we’re this paradoxical mixture of wanting to be self-sufficient, and yet we’re desperate for a social connection that reaffirms that we can justify the space we take up on the planet.
A similar proprietary fondness comes across in Brian Doherty’s This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, a balanced and well-organized chronicle of an event that began with two men — Larry Harvey and Jerry James — burning an eight-foot wooden man on a beach in San Francisco in 1986. Now their brainchild has become cause for a week-long festival in a “temporary city dedicated to art, liberty, and inspired insanity” 150 miles outside of Las Vegas. Last Labor Day, the celebration attracted over 30,000 participants.
Despite keeping what I thought was a firm finger on the pulse of popular culture, I had never heard of Burning Man until I read the book. Most of my friends and acquaintances had heard of Burning Man. How had this cultural phenomenon stayed off my radar? Okay, I’ve been out of the country since 1999. And I don’t own a television. But this is a big deal, right? An experiment in which you go to the boiling desert for a week and are expected to bring along everything you need to live and create art. An event in which our social norms are tested and broken. An event in which people coexist without violence, without commerce, and without judgment.
Doherty’s book fills a surprising void in the extensive “literature” surrounding this phenomenon. “If you don’t know what it is,” he writes on his website, “then you need a book to explain it.” And it’s true. His task is doubly difficult: The event has spawned blogs, newsgroups, bulletin boards, online clothing stores, documentaries, and a host of sociological and cultural studies and articles that make you wonder how anyone can contribute more usefully to the body of information on the event and its history. Serving as a testament to Burning Man’s Silicon Valley, California origins and information technology acumen, the event’s website is one of the most professional, user-friendly, and thorough sites I have ever seen. Based on his nine-year involvement with the Burning Man event as both participant and volunteer, Doherty decided that the event finally merited and needed a historical and cultural documentary. In a well-organized work of moderate length, he manages to compress a chronology of the event and its political and social landscape, biographies, and a surprisingly objective philosophy of social experiments that would pass muster with fanatics and detractors alike.
From his carefully crafted writing style, it’s obvious that Doherty — a self-described student of anarchy with a fondness for fire and things that make loud noises — is an ardent disciple of Burning Man. It is his dedication to the event that has allowed him access to a host of sources, including organizers, longtime attendees and performers, and past participants who've since broken with Burning Man, but whose insights are necessary to get a complete sense of the event's history and evolution.
He also demonstrates, without being too heavy-handed, what others feel is so important about Burning Man — its intent to bring people together in a creative community based on the free exchange of ideas and the concept of, for lack of a better term, reciprocal survival. He avoids making judgments about the event other than to quietly reiterate through example and anecdote that this yearly festival is important to American culture on a variety of levels, even if one takes issue with the temporary “society” that is created there.
The result is evident in Doherty’s vivid description of the festival’s early organizers. As if Doherty is ashamed to admit that the Burning Man “regulars” are, for the most part, the Bay Area community of literati not usually found in ghetto or on reservation, he downplays their level of education and professional backgrounds. The reader gradually realizes that, for the most part, this is a club of privileged white guys, however disenfranchised, creative, and rebellious.
Doherty is at his most effective when showing through history and example how the organizers of Burning Man learned to adapt and grow into their environment without forgetting the intent of their original experiment. With its compelling chronicling of a social experiment, This is Burning Man’s carefully detailed information allows even a detractor to understand and admire the vision of people who did not let growth stand in the way of their original intent. Even in the face of more rigid restrictions by the Bureau of Land Management and the neighboring town of Gerlach, Nevada, Burning Man basically remained three guys with a coffee can of money, paying to have the world participate.
It is this vision, however, that, suggests Doherty, polarized the two main organizers at that time — John Law and Larry Harvey. Doherty’s account of some of Law’s objections to Burning Man’s growth is one of the few times Doherty strays from the objectivity he has tried to maintain. Law became concerned about, among other things, the health of the desert and the permanent scars that thousands of visitors were leaving on an ecosystem that only appeared barren. Doherty writes, “To sincerely lament damage to the playa by Burning Man requires an almost mystical belief that there are certain surfaces mankind just should not touch.” This is key to the heart of this book and this event: Burning Man can be viewed as life-affirming, but it also implies a proprietary interest in anything we can get our hands on. Doherty doesn’t have a problem with that, and seems to have little patience for people who do. But his mindset belies the criticisms that Burning Man is mono-racial, quintessentially Anglo American, and economically and socially biased. The events that attract people to the desert for this week — self-reinvention, lack of sexual inhibition, willful and usually mandated destruction, absence of rules or control — are not seen as attractive by all cultures and classes, nor are they economically feasible (tickets now range from $220-$350 for admission; equipment and transportation can cost hundreds more).
It’s a small bone to pick when evaluating the effectiveness with which Doherty handles a lot of contradictory and volatile material. But when some proponents and organizers define the event by its creation of “a broad sense of participatory, collaborative, creative work,” it should be understood that this participation and collaboration is subjectively based, and therefore not as broad as some would infer.
If there is anyone remaining in North America who has not heard of Burning Man, This is Burning Man serves as the most complete primer possible. Future students of social movements who will only be able to experience this event as history will be well served by it, though it is likely the hope of Doherty and all fans of Burning Man that this particular history live forever.
Surrounded by coffins, ribbons, and three forensic anthropologists, families of victims from Guatemala’s 36-year internal conflict received their deceased relatives’ remains on January 25, 2007. The families fathered in a church in Xaxmoxan, Chajul, Quiché, Guatemala, finding closure more than two years after the National Coordination of Widows in Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) began compling witness testimonies from villages in the municipality of Chajul. During the internal conflict from 1960 to 1996, Quiché’s population suffered 263 massacres, according to the Recuperation of Historic Memory report, known as REMHI and entitled Guatemala: Never Again. In the words of one son who received his father’s remains: “This is a great moment. My father has arrived. The martyrs are home.”
I had come to Cambodia to turn 30. My twenties were not nearly as fabulous as I had planned, and I needed a dose of perspective to shake the decade off. Nowhere is perspective so easily gained as in Cambodia, and nowhere is the Cambodian trifecta of poverty, corruption, and genocide more apparent than in the capital city of Phnom Penh.
After days of trekking around the exquisite temples of Angkor Wat in the northern countryside, Phnom Penh is a shock to my system. My husband and I see kids sniffing glue on the street, white men parading around with prostitutes, and legions of homeless people sleeping and bathing on the banks of the Ton Le Sap. Phnom Penh is a city of non-governmental organization workers, not tourists, and after two days, we are quickly running out of attractions to visit. Only two essential stops are left on our trip: S-21, the prison camp where many suspected spies were tortured by the Khmer Rouge, and the killing fields, where those same prisoners were executed and buried.
When the Khmer Rouge seized power, Phnom Penh was evacuated within two days. Khmer Rouge soldiers, some as young as 11, had the French colonial city at their disposal. They turned mansions into barracks, hospitals into weapon storehouses, and schools into torture centers. One such torture center was Toul Sleng prison, also known as S-21, a former primary school in what had been a quiet, tree-lined, upper middle-class suburb. Today, the S-21 complex is a museum. The surrounding neighborhood is full of barbed wire, stray dogs, and trash-littered gravel roads. It seems sketchy even for a city as lawless as Phnom Penh.
Our guide at S-21 is a quiet woman in her late thirties who lost most of her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. “First they killed my father,” she says, echoing the title of Luang Ung’s haunting memoir of growing up under the regime. The rest of her family was split up and sent to camps in rural areas at opposite ends of the country, she tells us. The guide and her mother were transferred to a camp near the Vietnamese border; they survived by walking to Vietnam in the middle of the night. The guide was nine at the time. She never saw her siblings again.
S-21 is a series of four four-story buildings, which, though worn and weather-stained, give no outward clues to the torture endured by 20,000 prisoners inside. One step into the first building, however, and we are immediately confronted with its grim history. The former classrooms have been divided up into cells, each with a rusty, sagging bed frame. Next to each bed lie cattle prods and other rusty instruments of torture. Fuzzy, blown-up black-and-white photographs reveal how each room looked when the Vietnamese army arrived to overthrow the Khmer Rouge: torched corpses chained to the bed frames, bodies unrecognizable. Wild pigs and rats had already eaten many of the bodies.
Our guide is surrounded by an aura of profound sorrow. She walks into each room, delivers a sentence or two about what happened there, and immediately turns and walks out into the open-air corridor to wait for us. It is as if she cannot handle an extra second inside the walls.
In one cell, the biggest moth I have ever seen flutters about. Its wingspan must be 12 inches, and its brown markings match the dust and rust inside S-21. The moth is eerily beautiful, the product of a warped ecosystem in which pigs scavenge for human flesh and children tote machine guns. I imagine the impossible: that this moth has been around for decades, flitting about this room, quietly watching the transformation from school to torture cell to tourist attraction. The moth reminds me that life goes on, even in the face of insanity.
Our guide leads us to the next building, where hundreds more black-and-white photos of prisoners are displayed. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records, photographing each prisoner with a numbered plaque upon arrival at S-21. Looking at these photos feels like staring into the eyes of ghosts, each staring back, aware of his or her rapidly approaching death. Out of the 20,000 people housed at S-21, only seven survived.
In the next building, we view an exhibit of present-day photographs of and interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers, most of whom are now middle-aged farmers, eking out an existence in the countryside. None of them express regret about their involvement with the Khmer Rouge. Many feel like victims themselves, having been recruited as child soldiers. No one, including these former soldiers, has ever been tried for the atrocities that took place under the regime.
When I ask my guide how she feels about the movement to bring former Khmer Rouge officers to justice, she looks at me with sad, scared eyes and says, “It’s very difficult to talk about politics in my country.” Apparently, more than two decades after the Khmer Rouge, the walls at S-21 still have ears.
Leaving S-21, we negotiate with a tuk-tuk driver to take us to one of the killing fields — former rice paddies where political prisoners were executed and buried in shallow mass graves. The killing fields are now a memorial, but active farms surround them on three sides. Barbed wire demarcates the farmland from the graves. Young boys stand behind the barbed wire, offering to pose as prisoners for the equivalent of $1. In Cambodia, where the average monthly salary is about $17, that is a tremendous sum of money. These kids — some as young as seven — are already master capitalists. Some tourists take them up on the offer, getting the perfect shot of Cambodian boys standing behind barbed wire.
If ever there was someone in need of a time machine, it’s Jonathan Jacobs.
Amid the buzz of bar talk and acid-tripping hipsters, Jacobs leans over two Audiotronics Classroom record players, circa 1950. His shaved head and crisp grey suit — and his bulky headphones — stand in stark contrast to the increasingly raucous crowd, which doesn’t quite seem to notice him as he moves, trance-like, over the magic machines. It’s a Valentine’s Day-themed bash in a drafty, multi-level Brooklyn warehouse, and people are warming themselves with $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon and pot brownies. A huddle of especially enthusiastic partygoers plays a pickup game of spin-the-bottle opposite from the corner where Jacobs intently filters through boxes and boxes of weathered albums.
Jacobs, for his part, doesn’t appear to notice the crowd either, the blurring eyes and spilling beers and occasional loss of footing. Not even the drag queen in a pink tutu and six-inch platforms or the girl so drunk she’s fallen head-first into the spin-the-bottle table can shake his focus. He’s utterly entranced by his records, and the world that he’s creating. Like many DJs, Jacobs loves what he does but supplements his income with a day job to make ends meet. He takes requests when he spins, because his goal is to understand the vibe of the crowd wherever he manages to line up gigs: bars, cocktail parties, weddings, benefit shows, and most recently, the warehouse rager. But unlike other DJs, Jacobs aims to transport listeners into a totally separate universe. If Jacobs had his way, the year would be 1963, not 2007.
Jacobs, AKA The Vintage DJ, spins an eclectic mix of tunes from the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, all from the original 78’s, 45’s, and 33’s. Sometimes he’s accompanied by his dance team, the The Salesmen — two male dancers (actor friends of Jacobs) wearing sharpie suits and carrying brown suitcases. Sometimes he projects montages of old films or live feed of the audience. His goal: to immerse listeners in a dreamlike world, an “audio time warp” that transports them to a prohibition era speakeasy, a roadside juke-joint, a mod London hotspot, or an explosive Afro-Cuban nightclub.
In other words, to take them away from here.
Not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort
So who is The Vintage DJ, and what makes him tick? Up until five years ago, even The Vintage DJ himself didn’t know. Like any other thirtysomething with a 9-to-5, the former theater major didn’t have much time to spend on his predilection for old jazz and AM radio stations.
Then he bought an old record player for his friend James as a birthday gift. The sound in a small room was so amazing that Jacobs began to wonder what would happen if you could have more of the same: preserving the song, but amplifying it. From thrift stores, he bought himself two record players, then four more. Not having any older, wiser Vintage DJs to act as muses or guides, Jacobs forged ahead into uncharted territory, creating The Vintage DJ persona as he went along.
He did know one thing: when he laid the needle to vinyl, “there was a weird nostalgia, and with the nostalgia came warmth, and with the warmth came an emotional response — not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort, but something more complete.”
Jacobs kicked off his career in 2003 by working a small benefit where he connected the headphone jack into the mixer and played directly off the records. The crowd responded, and The Vintage DJ was born. He hit the streets of New York City on the weekends, when he wasn’t working his day job, hunting down gigs. It was summertime, and that made for a lot of sweat, because Jacobs had decided that The Vintage DJ must be properly suited (and hatted, when out on the street). Plus, he had to lug around a record player and a suitcase full of albums. He made a list of the top ten most interesting bars in Manhattan — not because he liked the nightlife, but because that’s where DJs do their thing — and went to every single one looking for a chance to show his stuff. But not everyone opened their doors.
“When you create as an artist, you really have no clue how odd your work is,” Jacobs says. “People wanted to know if I had a following, which I didn’t at the time. It wasn’t only risky musically for them, but inconvenient because of all the special equipment and hookups.” While there aren’t that many technical logistics associated with his craft, Jacobs has had to figure out how to work with different systems. “When you hear a song on vinyl, you’re hearing it in a different way,” he says. “The sound quality, and the fact that you can see and hold the record jacket, it’s authentic, and it is a porthole to the past. I’m playing an object that is 40 years old and has a life. It’s a vestige and a relic. And a relic is something that will eventually be extinct, so I’m trying to keep this thing alive, to share it with people in a special way.”
The path to fame for The Vintage DJ isn’t always easy, although Jacobs is quick to point out that he makes more money as The Vintage DJ than at any of his day jobs. “I’m making a living following my passion, getting paid to be who I really am,” he says. This week, however, he’s being paid in pizza for a gig he put on for a pizza parlor-owning friend.
Heads turned as she pushed her metal shopping cart down supermarket aisles. Strangers at stop lights turned to see if she was wearing a fake attachable halo like the ones children might don with their Halloween angel costumes. Even the kindergarteners she taught noticed — and gave her silent reverent bows as she walked by.
The wise woman’s mane of pure, majestic white hair was unsettling.
People rarely dared to speak openly about it.
Women over 30 were the only ones who blurted out their fears in little bursts of self-conscious comments.
“I wish my hair were striking white. Not this awful, lifeless ash,” they said mournfully, always lifting a portion of their own hair and letting it fall back to their scalps like washed-out pieces of dead seaweed.
“You’re so lucky. Once you dye your hair, you can’t stop. But I guess with hair like yours, you’ve never had to dye it, have you?”
The wise woman would shake her head silently. Never.
“I can’t believe that. I remember when I got my first gray hair, I was devastated.”
She knew that even if she tried to say something to help them acknowledge their inner light, they would not hear it.
So she stayed quiet, as the women, wrapped up in the tragedy of aging, prattled on about their fear of becoming obsolete, of losing their husbands to younger women with thick, vibrant, undyed hair that tumbled down their backs.
“Just like the ones in the Pantene Pro-V commercials — you know which ones I mean?”
They sputtered about feeling threatened by airbrushed TV goddesses, whose sexiness and confidence seemed to flow into their bouncy hair.
The women would eventually finish their monologues and drift away, muttering about models and the latest haircuts on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Never once really seeing the woman of wisdom’s luminous white hair.
If they had looked a little longer, they might have glimpsed the icy tips of the highest mountains piercing crystal blue skies.
If they had stilled their minds for a moment, they’d catch a soft aura and glimpse Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and awakening.
They might feel the gentle warmth of a church candle between their palms. Or a pool of tranquility deep inside their bellies, like an untouched lake in a forgotten grove.
Instead, the women walked on without looking back.
Toward the end of her life, my grandmother went shopping for birthday and holiday gifts in her own apartment. Some years I received pantyhose; others, a milk glass vase or a brass alligator nutcracker.
Although I never used the last present I received from her, I kept them: three pristine, precisely creased, embroidered muslin handkerchiefs. They have survived college in one state, graduate school in another, and the arrival of my own family in a third. Aside from the figurative ties they give me to my grandmother, whose nose I have inherited, I have always considered them valuable.
But value has a different meaning when it comes to eBay.
One day I was browsing its “clothing, shoes and accessories: vintage” category when I found a listing for an inordinate amount of women’s handkerchiefs. In fact, 238 lots were for sale that very week. The cheapest, a set of four holly-embroidered Christmas hankies, was going for 99 cents. The most expensive, an assortment of 154 floral “everyday ladies” hankies, was on sale for under $60. At 38 cents a pop each, these weren’t exactly Caspian caviar.
On a visceral level, I was a bit disappointed in these anonymous sellers. I know that many dealers bought these products from estate sales and have no attachment to them other than the scant money they paid. But other sellers are daughters and granddaughters who may have cleaned out closets after the owner’s final stroke or battle with cancer. Isn’t the hawking of these long-held possessions akin to the selling of memories?
And at rock-bottom prices, no less.
Sentiment aside, I have no practical use for these tiny patches of gauze, trimmed with faded cross-stitch and permanently scarred with folds. What does one do with such items? Turn them into appliqué lampshades? They’re more suitable for polishing the furniture than they are for clearing the sinuses.
But thanks to my robust love for fiction and a vivid imagination — something else I inherited from Grandma — I can visualize one of these lace-and-linen confections tucked up her three-quarter sleeve.
Each brings back a piece of her. The off-white one with the scalloped edges reminds me that Grandma Min pickled the neighborhood’s best herring in sour cream sauce, heavy on the onions the way my dad and I like it. The eggshell one, with the crocheted border, takes me back to her fragmented square of a linoleum kitchen table, where I sat in my nightgown, watching as she cooked breakfast. She always salted the eggs before scrambling them rather than after, making them taste so much better. The handkerchief that was imported from Europe — and still in its original packaging — takes me to my grandmother's girlhood during World War I. She escaped in a covered wagon driven by her mother across the continent to a ship that would take them to America.
Although in the final decade of her life, Grandma Min blew into disposable tissues like the rest of us, and these vintage handkerchiefs are no longer intended for use, their personal history will always be nose-worthy.
Chances are, my own grandkids are going to receive them, and while they may be initially puzzled, perhaps in the end, they will discern the handkerchiefs’ true value.
Semyon, Alexei, and Paul (from left to right) rehearse their take on “Beauty and the Beast.”
It is 6:30 p.m. and the brash young comedy team the Illegals have only half an hour left before the women in the Russian hair salon kick them out. Half an hour is not a lot of time, they figure, but it’s enough to run through their comedy routine one more time.
As the sound of an upbeat melody starts rolling, Semyon, Ruslan, Alexei, and Paul take two steps toward the mirror wall of the room, raise their arms, and smile smugly. Then they break into a flurry of short skits and absurdist one-liners, all in Russian.
“Do you have anything for the head?” Ruslan asks, looking pained, in one scene.
“Here, take an ear …” answers Alexei.
Looking in the mirror after every joke, the Illegals pretend to see the blinding stage lights and the cheering audience that will greet them in two weeks at the popular Russian comedy competition called KVN.
KVN, roughly translated as the “Club of Humor and Wit,” is a team game show, where students from different colleges, cities, and countries compete by presenting comedy sketches, humorous musical numbers, and improvisation. It is fast-paced and intense; one of the show’s creators once described it as “intellectual football.” With no direct equivalent in other cultures, KVN is an essential component of modern Russian life and a popular import of Russian-speaking immigrants around the world.
The fifty-year-old tradition started after the death of Stalin. As Soviet control began to ease in the late 1950s and 1960s and television sets became more common in Soviet households, a group of Russian university students created a unique television game show. At first, KVN was a question-and-answer game based on a Czechoslovakian show and similar to Western models. Although the teams had to give correct answers, witty answers were also allowed. Soon, the producers began to emphasize humor, making up amusing contests and assigning the teams funny skits to prepare.
With lightheartedness rarely seen at the time and humor normally reserved for the underground subculture, the nationally televised show immediately captured the Soviet imagination. During each game, life on the streets would cease, and the next day, everyone would discuss the jokes they’d heard. KVN aired through 1971, expanding to more and more teams from different cities and Soviet republics, but then was cancelled due to criticism from government officials. It was revived only at the dawn of glasnost, when emerging liberties and disarray in the government allowed for less control of what was being said on television.
A humorous critique of the world in the form of popular entertainment, KVN has continued almost unchanged since Soviet times. In Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, being a “KVNshik” can make one a celebrity on par with famous professional comedians. Away from its television audience, however, KVN is — for some 40,000 Russian-speaking immigrants in the US, Israel, Germany, and even Australia — not a road to fame, but a unique national tradition worth holding onto in a foreign land.
Ruslan, Alexei, Semyon, and Paul (left to right) in the green room.
Looking in the mirror, the Illegals rehearse a scene from one of the three essential contests forming any KVN game, including the upcoming quarterfinals. Each game starts with the “Greeting,” where a team introduces itself with short tidbits of humor, loosely connected miniscenes, and dialogues. Then they move on to the “Warm-Up,” an improvisational contest in which each team has thirty seconds to come up with a funny answer to a question. Then comes the “Homework,” usually the longest and most theatrical part of the KVN game. It is akin to a sketch from Saturday Night Live and is rehearsed in advance. The Homework skit needs a lot of preparation, and each teammate has to be on top of his game.
For the Illegals, one of the key moments in the Homework is a scene borrowed from “Beauty and the Beast.” Ruslan — a blond, blue-eyed, big-boned Byelorussian — plays the merchant, whose three daughters (Paul, Alexei, and Semyon) ask him to bring back gifts.
“What would you like, my oldest daughter?” Ruslan asks.
“Bring me a decorated shawl,” replies the redheaded Paul, “from Gucci!”
“What would you like, my middle daughter?”
“Bring me an older sister who is not stupid,” says Alexei, the tallest of the three “daughters.”
“What would you like, my youngest daughter?”
“Bring me alimony for three years from that Beast!” answers Semyon, carefully enunciating every word.
At the end of the scene, everyone starts talking at once. Paul gets criticism for his bad pronunciation of “Gucci.” He repeats it several times, giving more punch to the “cci.” Semyon blushes deeply as he tries to argue with Ruslan about the wording of the skit. Meanwhile, twenty-five-year-old Alexei — the team’s oldest member — smiles to himself like a satiated cat. His hair is sticking out and worn-out jeans hang on his tall, thin body. Over the clamor, he hears Sasha, the team’s music assistant and only man behind the scenes, scolding Ruslan.
“You show off too much,” Sasha says. “And you eat up lots of words.”
“He is fine, leave him alone!” says Alexei protectively. Putting his hand on Ruslan’s shoulder, he tells him, “You are a star.”
Other, less poignant criticism continues to echo through the room as everyone gets ready to leave. Ruslan, who has the springy walk of a boxer and a childish smile, tells the skinny, stylishly dressed Paul that he does not like him as an actor. “Do you like me as a man?” Paul says flirtatiously as everyone chuckles.
“Bunch of homos on this team!” says the dour KVNshik as he walks out into the cold Brooklyn night.
The Illegals, whose four members currently live in three states — New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – are a truly heterogeneous team. Unlike the majority of Russians who immigrated as Jewish refugees, Ruslan and Alexei both moved to the US three years ago, using a four-month visitor exchange program to stay on the new continent. Before the two friends met, Alexei and a few other young illegal immigrants created a KVN team based in New Jersey and named it, appropriately, the Illegals. At first, many KVNshiks, who have lived in the US since the biggest wave of Russian immigration in the early 1990s, thought the laid-back style of the Illegals was strange. Others, however, saw in their style a way to improve KVN’s American league.
“I first met them at the KVN festival in 2003,” remembers Sergei, a member of a Chicago team and a friend of the Illegals. “They brought freshness and youthful inspiration into the game. I immediately wanted to meet them. Their acting ability and quality of humor put them on a level higher than the other teams in the league.”
Yet so far, the Illegals have not been very successful. They left their first game due to disagreements about the judging. Then, they regrouped to incorporate some members of a team from Philadelphia — Semyon and Paul among them.
Semyon, who has attentive eyes and an apologetic manner of speaking, did not participate in KVN back in Russia, but loved to watch the games on TV. Unlike Alexei and Ruslan, he is not an illegal immigrant. After he moved to Philadelphia with his parents five years ago, he found out about the local league and created his own KVN team. “I wanted artistic realization,” he explains. “Some people paint, others play a musical instrument, and I play KVN. It’s a great feeling when you’ve written something, performed it, and the audience liked it. I feel artistic satisfaction.”
Semyon invited his childhood friend and neighbor, the redheaded Paul, to join the team. Paul, who had just moved from Israel, did not remember much Russian. But he was stylish and funny and had a good attitude. “I basically came to KVN for sex,” Paul says impishly. “But now I am the one who has to supply all the chicks.” Outside of KVN, Semyon and Paul work and go to college. They are majoring in film and hope to make a documentary about the plight of young illegal students like their teammates.
The last member to join the Illegals was Ruslan. Although he contributed professional KVN experience from Russia, the team still lost last season’s semifinals. “I went to rehearsals like a fool with a notebook and a pen,” says Ruslan. “And everything just ended in drinking.” Although Alexei’s official response to Ruslan’s complaint is “Nothing brings people together like vodka,” he blames their loss on razdolbaistvo — a slang word that means irresponsibility, carelessness, and even laziness.
“Razdolbaistvo is both our flaw and our style,” he says. “We can’t get together, we can’t rehearse, we can’t figure out the music. That’s why we lost at the semifinals last year. We were funny, but unorganized.”
The Illegals onstage during the “Homework.”
Less than two weeks before the game, Ruslan is having breakfast with Alexei at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn. A rowdy group of men drink vodka and argue about yesterday’s hockey game. It is noon. As they wait for a steak, chicken livers, and apple blintzes, Ruslan explains that he has been playing KVN since he was thirteen.
“I even remember the first joke I had to say,” he says, his blue eyes gleaming. “We had this scene: an ad for Aeroflot. The guy looked out the window and said ‘Oh, look, flying elephants.’ And I took his glass away and said ‘Okay, that’s enough for you.’”
“You ripped!” says Alexei mockingly as he digs into his steak.
“When I first started, I didn’t write my own jokes and didn’t really act onstage,” continues Ruslan. “I learned how to write jokes, how to feel the text. So, KVN is not about talent, but experience.”
“I had talent, but I’ve killed it working with these guys,” says Alexei with a sigh. “People told me to go into acting.”
“Well, people told me that, too,” says Ruslan defensively.
“No, no, they lied. Besides, I was the one who told you that. Anyway, I didn’t want to go to acting school, because I like it as a hobby, not as a profession. I’ve always played the role of a fool, and an actor is more than just one character of a fool. My first role ever was to play a fool, and then the second, and the third, and it stuck. But I sort of act like a fool in life, too. Maybe that’s why this role is easier for me.”
Alexei, who became a KVNshik when he entered university in Russia, thinks he should quit competing after this season. “This game is for the young,” says the twenty-five-year-old. “I need to quit soon. I am way too old and KVN takes away so much time.”
“It takes away health, too, since we need to drink a lot,” interrupts Ruslan.
“Time and nerves,” finishes Alexei, who goes to college and keeps a night job at a Russian TV station.
“A great classic once said that KVN is not a game, it’s a lifestyle. Of course, no one knows what that means, but it sounds beautiful,” says Ruslan. He turns more serious and adds, “Someone who once participated in the games, I mean like fully — writing, acting, and stuff — cannot just quit.”
But Alexei doesn’t want to dwell on the serious. “Anyway, to come back to talking about talent,” he says. “Me and him play pretty much all the roles. Wait, what the hell do those two do?”
“Well, one is a redhead, so if something goes wrong, we can always blame him.”
“He also makes great tea.”
“Yeah. And the other one, Semyon, he is just a nice Jewish boy who doesn’t do much.”
“Every team needs to have one, you know,” concludes Alexei.
In Russia and many former Soviet nations, every KVNshik nurtures the hope of becoming a celebrity. But in the US, where an independent KVN league started ten years ago, stardom is out of the question. Although in format and style the American KVN league mirrors the High league of Russia, it does not have millions of fans. The teams sponsor themselves, auditoriums rarely fill up to capacity, and only a few KVN games make it onto a local Russian TV channel.
However, the enthusiasm of local KVNshiks like the Illegals makes them stand out among the mass of Russian immigrants. They do not resemble the majority of older Russian Americans, who, having left the old country for good, severed all ties with modern Russia. They are also not like many younger Russians, who grew up in the US and know little about their country of origin.
Instead, the comedians grew up in the post-Soviet Russia of endless possibilities. They emigrated not because they had to, but because they could. They are media-savvy children of globalization — in their spare time, they browse Russian websites and watch Russian satellite TV. Unlike some immigrants who are completely detached from the life of a cold country thousands of miles away, young KVNshiks often exist in a strange niche between here and there. On the one hand, they have Russian friends, Russian wives, Russian vodka. On the other, they are integrated in American society — they graduate from schools like Harvard, Berkeley, and NYU and work as programmers, businessmen, or lawyers.
But living in this niche, American KVNshiks find themselves at a disadvantage. Surrounded by a different culture, they have neither the structural and financial support enjoyed by Russia’s nationally televised KVN, nor the possibility to achieve true stardom as Russian-speaking comedians. Even their humor reflects their unique situation. To entertain their small, immigrant audiences, they often turn to localized jokes about the immigrant experience, be it Brooklyn restaurants or linguistic mix-ups.
When he first saw American KVN, Alexei thought it was very amateur. “Three years ago it was just horrible,” he says. “The favorite theme was when a dude dressed up like a woman, came out onstage, and said something. The first time I saw that, I realized that you can’t perform here. But everything has been changing and looking more like the real thing. If there are no young teams who want to compete, there can be no KVN. What would be left are the older teams. They are nice guys and their humor may be fine for this audience, but they are not helping KVN evolve. We need more young teams, especially guys from back home.”
With their experience from “back home,” the Illegals are trying to raise the level of the American league by bringing humor that is both poignant and not immigrant-specific. Their other choice would be to give up KVN completely. But even with this amateur league and a limited audience, playing KVN is worth their time. It is a tradition, a form of identity, and a way to preserve their culture.
“We can spend a whole evening talking about KVN and not even notice it,” says Alexei. “It has become part of our lifestyle.”
The KVN teams gather onstage to hear the final results.
At 11 p.m. on a Thursday, Alexei is working the controls at the Russian TV station. With little time left before the game, he is surprisingly calm.
“We still have a lot to work on, and we only have one day left — that’s definitely a big minus,” he says. “At the same time, we are funny dudes, we look cool onstage, and we are pretty good actors. I don’t remember a game when we totally rehearsed. If one joke doesn’t get through to the audience and then the second, people see that the team did not rehearse. But if the first joke gets to them and the second, then the audience is in the right mood, they clap and cheer and don’t pay attention to the little mishaps, because everything is absorbed by the overall atmosphere.”
His deep voice leaves the hope for that magic atmosphere lingering in the empty control room. “Even though we are jerk-offs, everyone still wants to win. We all have problems, work, school, some of us have both work and school, not enough time, but you gotta have more in life than work or school.”
Alexei wants to win this season because he is not sure the Illegals will play next year. It’s not only his age. He is also worried that Ruslan may go back to Belarus. Although he has just received his work permit, Ruslan is waiting for a travel visa to see his friends and parents back home. For now, he refuses to buy a car, because he doesn’t want “to get anything that would tie me to the US.” If he does not get the visa before the end of the year, he will leave the country for good. At least in Belarus, Ruslan — the kind of person who sees the world “as if it’s made up of punch lines” — has a bigger chance of becoming a real KVN star.
Two nights later, there is commotion outside the dressing rooms of the Jewish Community Center in Philadelphia. Leather-clad Russian men smelling of liquor swagger down the hall, with Russian women in short skirts and heavy makeup trotting behind them. The women smile confidently, leaving a trail of sweet perfume.
Two women come back to the green room of the Illegals, with cigarettes and cans of Red Bull for the teammates. Semyon and Alexei open the cans and drink. All four Illegals put on hip, dark-gray jackets, beige slacks, and bright-colored shirts. The female admirers straighten out the men’s jackets and put gel in their hair. With only a half hour left before the game, the room is tense. There are endless bottles of cognac and juice on a table surrounded by drinking visitors. Semyon is angry and nervous because Ruslan has been drinking heavily.
“I’m gonna kill that fucker!” he yells. “How can he do this? The game is about to start! Where the fuck did he go?!”
Someone walks into the dressing room and asks, “Why do you guys look so gloomy?”
“Why should we be happy if we’re losing?” says Alexei, half to himself. He circles the room, muttering his lines and squinting nearsightedly. Sergei from the Chicago team tries to rally him. “Capture the audience, this scene is totally on you. If you capture the audience, you’ll rule, I promise you!”
Alexei nods absentmindedly, but does not speak. Ruslan comes back. He does not seem very drunk. “I’m always nervous before the game,” he confesses. “But when the fanfares sound, it goes away.”
Five minutes before the start of the game, the Illegals gather in a tight circle, put their hands together in the center, and yell in chorus, “We swear to you, O goalkeeper, that we will never lose!” They jump up, screaming and making punching gestures.
“I’ll destroy everyone!” bellows Alexei.
The female fans line up to kiss the teammates and wish them luck. An entire minute is filled with a seemingly endless “mma, good luck, thanks, mma, good luck, thanks …”
“It’s like we’re leaving for war,” Semyon says.
The auditorium is almost full. There are no empty seats, someone jokes, just unsold tickets. E. Kaminskiy, an experienced KVNshik from a legendary Russian team of the late 1980s, hosts the game. The jury, consisting of older KVNshiks, two of last year’s champions, and a TV newscaster (the only woman), sit in the first row. Five teams are competing tonight: NYU (famous for winning ten years ago), ASA College (famous for ever-changing members), the Philadelphia team (famous for attractive members), Nantucket (famous for constant intoxication), and the Illegals (famous for razdolbaistvo).
The game starts with the Greeting. “The Greeting is a chance to conquer the audience,” Sergei notes. “It’s all psychological. You need to click with the audience from the first phrase, with your energy and charm. If the audience reacts to you, then you’re the king.”
In order to pack in many disconnected jokes into the fast-paced Greeting, KVNshiks often imitate the format of TV ads, with their spicy one-liners. When the Illegals take the stage, Alexei announces, “American masochists ask to increase the punishment … for masochism in America!” The young audience is quiet. They process the joke. Then, they erupt in laughter. In another scene, Ruslan (who likes “current” jokes) plays Alexander Lukashenko, the Byelorussian president. After he won the elections, he says, “Dick Cheney called to congratulate me. He invited me to go hunting …”
After the Greeting, the Illegals are in third place. But this is no time for distress. They have to prepare themselves for the improvisational Warm-Up — what Alexei calls the most telling contest in KVN, as it allows the participants to show off their true ability in spontaneous comedy. With only half a minute to think, the teams have to answer each question as wittily as possible.
“In the last Winter Olympic Games, the athletes from Zimbabwe did not win any gold medals. Why?” reads out Kaminskiy.
The Illegals stand in a circle, whispering, laughing, and nodding. Finally, Ruslan approaches the microphone. “That’s because in the last Summer Olympics, Zimbabwe’s diver died of happiness when he finally saw water!” The audience cheers loudly — nothing like a bit of dark humor to please the Russians. After several questions, the judges once again reveal the score for each team. The Illegals move up to first place.
The next and last contest is the Homework. The Illegals have constructed their Homework performance around the childhood of each of the four members. First, Semyon announces that when he was a kid, he wanted to be a banker. In the bank, Semyon offers his customer (Ruslan) a $100,000 credit line.
“A hundred thousand?!” cries Ruslan. To the music from Pulp Fiction, he pulls out a gun and points it at Semyon. “Attention, everyone, this is a robbery!” He turns to Alexei, another customer at the bank. “Don’t move!” he yells. “Or I’ll shoot his brains out!”
“You are bluffing,” says Alexei, calmly.
“Why the hell am I bluffing?!”
“Because he doesn’t have any brains.”
After Semyon is dead, Alexei flees the bank and Ruslan hides from the cops under Kaminsky’s podium, where he finds “a remote control for the judges.” Suddenly, a newscaster — also played by Alexei — interrupts with “breaking news from the scene of the robbery.” Ruslan, it turns out, is a correspondent sent to cover the robbery he has just committed. Smugly, Ruslan says that no one has seen anything. “There is only one witness,” he says, pointing the gun at KVN’s host in the corner. “But he didn’t see anything, either.”
In the next scene, Paul comes out onstage to confess that he always wanted to be “a tall, broad-shouldered blond,” rather than a skinny redhead. At least he has acting talent, he says, and the Illegals break into the scene from “Beauty and the Beast.”
The final scene is from the childhood of Alexei and Ruslan — two thickheaded thugs.
“I can read thoughts,” says Alexei.
“People’s thoughts?” asks Ruslan.
“Yeah, people’s … c’mon, help me out!”
Ruslan raises a cardboard sign and Alexei proceeds to read it. “Thoughts,” the sign says.
When Ruslan ends up robbing Alexei, Paul and Semyon emerge in police uniforms and arrest them.
“And that is how we all met,” concludes Ruslan, as they take a bow.
Tonight, there is nothing stopping the Illegals. They have the charm and the energy, and they are prepared. The audience loves them. Most importantly, the judges love them. Tonight, the Illegals finally win.
Now, they only need to survive the after-party.
Update, August 3, 2013: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
Sasha Vasilyuk Sasha Vasilyuk is a writer based in New York City. She was born during a cold Russian winter and grew up in the golden hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays and articles on art, culture, business, travel, and love have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Russian Newsweek, Oakland Tribune, and Flower magazine. She received the 2013 North American Travel Journalists Association silver medal for her Los Angeles Times cover photo "Barra De Valizas." She is currently working on a collection of essays about her year-long solo journey around the world.
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