Borders
After months of talking about it, Gordon and I finally got around to making hotpot at his house tonight. Madeline was there too. Ever since they started dating about a year ago, she's basically always there when I'm there. Not out of a sense of duty to her partner, or because she's excited to see me, but because she wants to keep an eye on me. Gordon knows that none of his friends want his "sexy body" (sic), and he tried to stamp out this fire when he told her (without my permission, LOL) that I'm a lesbian way back when, but maybe she saw through that half-lie, or maybe she didn't. Either way, we weren't allowed to eat dinner without her at my house last summer. Her cheating ex, the scapegoat for this behavior, is long gone, and yet Gordon's still sidestepped most of his friendships because of her. Anyone can see the double standards, the anxious attachment, etc. The details stop mattering when the problem stays unchanged.
It's all silly. I've genuinely wanted to be Madeline's friend ever since my bestie and I helped Gordon design his profile on the apps after he'd finally come to terms with the end of his last relationship. But that undercurrent of jealousy is a real vibe killer. Even though Madeline let me stay at her family home in Nanhai, and her mom doted on me when I was sick, and she had her high school classmate drive me the two hours from Chancheng to Sanshui and back, I am not allowed her time and enthusiasm and hospitality and consistency in the same ways. The few times I've seen her one-on-one, she treats me with obligatory politeness, which I meet with regrettable restraint, before the convo fizzles out and we say our stilted goodbyes.
But at the table, through our mutual friend and the steam rising from the pot, connection inevitably seeps its way through. Madeline and I latched onto these pieces and moments. Tonight's bit was that despite Gordon's wandering eye, he did not flirt with any mei nu when he last went to China, because 1) he plays volleyball at the church in Chinatown and sometimes attends service as a social formality, therefore he is a man of God, praying hands added for irony, 2) Beijing de mei nu bijiao shao, and all the baddies are actually to be found in Bay Area rock climbing gyms which he stopped going to bc he was no longer eligible for the EBT cardholder rate, and 3) he only gives his phone number to girls "who are not attractive." Madeline retailiated by plugging her ears with her fingers, and saying that she has a leng zai waiting for her in HK and a boyfriend in Russia anyways.
Finally, after long last, I thought, a noticeable upwards shift in morale as we verbalized what I thought was taboo. Naturally with that came the willingness to complain. Gordon bemoaned that all Madeline's friends do is talk about their research, to which Madeline reassured that she doesn't like when they drone on about that either, and they talk about other things too, like their travel ideas and their H1Bs. The two subsequently debated if they could survive long-distance, with the verdict being no, as Gordon saying that if Madeline got a job on the east coast it would be doable, west could be tolerable, but they couldn't last if she took that job offer in Shanghai, and Madeline ultimately agreeing because it was this exact setup that enabled her ex to cheat. Unless Gordon could find a job in Shanghai too, which also carried an implied sense of impossibility. Not even as a hypothetical. We all know he tried and didn't find shit. Because you don't have the right visa, Madeline pointed out.
And you know what? It's always bc of that damn visa. Another hoop to jump through at best, an exile if you're unlucky, and the lack of it a death sentence at the worst. The issue is almost always both that singular and that deep. Because of course it is. There's everything wrong with attempting to neatly package ten thousand years and more of human migration into the defacto bureaucratic document of the 21st century. I mean, people are going to go where they want anyways, especially if they have money. Like tonight, I learned that Madeline's bestie Manqing just had to abandon the dream job that she just got in Beirut because of the war. But Manqing grew up in Zhuhai, received an IV Leak education, and moved back to her boyfriend's house in our city right when she learned her employment was at stake. Gordon and Madeline and I too, have a considerable degree of agency, even if not in the same way, via our codification into the imperial core.
And can we talk about the war? I'm not an expert in military affairs or history or diplomacy or any of the relevant fields that might provide the most insight into it. But we know who's funding it, why it's being fought, and who's dying from it. And it's the same machine and same answers as to why I saw a thirty-foot metal fence and border patrol agents in their trucks in Hidalgo Texas trailing a group of kids riding their bikes on the Reynosa Tamaulipas side, and I was witness to that in 2017, and it didn't start there, and it hasn't shown sign of stopping now. There's so much going on here that I could never fit in one post, and that has already been said about border politics, citizenship, naturalization, imperialism, human rights abuses, and more, words that I believe are better off spent donating to a abducted family's legal fees, volunteering for an immigrant advocacy organization, protesting at a concentration camp / detention center, or in other forms of direct action.
This might sound cliche, but it's true: It's not fair. The kids of Reynosa can't ride their bikes without subjugation. The cafe owner's daughter had to crowdfund over six figures for her dad when he was abducted. He came home, but at what cost? Literally and figuratively. So many don't. Of course Madeline misses home, her parents told me, xuexiao na me yuan, ta neng bu xiang ma? My friend Jinna wants to meet up with me in NYC, but she makes maybe 700 USD a month 深漂ing working the night shift 6 days a week. Gordon and I would gladly return to our ancestral homes, but the international feuds going on for longer than anyone on this planet have been alive bar us from most avenues that even just slightly resemble the permission to stay. What's a promise without a document? What's a friendship to a border?
All of these unbearable questions and their answers that seem to be found only in bloodshed makes me wish that the mundane everyday interpersonal conflicts was the only thing anyone had to deal with. Give me Madeline's jealousy, Gordon's totally unhelpful health anxiety, the pettiness, the drama, these abstract borders between our connection. Not the physical sky high barrier of metal and barbed wire and electric shocks. Anything but this 大环境. A person's natural movement across the earth should never be hell to pay. We should be able to move freely and work out ways to coexist and thrive with others on the land we occupy without the need for domination (This is just me riffing, Assata and Ursula said all of this better, LOL). In the face of the H1B, Q1s, N400s and other unfortunately relevant strings of numbers and letters, we must channel this despair towards the work that will land us on the right side of history. Join us at the hotpot table, and we'll hash it all out together.