by Pico Iyer
THE AIRPORT
“If you stayed in that airport for one year,” she said, beaming like a carhop as we headed up the glittering concourse full of passengers and loved ones looking for partners, “you’d see everybody in the world. And you’d sure see Charley Pride a hundred times at least.”
—RICHARD FORD
I started my travels—where else?—in the airport. For many a Global Soul is likely to find that he spends as much time in the air these days (forty days a year, I once calculated) as with the closest members of his family, and so will conduct many of his most essential tasks in a nonplace, an interval of sorts, where there are no rules beyond the IATA regulations, and few people who aren’t on the time schemes of distant continents. Many of my most vivid memories of growing up had come from those times when I’d say good-bye to my parents and get onto a jumbo jet as an “unaccompanied minor” to fly to school—leaving behind a shiny, synthetic world with very little sense of past for an ancient monastic realm where we wore morning dress to chapel twice a day and were beaten for stepping “out of bounds.”
It is the same transition that every child makes, of course, as he says good-bye to his mother and races towards his girlfriend, yet it is a stranger one, perhaps, when you’re traveling between 1441 and 1968, and neither is the place where you entirely belong.
For me, in those days, the airport was a rare interregnum—a place between two rival forms of authority—and the airplane itself was a kind of enchanted limbo in which, a de facto VIP, I was brought soft drinks and nuts and headsets, on which to absorb risqué (to me) movies and Burt Bacharach’s Greatest Hits, by attractive young women—all on my way to a school where movies and snacks and Cokes and young women were attractions punishable by near death. The plane became a high-tech equivalent to the Dickens adventures we read in class, where the man next to me said that he was a professional football player, and had boxed against Cassius Clay, while the woman ahead of me in the check-in line turned out to be Raquel Welch. The entire area around Los Angeles International Airport is, moreover, where Hollywood re-creates Beijing and Morocco, and the glamour of my hours there, the sense of unreality, was heightened every April as a Brit or two would get on my plane waving the golden man-shaped statuette he’d won at the Academy Awards the night before.
In midair, above the Pole, I’d carefully switch the voltage on my radio, turn my watch eight hours forwards, and move my accent (and perhaps my attitudes) a little to the right: upon arrival, a surrogate mother would be waiting for me at the passenger bridge and I would hand her my papers—my very identity—to carry to the Immigration area. There I would give my British passport to the British passport officer, say my good-byes, and be free—alone, for several hours, in a multicolored swarm of turbans and galabias and record shops and telephones, lit up by the excitement that attends any child’s unmonitored time. Were I to return to school—hours before my classmates, taking the evening train down from London—I’d have nothing to look forward to but a drafty medieval room, a regimental matron, and a one-eyed clergyman; but in the airport, homemade living room, study, bedroom, and recreation room, I was free.
I think I intuited, even then, that the airport was the spiritual center of the double life: you get on as one person and get off as another. I had emigrated to California by plane, after all (and seen, for the first time, my mother’s sari as exotic, as faces pressed against the glass in Reykjavik to look at her), and so had learned that even a routine ten-hour flight can shake up one’s life irrevocably. Later, when I picked up Caryl Phillips’s European Tribe, describing how he would sit through tutorials at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and then race up to Notting Hill to spend evenings with other West Indians, the part that stayed with me was his confession that, sometimes, loitering too late in London, and too poor in any case to afford a hotel room, he’d go to Heathrow and spend the night there (surrounded, no doubt, by Indians and Jamaicans, the airport always being a suburb of Empire).
When I heard that a dozen people or more often live, around the clock, in Kennedy Airport, making the most of the ubiquitous snack bars, the climate control, the strangers rendered openhearted by jet lag or culture shock, I was hardly surprised: I’d been doing the same thing, using my large suitcase as a pillow, and occasionally spending days at a time in an airport, catching my breath, since my teens.
In recent times, however, airports have become something more than just an intranational convenience zone, and it is easy to see them as models of our future. So often we find ourselves in their accommodating, anonymous spaces, surrounded by the familiar totems of The Body Shop, The Nature Company, The Sharper Image—the impersonal successors to the family names of old—while a man taps away at a laptop beside us and another mutters into his cell phone, “If there’s no emotion in it, it’s just a business decision.…” The air is conditioned and the plants are false.
A modern airport is based on the assumption that everyone’s from somewhere else, and so in need of something he can recognize to make him feel at home; it becomes, therefore, an anthology of generic spaces—the shopping mall, the food court, the hotel lobby—which bear the same relation to life, perhaps, that Muzak does to music. There are discos and dental clinics and karaoke bars in airports today; there are peep shows and go-cart tracks and interdenominational chapels. Dallas–Fort Worth International is larger than Manhattan, and Istanbul has a special terminal just to accommodate “shuttle shoppers” from the former Soviet Union. As I was passing through San Francisco’s airport recently, I came upon a whole exhibition on the history of airports—wheels within wheels—and read that Berlin’s Tempelhof used to be the busiest air facility in the world, receiving eleven thousand passengers in 1925. Now Chicago’s O’Hare sees that many in two hours.
As a boy, I had often found airports exciting because they were the closest thing around to the starship Enterprise, a cut-rate Adventure-land, Tomorrowland, and Fantasyland combined, rich in flashing screens and exotic costumes; now you can see the same kind of activity on every other street corner in Paris, or Sydney, or Vancouver. The modern city is a place where everyone’s a stranger, so it seems, on his way to somewhere else.
Yet what makes an airport especially curious is that its look-alike settings are the scenes for the most emotional moments in our public lives. People break down at departure gates, I’d noticed as a boy, in racking sobs, and others shout at workers they’ve scarcely met; many passengers are at the far edge of themselves in transit areas, in mingled states of alertness and discombobulation. So all the most intimate encounters—that girl closing her eyes as she kisses her lost love, that child comforting the mother just widowed, that group of dark-suited worshipers gathering around a departing missionary with their prayers—are played out in a maze of yogurt shops and public-address announcements and crowds waving pyramid-shaped boxes of chocolates that say AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL.
Part of the pathos and stress of the airport (the leading cause of death at JFK is the coronary) is that lives are being changed irreversibly, and people have nothing to steady themselves with but a Coffee People outlet, a Sky Plaza, and a Smarte Cart that (in Los Angeles at least) speaks seven different languages. All the comforts of home, made impersonal.
Thinking all this—and suspecting that LA, of all places, was the one where people most come to make new lives (40 percent of its residents now are foreign-born, and California receives half of all America’s immigrants)—I went to live for a while in LAX.
• • •
As I began to look around Los Angeles International Airport, walking around its terminals as I might a foreign city, I quickly realized that it really does have all the amenities of a modern metropolis. There is a fire station there, and a private hospital next door; the airport has its own $10 million post office. There is an airport police squad, cruising around in Crown Victoria patrol cars, another unit forms a Bicycle Patrol, and the Coast Guard also maintains a station there. There is a movie coordinator at LAX, a
tow-truck service and a five-person Airport Commission (made up, not long ago, of a Chinese man, a Japanese man, a Hispanic woman, an elderly white man, and an African-American named Johnnie Cochran, Jr.). There is even a public-relations department, one of whose employees told me, casually, “FBI, Secret Service, CIA—everybody’s here.”
There are 23,000 parking spaces in LAX—the PR person dubbed it “the largest parking lot in the world”—and more than fifty thousand people work in this microuniverse (or almost twice as many as live in Monaco). Everything was more complex than I had imagined, in fact. I thought I knew LAX pretty well before going there—after all, I had formally emigrated to the U.S. there, thirty years before, and had visited every few months ever since; many of my most fateful partings and reunions had taken place there.
Yet when I looked around me, I found myself adrift in a world I could not recognize: even most of the airlines here were ones I’d never heard of—Air L.A. and Great American Air, and AOM; Carnival and Leisure Air and Express One; Translift and Sun Country and Canada 3000. The previous year, a few people had even flown in and out on Air Evasion.
To get my bearings within this mobile sprawl, I went to consult a Travelers Aid desk in the Tom Bradley International Terminal (or TBIT, as it’s exotically called), at 400 World Way, built in anticipation of the 1984 Olympics. Around me, a blond Mexican in a Caesar’s Palace hat was sprawled against an Indian swathed in Giordano and Vuitton, while a Japanese girl in a sari was pushing a lurid copy of the Bhagavad-Gita on an African. “Oh, I forgot!” cried a woman in front of me, addressing two very bewildered-looking Home Stay visitors. “In Japanese, yes means no!”
The friendly volunteers at the Travelers Aid desk assured me that I could request help in more than one hundred languages, from Tajik to Pashto and Pampango to Waray-Waray. But the miscommunications around me suggested that more than translators were needed: “Remember me?” someone was asking plaintively, and someone else was saying, “It is not a request, but can you spare some money today?” A group of Cambodians in Long Beach Unified School District shirts were bumping against black-clad security men who looked uncannily like ninjas.
Airports say a lot about a place because they are both a city’s business card and its handshake; they tell us what a community yearns to be as well as what it really is (much like the people inside them, often, who are dressed up for the occasion, and worn ragged and bare by the experience). YOUR IMPRESSIONS BEGIN HERE, the sign in Bangkok’s arrivals terminal announces, and governments often cannily turn their airports into showpieces, with landscaped exit routes through Potemkin settlements, designed to disarm the disoriented newcomer. Osaka’s $15 billion Kansai International Airport is the largest building in Japan, its mile-long terminal the only man-made structure (other than the Great Wall) visible from the moon; Hong Kong’s new $20 billion facility boasts the “largest food court in the world” and a 140-store Sky Mart; even the unremarkable Kenyan town of Eldoret (the hometown of President Moi) now has a $90 million international airport.
LAX, however, is unlikely to thrill people who’ve dreamed of it from afar. It is a flat and centerless mess with no real defining principle or heart—just a mass of gray, gray terminals around a central international building that is no longer large enough to accommodate all international arrivals. Eight satellites, you could say, in search of a sun.
As I walked around this microcosm of LA, I was taken aback to find deserted Eastern Airlines counters (with all the defunct airline’s destinations still painted on the wall) in place, and goods on sale from a World Cup that had finished long before. Huge Pan Am Clipper Cargo hangars sat disinherited around the perimeter, and ten of the twelve car-rental phones I tried were broken. Yet the AMC Gram I found (an Air Mobility Command newsletter) at the edge of one terminal proudly, even patriotically, announced, “LAX—Leading and Excelling Daily,” and the postcards in the gift shops (made in Korea) declared LAX to be “one of the busiest and most beautiful air facilities in the world.” The place resembled, in that way, many of the city’s most famous residents, clinging to outdated five-by-seven glossies of themselves while the face-lifts and Gucci-leather skin told a sadder story.
At one point, while I was staying in LAX, I had to go to Melbourne for a weekend for my work, and I found myself passing through a rapid succession of air facilities. The new airport in Osaka, with its talking telephones and fifty pinball machines in the departure area, showed off its own telephone card and T-shirt and hand towel, all featuring its own Olympic-style mascot (and tourists came from all over Japan to inspect this modern wonder of the world); in Auckland, I happened upon a beautifully silent Scriptorium in the transit area, with writing desks for last farewells, and a quiet, clean chapel and Theaterette. LAX, by contrast, seemed mostly to offer two enigmatic tortoises in front of Gates 111 and 113. The copy of Business Traveler I read on the plane back placed LA among the five worst airports in the world, in terms of Customs, Facilities, and Conveniences (its only consolation being that JFK placed dead last in all these categories).
In recent times, its rulers have given the international terminal a theme-park makeover, so that foreigners can walk through a neon-quickened blur of L.A. Sports and Euro Coffee, Sushi Boy and a Warner Bros. store (all in a concourse called El Paseo); yet still it was clear that LAX told more about LA than it would like to, with its public-address system, on perpetual loop, telling the thirty thousand international passengers who arrive each day, “Attention, travelers! You are not required to give money to solicitors. This airport does not sponsor their activities. I repeat: you are not required …”
Airports are always a little like dolls within the larger dolls of the city, like the ads for a My Twinn product in Denver’s new Stapleton Airport—its terminal made to resemble the snowcapped mountains all around—showing a picture of a little girl holding a machine-made replica of herself: INDIVIDUALLY CRAFTED TO LOOK LIKE YOUR DAUGHTER. Thus Shanghai, true to stereotype, has People’s Liberation Army soldiers guarding its gleaming corridors (under Master Card Global Service signs), and liveried attendants who present you with a baggage cart upon arrival, then promptly ask for payment. Rio has a famously husky transvestite announcer whose breathy invitations to final calls have often caused whole groups of mesmerized Japanese businessmen to miss their flights, while Dum Dum, in Calcutta, in order to assure itself of maximum chaos, has all international flights, it seems, touch down at 2:00 a.m.
Orly, near Paris, has an art gallery, and San Francisco obligingly pretends to be the place we’re hoping for by including a Grateful Dead corner, a cybershop featuring cutting-edge Bay Area graphics, a Hairport, a funky b-zinc shop offering books on Krishnamurti and Jung, and fourteen quirky corridor exhibitions at any time, on such unlikely themes as platform shoes and Ashanti stools. LA, by contrast, offers VAC8ION mini license plates and tilting mugs that say CALIFORNIA: A NEW SLANT ON LIFE, amidst $12.95 Best Actor statues and Beverly Hills Confection Collections. Much of what I saw on offer was the kind of thing you’d find anywhere in America—U.S. Army patches, mock-Elvis gold records, magnets representing Tanzanian stamps commemorating Whitney Houston. Yet in its particulars, LA was selling beaches and movie stars and cash—that whole anomalous mix of leisure and affluence captured by the curious term entertainment industry.
At the time I was staying in LAX, Malibu had just been washed into the ocean, Hollywood Boulevard was more run-down than Tegucigalpa, and in parts of LA, only 11 percent of the people over the age of eighteen could read; but in the simplified transaction of images in which the airport traffics, the departure terminals were still selling L.A.’S THE PLACE posters and postcards of the Disney trinity announcing LIFE’S A PICNIC IN CALIFORNIA. It had also shrewdly identified the consumers most ready to spend handsomely on a piece of the California Dream. JCB credit cards from Japan were accepted in many gift shops, and welcome signs (in Japanese) were plastered often on their windows. Daruma dolls sat amidst miso soup and onigiri in the coffee shops,
and one of the only non-Crichton or -Krantz offerings on display among the books was The Japanese Visitor’s Guide to Silicon Valley. An Osakan arriving here—and paying ninety-five dollars for some Teriyaki Beef Jerky—might reasonably have concluded that he’d never actually left home.
The other item that greeted me everywhere in the airport were magnets with one-hundred-dollar bills painted on them. In some gift stores, there were mugs designed to look like rolled-up hundred-dollar bills, and in others, lighters that resembled hundred-dollar bills. It was a poignant thing to see Filipinos, say, with the ten-dollar bills they’d saved up over months, buying one-hundred-dollar bills to take back to their brothers, or others, who’d found life hard here and were returning home in disappointment, buying key rings that said LIFE’S A BEACH.
What makes the airport special, though—something different from any souvenir store in Universal City or Warner Bros. store worldwide—is that it is a gift store with culture shock; the product, in its video arcades, its hotels, and its cocktail lounges, of a mixed marriage between a border crossing and a shopping mall. And the confusions of any shop where people are surrounded by signs they can’t read and people they can’t follow are amplified in this place where so many customers are from somewhere far away, and so many of the shopkeepers are recent arrivals with a shaky hold on English. Things get lost in translation in airports, and the whole cross-cultural drama is stirred up by the fact that many of the people in airports are in something of a dream state.
As I was looking at some macadamia nuts in a gift shop—the closest thing we have, an airport suggests, to a One-World currency—an Indian man, with a fresh copy of the hard-core magazine Variations (its cover half-concealed for discretion) under his arm, rummaged showily through his pockets, then asked me for some change in Hindi (I assume it was Hindi, of which I speak not a word, though it included the English word change).