The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  If it is as I suspect, and the young couple’s summons is for a marriage fraud interview, then they will be questioned by trained interrogators.

  “What did you get your wife last Christmas?”

  This might have been what their attorney was mouthing, possibly attempting to coach them through a scenario he thought was possible in the interview rooms. As their attorney, he must have already informed them that the process would end with the state granting or not granting their love written legitimacy, and that failure was a very real possibility.

  “It would mean deportation,” he probably said in solemn tones, twiddling a pen nervously between his fingertips.

  “It would mean being permanently barred from the country. You would never be able to adjust.”

  He clarifies for good measure: “Never be able to come back.”

  Acute ticks would have suddenly become audible, maybe from an old clock on the wall. Somewhere in his subconscious, the attorney would imagine what it would be like to be under that kind of pressure. The young white lady would feel her face flush, feel her cheeks suddenly rush with heat. A line of perspiration would emerge and then begin to run down the channel of the attorney’s back. His pale face would have turned bright red as he informed them that the state might ask questions about their partner’s intimate clothing: what color, what cut, what size.

  “Does your wife prefer boy shorts or thongs?”

  “What kind of birth control do you use?”

  If he’s a thorough lawyer, he will let them know that if they’re lucky, they’ll get an investigator who’s mostly disinterested and cold.

  “Don’t be surprised if they cut you off. That’s good, just move on.”

  He would explain the opposite scenario, the possibility of getting someone who believes himself or herself to be a gatekeeper, thinks he or she is doing good work, wakes up in the morning eager to make sure “America is secure.” Counsel’s knuckles will turn white as he squeezes his pen, looks at his male client, and explains that in this situation the investigator will be crass, perhaps even vulgar—that he’ll look smug at delicate moments, trying to provoke in him an emotional and volatile state.

  “Tell me, does your wife have any distinguishing marks in places usually covered by clothes?”

  Counsel will tell them they’ll have to answer these kinds of questions.

  “Remain calm. No matter what.”

  The girl will look at her young husband, run her hand down the back of his head, fingering a fibrous line of scar tissue. She’ll imagine his body suddenly jutting across a table, a hand grabbing at the investigator’s face.

  “Calm. No matter what.”

  Inside the interview room, small bureaucrats are made insurmountable. It takes a minuscule reason, or no reason at all, to raise suspicions about the authenticity of a marriage. The criteria the US Citizenship and Immigration Services use to determine whether a marriage is bona fide or not is vague and based on institutionally held normative models of marriage. I know at least one couple who would surely fail even though they’ve been married for over twenty years, because they’ve never lived in the same state, shared a bank account, or spent more than a couple of days a year together. And until very recently, when the federal government started recognizing same-sex unions, only heterosexual couples could be granted immigration relief through marriage. A few scribbled notes on a sheet of paper, a few boxes checked or unchecked, and the couple can formally be called a fraud, with little recourse to appeal. A few keystrokes and the young brown man will officially be categorized “removable,” and deportation proceedings might automatically be triggered.

  The only people allowed in this second-floor waiting room are those on either end of this official USCIS business, so the particularities of this kind of administrative population control aren’t widely seen. As I sit staring at the three of them, I wonder how many marriages between people I know would pass this test. I know my own parents probably stayed married during various rough periods in their relationship because they couldn’t afford to get divorced or because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves financially without the other’s income. How can an arrangement based on tangible, sometimes material needs be deemed fraudulent when that is exactly the basis of so many marriages, many of them happy and enduring?

  The young man looks up, and at first I think he catches me staring at his wife, but he hasn’t. He shoots me a reverse nod: one sudden upward jerk of the chin. It’s a question that varies slightly with the forcefulness of the jerk. I know it means “qué pedo?” It could mean “qué pedo, cabrón?” but it doesn’t. I shoot it back with an equal force, and now they both mean hello—now it’s the recognition of sharing something in common, because we both know that we know a substantial thing about the other simply by being in this room together. We stare at each other for a moment before we both turn away. It had been comfortable to place myself in the role of a spectator watching from a safe and comfortable distance, but I too was in this room, waiting to be evaluated and waiting to underwrite the legitimacy of the dehumanizing categories in which I have lived.

  We are, of course, not in the same predicament. My presence here is more or less a formality, provided I’m not caught committing any felonies, certain misdemeanors, or any crimes of moral turpitude prior to the oath ceremony. I look down at the booklet in my right hand, the one I’d been given to study. On the cover Mount Rushmore dissolves into an undulating US flag. George Washington’s stone face looks out beyond the horizon. I think about Mantegna, how his own desires may have been reflected in Caspar’s expression, the slacked jaw, the downward tilt of his head, the lust in his eyes. Caspar looks upon the Christ child, understanding that his kingdom is for sale. When Mantegna made his painting, he and others like him had ascended to the kind of life previously reserved for royalty or clergy, but rather than signaling the dismantling of structures of power, as such, power simply adapted to a new world. It feels like we are living in a similar moment.

  A young woman in a dressy pantsuit comes through a door that leads to a hallway beyond the waiting room. It’s a hallway lined with cubicles in which the banal task of sorting populations is done through the orderly processing of forms, the evaluation of answers to standardized questions, and spreadsheet analysis. She calls the man’s name. She smiles genuinely at him and holds the door as they enter.

  CHAPTER 6

  Good Moral Character

  From outside the window, construction cranes cast long shadows on the hotel curtains. I put my bags down and go to the balcony, which overlooks a group of workers smoking cigarettes in the depressed concrete foundation. A few pieces of bare rebar jut out of the flat gray surface and extend upward, looking like the cleanly picked bones in an upturned carcass. The cranes slowly track over development in Metro Manila. The blood-orange sky makes the reflective skyscrapers look as if they’re hemorrhaging.

  At my last appointment the US government determined I was “of good moral character” by evaluating my responses to a series of inane questions. Had I ever been a habitual drunkard? Been a prostitute or with a prostitute? Had I ever sold or smuggled controlled substances, illegal drugs, narcotics? Had I ever been married to more than one person at the same time? Had I ever helped anyone enter or try to enter the United States illegally? What about gambling? Had I ever received income from illegal gambling? Had I failed to support any dependents or failed to pay alimony? Had I ever committed a crime for which I was never arrested? The fact that my record was clean meant that in their eyes I was one of the good ones, and I had done something or not done something to receive the benefit of no longer being subject to a punitive body of law that is arguably the most, or one of the most, complicated in the United States. The woman who asked me this series of questions seemed rather uninterested in my answers, but still, as she rattled them off, I wondered what my fate would have been if my answers had been different, if they had pulled images and information from social media to de
termine my moral character, or if they’d simply talked with friends, acquaintances, ex-friends, and ex-acquaintances. I wondered too how many of the affluent kids I went to high school with—sons and daughters of politicians, news anchors, and high-ranking business officials—would pass this kind of test.

  Having lived as a permanent resident through my teens and early twenties had been an incredibly reckless thing to do. In retrospect I’m not sure what my parents were thinking in not putting me through this process as soon as I qualified. In 1996 the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the list of deportable offenses by several orders of magnitude, and things many of the kids I went to high school with were doing on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day, were deportable offenses. I could have been forcibly removed from the country, severing all associations with the people, places, and things that had become home. Minor crimes friends and peers were able to expunge from their records, things cops gave them warnings for, or things they weren’t even stopped for because of who they were and how they looked could have gotten me deported. I can’t imagine my reality if that had come to pass, and I can’t believe I’d walked that line for so long. The amount of luck involved in never having been caught doing things that teenagers do seemed supernatural, but maybe it had to do with who I hung around with, in what spaces, and the protection those associations offered. I’d had several close calls with law enforcement, sometimes having been stopped because of the way I look, but they somehow all ended favorably for me, because, I think, I’d immediately played the game of demonstrating that I was, in fact, “one of the good ones” by choosing a “higher” register in which to speak and mentioning where I went to school.

  As I waited for the next certified letter telling me where and when my naturalization ceremony would take place, an opportunity to travel to the Philippines presented itself. I would be able to go, free of charge, as a fellow for a graduate writing workshop that would take place on various islands throughout the country.

  I’d been one of the last fellows to book my flight, so the rest of the writers’ group was staying at another hotel. I read that it wasn’t a great idea to leave the country during the naturalization process and if it could be avoided, it should. The trip was especially troubling considering the amount of time I’d be gone, the potential to miss the actual ceremony, and the potential to get into some kind of trouble that would prevent me from completing the very last step in becoming a citizen of the United States. If I missed the ceremony it could technically be rescheduled, but a failure to respond promptly to the government’s certified letters while missing appointments could end in the denial of the application in this final stage. Despite all this, a free trip to Southeast Asia was too good to pass up.

  My room at the A. Venue in Makati City is small but luxurious, and it has a Western toilet. It’s reminiscent of one of those boutique hotels in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan—the ones that staff their bellhop positions with tall men who look like male models—except here we’d been warned not to drink the water, to use bottled to brush our teeth, and to be discerning about the establishments in which we took ice in our beverages. “They’ll like you,” I’d been told, “because you look like one of their celebrities.”

  Below the window, the group of laborers has finished their cigarettes, resumed their work. On an adjacent street, a man and woman push a makeshift cart toward an empty lot, and as I turn away from the window, movement in the bed of the cart catches my eye. Looking back, I see a small boy in a bright yellow tank top the color of cartoon birds. He could be two years old or perhaps a malnourished three or four. A small girl, about the same size, sits on what looks like a pile of rags in the cart. Nestled in her lap, an infant gropes at her long black hair. Then the cart and its contents disappear below a sheet of corrugated tin that tops a small structure they’ve made between construction sites.

  Jeremiah, a nonpracticing Jew from Alabama, whom I’ve known for a couple of years, will be my roommate for the trip. He’s a lanky man who always seems to be in a state of bewilderment, as though he were moving through the world seeing everything for the first time. We took separate flights, and, characteristically for both of us, we failed to coordinate our arrivals in any way. Before I can start worrying, though, I see Jeremiah across the hotel lobby examining the texture of one of the walls.

  “Oh, hey,” he says, smiling when he sees me walking toward him.

  Makati City is the financial center of the Philippines. After dark, everything bleached by the sun glows in disquietude under the blinking of neon signs. S-Class Mercedes pull out of embassies and multinational headquarters into teeming streets, where they roll so slowly Jeremiah and I can observe the individual revolutions of each wheel. A skinny old woman with a white braid dangling down to the small of her back pushes past us, somehow able to move a rolling food stand three times her size. She takes care not to get too close to the luxury vehicles, instead opting to almost roll over the foot of a child sitting on the curb. English-language Revlon advertisements featuring a smiling Halle Berry hang on the street lamps, while emaciated dogs tear at husks and overripe fruit caked in the gutter.

  Less than a block from the hotel, we find ourselves walking down a dark street lined with bars that advertise women. Inside my right pocket, I feel the jagged edge of a cracked Ambien left over from the transcontinental flight. For a second I consider not taking it, but I know our drinks will be watered down and overpriced, so I gather saliva and swallow the pill. We turn onto Makati Avenue, a long strip of twenty-four-hour fast-food restaurants and twenty-four-hour bank branches. The glass fronts of ChinaBank and 7-Eleven throb in the magenta light of an adjacent girly bar, and inside large guards in navy blue uniforms and aviators keep watch with arm-length assault rifles and pistol-grip shotguns. I begin to wonder what the consequences of having several loose pills on my person would be if caught, but I don’t worry too much because the authorities don’t seem concerned with anything but registers and moneyboxes. Outside, the avenue is clogged with middle-aged white men looking over groups of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls as if picking produce at the market. A white man I later hear speaking Dutch, with a belly that hangs over his elastic waistband so far he can’t see down to his curled yellow toenails, walks with each arm slung around a young Filipina, clearly underage, barely clothed. A young man with shiny spiked hair and a pinstriped black button-down shirt open to mid-chest is led by the hand by a heavily made-up girl who looks like she could be in middle school. This is the so-called Third World, seen as a sordid Disneyland, a repository for the West’s most uninhibited fantasies. The red-light industry is the fourth-largest sector in the Philippine gross national product, and the averted gaze is part of protecting commercial interests too.

  Jeremiah and I settle on a New Orleans–themed bar just off the main drag. I was drawn to the rakish dive by my own perverted desire to observe the remnant wounds of colonial powers fighting for landmass and constituent bodies, the subsequent colonization, and the forty-year “tutelage” in democracy. It’s too dark to be sure, and the Ambien has started to take effect, but it seems like there’s a full-sized American muscle car attached to the ceiling toward the end of the bar. Once Americans had been surprised not to be greeted as liberators in the Philippines. Now the ones who are still around are glad to be tourists and customers. A sinewy waste—gray hair and a Harley Davidson tee with the sleeves cut off—paws a Filipina who is sitting next to him trying not to look disgusted. He seems glad to have found a place where he can be the truest version of himself, and I’m glad too, to be on this side of the global order, allowed to wallow in the spoils of democracy even though my passport is not yet blue.

  Before we order our whiskeys, several sets of hands slide up and under our shirts. “Would you like massage, ma’amsir?” “Buy me a drink, ma’amsir.” Each of us is the center of a huddle of taut brown bodies wrapped in plastic made to look like leather, women from the countryside or sev
eral generations removed, victims of having been born into the continuity of imperialism from which there is little way out. The Ambien has a numbing effect on my body so that all the hands running across my skin feel like one rhythmic throbbing. Jeremiah has drawn more women, perhaps because in the dark his skin glows lighter. He proposes a toast to my impending “transition,” which the women react to with confused expressions. One of them grabs hold of my crotch.

  “Not that,” I say, trying to squirm my way out of her grip.

  He tells them about my upcoming naturalization ceremony, and they all seem to understand what this means. One of them points to a cake at the end of the bar and says they were about to celebrate her birthday and we can share. Most of them seem drunk or high already, a few of them are unsteady on their long, thin heels. “Cheers.” Clink. Everyone does a shot for the birthday woman. A couple of the drunker ones grab chunks of cake off their plates and try to shove some into our mouths.

  The bar is nearly empty except for the women who work there, so the crowd around us keeps swelling. They’re at work, so each one struggles past the others to rub various parts of their shiny bodies against ours. The so-called expat in the Harley shirt, really just an émigré like the rest of us, grows his own crowd around him. He raises a glass to us, which we awkwardly and reflexively turn away from, thinking we are somehow distinct from him (and wanting to be). The women understand better, though. They understand the commodity character their breasts and genitals bear, and that we are already in various kinds of transactions. They’d seen us walk through the door, and we weren’t yet gone. Places like these are stages for what Alphonso Lingis, American philosopher, writer, and translator, refers to as the “theater of libido,” and we’d come for the performance of which the audience is always a part.