the border crossers

When I saw him on the platform, dressed in five different shades of green, I guessed that he was Tibetan and that he didn’t have a confirmed seat on the train. As I watched him negotiate his way onto our car I found myself hoping there was a seat for him, surprised to feel behind my sternum that rumbling anticipation of meeting someone important.

By the time the sun set, he had been bumped from the neighboring compartment into ours, bearing gifts of Tibetan empanadas, a twinkling smile and stories of his trek from Tibet five years ago. On his first attempt his group of forty was apprehended by Chinese border police and thrown in jail, all their money and possessions confiscated. As soon as he was released he set out again with two Tibetan monks, barefoot, south through the snowy Himalayas. They all reached Kathmandu alive, though seriously frostbitten and recovering from a debilitating bout of altitude sickness. When we ran into him he was on his way back to Dharamshala, where he studies English and a few other subjects in Tibetan. His luggage contained his own handmade paper books, rosary beads from the Dalai Lama himself, beautiful Tibetan rugs to sleep on, and warm woolen pants and jackets to replace his Hawaiian shorts and olive-green T-shirt. His name is Choekyi and he is 27 years old.

I didn’t know what to say to him or what questions to ask, so virtually everything I know about him I learned through eavesdropping or mooching off his conversations with other members of our party. Mostly we just stared out the window at the passing Indian landscape. But Choekyi understood silence. I was satisfied with only his warm, twinkling smile, and he seemed satisfied with my returning startled grin. I understood with an ache how much he loves and misses his beautiful, rich and peaceful homeland. But he is Here Now, and by the end of the two-day trip he had crossed another border – into Us.

I remembered listening to the stories and local wisdom of our Tibetan taxi driver Gyatso in Leh Ladakh a year and a half ago. He had crossed into Leh from Tibet in 1961 and lived in a refugee village until he could settle into his new life as a Ladakhi. He had an 8-year-old daughter and a ready smile, and a contagious passion for the land and for life.

-- RESPECT THE RIGHT OF PEDESTRIANS ON ZEBRA CROSSING --

Every year the multicultural orgs invite a Latino spoken word group from the Twin Cities to perform at St. Olaf. They call themselves Palabristas, word-slingers, and they speak out of anger and love for their families and their countries and themselves. They speak with a passion for identity that I know very well.

Every year I go and sit in the corner and I wait for That Piece, the most poignant and most true, a piece by a Peruvian man who married a Guatemalan woman and loves his American daughters more than life itself. He stands on the small, intimate stage and struggles through his identity crisis for all of us to feel. “I am a border crosser,” he begins in even tones, and by the end he is shouting: “I AM A BORDER CROSSER! YO. CRUZO. FRONTERAS!” And my heart is beating fast and I am fighting tears and gripping the plastic booth with white knuckles. Because the Border Crosser is the truest label I have ever heard.

President Rafael Correa of Peru’s Andean neighbor speaks for his people: “Todos somos migrantes” – we all are migrants. To date some 1.5 million Ecuadoreans live abroad, primarily in the U.S. and Spain, and remittances constitute the third highest source of national income. The amassed resources of a migrant population attract thousands of Chinese and African migrants in transit to other countries. My teachers this summer swore that every single Ecuadorean has at least one family member in another country, and parts of Cuenca consist of beautiful mansions being built from abroad – all empty.

I am an immigrant. I understand the feeling of straddling an expanding fault line, a rising barbed wire fence. I have spent much of my life struggling to force-fit pieces of different puzzles together to try and get a glimpse of my true identity. When people ask me where I’m from I wish to be a snail, carrying my home on my back so the answer becomes immediately and uncomplicatedly evident.

For Choekyi, the relevant question is not “Where are you from?” but “Where are you going?” Perhaps it is more important to ask, “Where are you now?” And that has an easy answer: I AM HERE. I have come this far and because of that I know I can go on. But I am here, in my body, and I have a lot to offer.

James Doyle claimed his body as his home. When I mentioned that to my dad, he said, “Well, that sure gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘Home is where the heart is.’” “Or ‘state of mind,’” added my brother.

And as I, Choekyi, and the border-crossing Palabrista have found, when we are at home in our hearts we can go anywhere, cross any number of fronteras, and be no farther away than when we started.