The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  Yet the biggest problem of all was simply—insolubly—money. Though the first wave of boat people, in 1979, had generally been fleeing war and uncertainty at home, the second large wave, around 1990, had not been fleeing Vietnam so much as seeking out affluent Hong Kong. Ironically, they were coming only because of relaxed travel restrictions and greater freedom at home. And when word got round that the UN was paying $360 resettlement allowances to every refugee who agreed to go back to Vietnam, more people came here in order to be paid to go back home. The $360 they could get for being professional exiles was higher than a whole year’s salary.

  The UNHCR, formed as a temporary agency in 1951 to deal with the refugee emergency in Europe at the end of the war, had received mandate after mandate to keep going. It now had offices in 115 countries, and the number of refugees, just 2.5 million in 1970, was up to 27.4 million, having doubled in just the past eight years. Refugees, a UNHCR official told Time, “are one of the growth industries of the ’90s.”

  The woman selling pomelo smiled sweetly at us as we inspected her goods, syrupy Vietnamese music floating out of the shacks and, here and there, used needles on the ground around us. She’d been here for eight years, she said through Tom, the Vietnamese interpreter who’d chosen to come back from Canada to work with refugees, and she was very much happier than in Whitehead (where people had lived four or five to a bunk, and behind five or six security posts, with nothing to separate them from the next family). But she was still a resident of limbo.

  “I am wondering when I can leave Hong Kong,” she said, searching out my eyes. “My mother is very old. My girl is sick all the time—ever since the screening center she has headaches.” She looked at me with hopefulness. “My husband has relations in San Francisco.”

  My handlers, at this point, tried, understandably, to cut the discussion short, but, before they could do so, the woman wanted to ask a question. Where did I come from? England, I said.

  “England is fine,” she said, looking up at me expectantly.

  Back in my room, I picked up the book I had been carrying round with me, L’Enracinement (translated as The Need for Roots), by Simone Weil. For most of her thirty-four years, the French Jewish Catholic had taken pains to live no better than the peasants and factory workers around her, and so, during the war, while in England, she had been asked by General de Gaulle to write a report on the possibilities and responsibilities of the French after they were liberated. Anticipating the death of certain fixities, she had written, “No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say, of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, tradition, cultures, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”

  Such issues, inevitably, were on many minds after the Chinese handover. “What are the values we stand for? And what is the social fabric that ties us together?” the new chief executive of the Special Administrative Region, Tung Chee-hwa, had asked aloud at the Asia Society. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I reencountered several times in the UNHCR literature, said, simply, “Everyone has a right to a nationality.”

  Richard and Sharon, I knew, were solid and inwardly rooted enough to live with any change; now, in any case, they live in London, with a son, as firmly grounded as anyone I know. But what of the others who don’t have their gift for adapting, the ones I knew who called their own answering machines several times a day, to be greeted by their own voices, or were crowding in, even now, to Jolly Air Cargo and the Pansy House and San Tropez to send remittances back to Manila? I thought of the friend who’d called me up once to say, “Yesterday I was driving towards the Hollywood sign, and I had a cell phone in one hand and a laptop in the other. And I thought, What am I doing? Who is this? It’s not even like I had anything to say.”

  That same friend had once flown so many miles that he’d won the ultimate frequent flier award—thirty days of unlimited flying around the globe—and had told me of a dream he’d had under jet lag which was “not a ‘Where am I?’ dream, which you’d expect, but a ‘Who am I?’ dream. I couldn’t remember who I was.”

  It was no surprise to me that nowadays he was spending much of his time (as I was, too) on retreat in a monastery.

  My last day in Hong Kong, I celebrated my birthday together with Richard (born on the same day of the same year—my global twin), as we had done almost every year for a quarter of a century, in small tea shops in Berkshire, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the Oxford Motel in San Francisco. Now we went to one of the restaurants in the four-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel next door, to find the largest transoceanic buffet I’d ever seen, while Richard’s clients in Indonesia called on the cell phone and his wife disappeared to check on the man who was checking on the hard drive.

  “I really don’t need to exist in real time or real place at all,” my friend concluded, putting the phone away. “Probably the strangest thing is when I’m sitting right here, and Sharon’s over there”—he pointed to a chair across the table—“and I leave a message for her by calling her voice mail in Boston.”

  “Because you can be more specific?”

  “Yes. And she can listen to the message repeatedly, and take down a lot of concrete information.”

  A little later, I had to get up to go to Bombay, where a cousin of mine was getting married.

  “You know where you can find me,” Richard said.

  “I do. I can call you up from anywhere.”

  “Eighteen countries,” he reminded me. Just in case, though, he gave me his number in Tokyo and his office number in Tokyo. He gave me his fax number “at home,” his fax number “at the office” and his home and office numbers in Hong Kong. He gave me his fax number in both places, an 800 number for his voice mail, his mobile number, his mother’s fax number, his office fax number in London, and his E-mail address. He even gave me a toll-free number for calling his voice mail from Japan.

  Somehow, that left no room in my address book for his name.

  THE MULTICULTURE

  I can’t be Japanese and I can’t be Western—but I understand both. I am double-binded, but—and this is perhaps most important—I am also in a position that generates a great deal of energy and creativity.

  —ARATA ISOZAKI, describing

  his “schizophrenic eclectic”

  brand of architecture

  The first time I ever flew into Toronto, coming from San Francisco, I felt as if I were flying east in the classic sense, into somewhere ancestral, with nearly all the passengers around me chattering away in some Chinese tongue as they moved from one suburb of the Chinese “world-city” to the next. The woman next to me brandished a passport on which was written “Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” and spoke not a word of English; every time the cabin attendant came round with drinks, she whirled around to the younger women behind her—a daughter-in-law, I presumed, or perhaps a niece—and asked her to request hot water on her behalf (or to find out whether the water was boiled); meanwhile, around us, some member of the family or other would pop up every now and then, whip out an expensive Olympus camera, and snap photos of the others, the startled purser, or herself.

  I watched my old neighbor as she looked and looked out of the porthole, and I wondered where she was going, and what future awaited her: a new home, perhaps, in another alien colony, and surely a different place from the one that awaited her English-speaking relatives.

  I, for my part, was on my way to Cuba—in the archetypal way, I was coming to Toronto not for itself, but for the other worlds it opened up—and when we disembarked, I noticed that most of the faces pressed against the window in the arrivals area were from India. The Visitors’ line at the Immigration desk stretched all the way into the corridor, people fanning themselves with a rainbow of passports; the line reserved for Canadians was next to empty, save for a small Indian family, a Chinese girl with fuchsia hair, and another Chinese girl deep in a volume entitled Conversational French.

  �
��Sir, please, welcome to Toronto,” said a turbanned man as I stepped out of this western Heathrow, throwing open the door to his Aerofleet car and half-bowing before he disembarrassed me of my bags. “Sir, kindly watch your step; I hope your stay in Toronto may be a pleasant one.” We headed off into the dark, the screech of Hindi film music turned low on the radio, the billboards looming at me with their Hangul script, and the man told me how they had gurdwaras now in Toronto, and places where you could follow all the news from home. When he’d arrived, twenty-two years earlier, he’d felt like the only Sikh in town; now there were 23,000 from his community here.

  “I can’t believe how much I feel at home here, too,” I said as we eased towards the universal lit-up huddle of skyscrapers, the antique word DOMINION gleaming on the top of one, and I pointed to the crown encircling the numbers on the green interstate signs, the exit ramps leading to Kipling Road and the Queen Elizabeth Way. “Very nice city, sir,” my self-appointed guide assured me. “Very clean, very safe. Nobody here, he is from Canada. So nobody can say, ‘You could not be here. You cannot come!’ ”

  There were kilometers on the odometer, I noticed, and “litres” outside the gas stations, and as the man dropped me off, wishing me well, as if he really did hope I would find a new life here, I saw that every word of the sign in front of us—HARBOURFRONT THEATRE CENTRE—was spelled differently from the version of America where I now lived.

  The next time I found myself in Toronto, it was to go to that very Centre—I was one of more than three thousand international writers who’ve traveled to what is now the largest literary festival in the world. The Harbourfront Writers’ Festival, partly founded and run for all its twenty-five years by Greg Gatenby, a vigorous evangelist for Canadian writing, takes care to invite participants from every continent, every year, as if to remind us that Canada can be a confluence of rivers; indeed, while politics and economics take care of the external details of the new world order, writing (Harbourfront tells us) can actually give the global village a face, a voice. Though the huge modern hotel in which I was staying posted up an Innkeepers’ Act, protecting itself against damage done by a “horse or other live animal or any gear appertaining thereto” and though the signs at traffic lights still read, quaintly, PEDESTRIANS: OBEY YOUR SIGNALS, there were “Jamaican Beef Patties (spicy)” at the deli across the street, and “Indo-Canadian sweets” flavoring the fragrant streets.

  “We’re all displaced here,” said the woman from Australia who greeted me as I walked into the Harbourfront Hospitality Suite; her own first name was Spanish, she explained, and her last name was from Hungary, though she’d been born, in fact, in Italy, and was on her way now to India. “Australia’s better than it’s ever been,” she went on, thanks to its recent influx of Russian cabbies and Filipina nurses and venture capitalists from Hong Kong.

  “That’s right,” piped up one of our official hosts, with an enthusiasm I’d never expect to find in Britain. “The new immigrants here have made our city, too, more international, more alive. Sometimes the old people object because the white-bread areas are full of samosas. But it’s good: cosmopolitanism has made the place more tolerant. When my parents were growing up, you couldn’t get a drink in a hotel.”

  It was the same sentence, almost verbatim, that I’d later hear in Wellington, and similar to one I might deliver to a newcomer in London; it echoed, in reverse, the kind of sentences you hear in Bombay, where, suddenly, respectable young girls can enjoy drinks with American stockbrokers in MTV-crazy bars. Yet what was different about Toronto was that everyone, in Harbourfront at least, was speaking of books as the new unlegislated power, hymning into being a new cross-cultural order, and many of these novels (which were invariably the most striking and unprecedented that came my way) took Toronto not just as their setting, but as their inspiration. A few blocks away, Marshall McLuhan had written of how electricity—communications technology, as it’s become—could bind us all together in a new kind of global community; yet Canadian literature (which had mostly to do now with Italian priests and Zoroastrian landladies, Japanese grandmas and the uncertain affiliations of Egypt before the war) offered an even more emancipating vision of a new kind of gathering: the city as anthology.

  Back in my hotel room, I turned to the local phone book and was surprised to find ten “Iyer”s listed in its pages, and thirty-nine “K.Kim”s (the “Lee”s alone took up thirty-six columns); at dinner the next night, I looked across the table and saw Michael Ondaatje, a central figure in the Canadian literary renaissance (his ancestors English and Singhalese and Dutch), handing me a copy of the international magazine he brought out here, in which Salman Rushdie said, nicely, that if he could have been anything other than a writer, he’d “always wanted to be an actor.” So much around me was familiar, but in unfamiliar ways, as if different corners of my life—an Indian grandmother and a Californian girlfriend—had been brought together into the same small room. People used the word thrice here, in the same sentence in which they’d speak of “triples”; the airport, I’d noticed on the map, gave out onto American Drive on the one side, and Britannia Road on the other. “Toronto used to be this no-man’s-land for various Indian tribes,” my host explained to me as we sat among the tropical buildings along Queens Quay West, overlooking the chill gray lake. “The name Toronto comes from an Iroquois word that means ‘meeting place.’ ”

  The hope of a Global Soul, always, is that he can make the collection of his selves something greater than the whole; that diversity can leave him not a dissonance but a higher symphony. In Toronto I wondered whether the same could be true of a Global City. And I felt, at another level, an instant kinship with this place where people seemed to speak a language I could understand. For even as it presented itself in the self-deprecating tones of Europe, it was going about the classic American task of making itself something new; its hopefulness felt earned, its buoyancy nuanced, like that of one who had struck off on his own en route from the Home Counties to Illinois.

  I could hear, now and then, the sound of a onetime colonial township insisting on itself a little—“I’m not anti-American, but I wish people would understand the difference between us”—and I could understand how a land that was shadowed by an empire to the east and an empire to the south would flinch a little at the fact that Saul Bellow and Neil Young and Pamela Anderson (and even Wayne Gretzky) were all taken to be American.

  Yet what surprised me was that this not-untypical unease was expressed with a good humor I wouldn’t expect to find in England, and a sense of irony (which means a chastened sense of history) I wouldn’t associate with America. In Toronto, I felt, there were ghosts as well as prospects.

  The first time I ever met the word multiculturalism was while reading an essay of Jan Morris’s, about Toronto, from 1984, in which she described meeting the word herself for the first time in a city that seemed to be built around it. The singular promise of Canada, for her, lay in the fact that it was no Promised Land, had no torch-bearing statue, no vision of a City on a Hill nor constitution guaranteeing the pursuit of happiness. Canada seemed to her a vast and all-accommodating open space, “all things to all ethnicities,” with “Canadian nationality itself no more than a minor social perquisite, like a driving license or a spare pair of glasses.” Ever acute, Morris had begun her piece with the image of a single clamorous immigrant woman pushing her way through an airport arrivals area filled with classically buttoned-up Torontonians; Toronto for her was a “limbo-city” and “a capital of the unabsolute,” not unlike the “Sacred City” of the “Church of the Last Purification” I’d read of in V. S. Pritchett, from which anodyne missionaries issued forth to tell small English boys that there was no “Evil” in the world, only “Error.”

  As the years went on, however, I started to run into multiculturalism more and more, much as I began to bump into Toronto at every turn, often in the least expected of contexts. “There are forty thousand South Africans in Toronto,” a South African told me ov
er lunch in California one day; the largest congregation of Goan Christians (outside Christian Goa) was in Toronto, I was told by a Goan Christian in New York. “Ya, all the Russians go to Toronto,” a Russian émigré shrugged, with a massive show of unsurprise, as we had breakfast together in San Francisco; and even in Manila’s airport, on a sultry tropical morning, I noticed box after box being sent to York (Ontario) and Hamilton, and passport holders adorned with maple leaves.

  Historically, “Toronto the Blue” (as Margaret Atwood called it) had always seemed a friendly and hospitable tabula rasa for the second sons of Empire—the next best thing to England for many a bright student from Bridgetown or Madras, the nearest thing to America for those from Haiti or Somalia. And in the way in which cities (like people) become what they are perceived to be, it had become more and more a magnet for refugees who knew nothing more of it than that it was a magnet for refugees. So “New Canadians” from Rwanda and Bulgaria and Afghanistan joined several other groups of fugitives who didn’t even show up on many charts: Americans who’d come here to escape the Vietnam War (and colored the city now with their impenitent idealism); 300,000 Anglophile refugees from Montreal, in flight from Quebec’s violently anti–English language policies; and others (from Palestine, say) who’d simply learned that it was easier to pass immigration tests in Canada than in the United States. One day, I even heard that Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old girl whom much of the world saw running down a country road, her mouth open in a scream as she fled her napalmed village in Vietnam, was settled now in Toronto, and, with a kind of Canadian aptness, working for UNESCO. “I am happy,” she’d said, looking past the third-degree burns that still disfigured her body, “because I’m living without hatred.”

  And the astonishing thing about this flood of foreigners was that it was all happening so quickly—as recently as 1971, 97 percent of all Canadians had been of the traditional kind, of European descent (with the rest mostly “aboriginals,” as the Canadians call them); yet already, in scarcely a generation, the number of “visible minorities” in Toronto and Vancouver (to use another local coinage) had climbed above 30 percent. What this meant, in effect, was that seven of every ten of the immigrant beings I noticed on the streets were burdened with no memories of civil rights battles or (as the local paper pointedly put it) of “violently entrenched racism”; their memories were of cricket games on Queen’s Park Savannah, or family gatherings in the New Territories, or (as it also happened) racial massacres in Jaffna.