by Pico Iyer
A small Russian man bumped into me at that point, asking me where the “Something Department” was, and, as I stood outside, working out exactly what he’d said, any number of Korean and Mexican and Iranian shoppers shoved past me. Inside the store, just past the picture of the eight-year-old triplets modeling camisoles for Mirvish in the Eisenhower years (and the notices pointing out how his name featured in the titles of even his Italian and Szechuan restaurants), I was in a world of Indians and Guatemalans and Chinese families and Poles, sorting through $.99 salad bowls and trying on $4.99 jackets (the store keeps its prices insanely low in part by offering no credit, no service, and no parking—though, in a typically Edian flourish, Mirvish does employ his own street cleaner to keep the block half-immaculate). On pillars and walls and signs all around the place were reassuringly bumptious one-liners and upbeat slogans: OUR PRICES ARE BOTTOM!!! (DIAPERS UPSTAIRS) and DEVELOPE A SMILE AT ED’S PRICES (the misspelling itself surely part of the reassurance). One whole wall of the store—unusual, I thought, for a shop owned by a Jewish man—consisted of crucifixes, and, amidst his black velvet representations of the Toronto skyline hung framed pictures of the Last Supper. Honest Ed certainly knew his market: though once he’d sold a swimming pool for $.88, Elvis figurines here went for $99.95 and “Tomato Machines” for $267.77.
The biggest surprise of all, though, past the framed photos of Jerry Springer and in front of the stairwells decorated with hymns to Ed written by eighth graders, was a sign near the steps, advertising an IMMIGRATION SERVICE (2ND FLOOR EAST BUILDING BY MENSWEAR). I went up and found what looked like a travel agency, with stirring posters of Canada and solemn treatises on Flag Day on its walls, and a team of “Certified Immigration Counsellors” offering advice on “Landed Status / Ministers’ Permits / Live-in Caregiver / Refugee Claims / Detention Reviews.”
There were signs for a dental clinic around me and posters advertising lunch with a ventriloquist; there were clippings noting that Honest Ed had entered the Guinness pantheon by erecting the largest neon sign on the planet. But the most essential accessory of all seemed to be the list, hand-scrawled on a wall, of all the paralegal services offered, from “Canadian Pardons” to “U.S. Waivers,” from “Name Changes” to “Landlord Problems.” Mirvish—an Officer of the Order of Canada and showpiece of the city (he’d once even led a walking tour of the neighborhood with Jane Jacobs, and reproved the Queen Mother for not visiting his store while in Toronto)—was doing everything he could to help the new immigrant find a future here.
In 1972 (one of the clippings recorded), while Mirvish was guest-editing a column in the Toronto Sun, a fifteen-year-old had asked “Mr. Toronto” (born in Virginia, as the papers did not so often stress) whether he preferred “Toronto the Old (Hogtown) or Toronto the New (Fun City).” With all the wisdom of a village elder, Ed had looked past either/or distinctions and written, “We are all of us in Toronto a product not only of our aspirations, but also a product of our past.… As important as what we become is what we were”—a sentiment slightly different from the one I might have read if Mirvish had stayed on in America.
When I walked out of Honest Ed’s, I found myself in a whole area now known as Mirvish Village, and largely given over to artists’ haunts (because, they say, Ed’s wife likes to paint); in the trademark Toronto style, brownstones sat next to open-air cafés, chic boutiques were scattered among workingmens’ residences along the leafy side streets. Slipping into a store full of architecture books, I happened to pick up Rem Koolhaas’s S, M, L, XL, a treatise whose very title impenitently announces its ideal of a new world made generic, with cities constructed like shopping malls.
Architects are among the shrewdest readers of our globe, I often think, not only because it is their job to gauge the future but also because it is their task to make their most abstract ideas concrete. Besides, in the modern, postnational globe, many of the leading architects—Toronto-born Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, I. M. Pei, and Koolhaas himself—are working in several continents at once, literally fashioning the international monuments of a new transnational culture. It’s not difficult to think of Koolhaas as a cross-cultural Jane Jacobs of the new millennium, sharing her impatience with pious orthodoxies and received notions of the quaint, yet translating that iconoclasm into a vision of a “Bastard Metropolis” of the future, for “people on the move, poised to move on,” a community without neighborhoods or hierarchies or even much of a sense of shape. “The ‘Western,’ ” Koolhaas writes with typical (if sometimes excessive) panache, “is no longer our exclusive domain.… It is a self-administered process that we do not have the right to deny—in the name of various sentimentalities—to those ‘others’ who have long since made it their own.”
This radical, unideological vision of a city as a kind of motel room writ large made sense to people like me, who’d grown up without a stable sense of base, and who never felt the need to ask whether I belonged to East or West—it seemed as irrelevant as whether I was wearing a white shirt or a blue shirt (and I hardly cared if someone chose to refer to me as an “Indian writer living in America” or an “American writer living in Japan” or whatever tag appealed to them). And as one who felt at home in impersonal spaces, I could not quarrel with the polemical quotes Koolhaas arranges, like the one from Douglas Coupland (another Canadian inspector of tomorrow): “I like hotels because in a hotel-room you have no history; you have only essence.” I was even ready to accept that, as Philip Johnson claimed, Koolhaas, the designer of cities more than of buildings, might be to the twenty-first century Empire of Internationalism what Edwin Lutyens had been to the British.
Yet the effect of his wholesale elimination of the past, not in one life but in many, was that Koolhaas’s ideal of a “Multi-Ethnic” city was a place like Singapore, a “city without qualities,” as he puts it, created out of nothing but an abstract marriage of Confucius and Victoria; a “virtual city,” as he writes, in which nothing is random and authenticity itself is a fraudulent notion. Singapore, for Koolhaas, was pure facsimile—almost an architectural blueprint, in fact—in which the red-light district was mowed down to make room for a theme-park re-creation of sin, and the famous old transvestite bars on Bugis Street were rehabilitated to serve as tourist traps featuring “female female impersonators.”
This was all very well, except that cities, no less than people, rebel against being nothing, and Singapore—a British boarding school with Chinese prefects—had the disconcerting habit of boasting of its British legal system and then, when challenged, talking about its “Asian values.” Toronto, by comparison, seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland: layer joined upon layer here to form a kind of colorful palimpsest, as in Kensington Market, where what had begun as a Jewish area, and become a place for Ukrainians, Hungarians, and even Portuguese from the Azores, was now a pell-mell mix of Abyssinian, Middle Eastern, and West Indian stores, where a maple leaf flew above a carnicería and counterculture types pointed out that Emma Goldman had fought her last battle here, on behalf of Italian anarchists.
Sometimes, too, the multicolored present actually redeemed an unaccommodating past here, not by bureaucratically erasing it (as in Singapore), or by turning it into a food court, but by offering unorchestrated cacophony. I had heard of Christie Pits—a park on Bloor Street—that it was the place where the whole city had turned on its Jewish residents as they played games there (in the thirties, when areas like the Beaches posted signs saying NO JEWS AND DOGS ALLOWED); now, when I went there, it was to find Jamaicans playing soccer in what was largely a Korean and Hispanic area, while Willie Nelson sang “Home Again” above an all-white baseball game. The signs above the public rest rooms denominated UOMINI and DONNE (though people also reminded me that one of Hitler’s most vocal supporters lived only a few minutes away, inside a padlocked castle).
The brightest expression of a counter-Koolhaasian vision, though�
��a lyrical way of rising above differences—came, again, in a novel, from Michael Ondaatje, the latest in Toronto’s distinguished line of visionaries exploring a global future. The most radical thing about the people in his The English Patient is, quite simply, that they are not hybrid beings so much as postnational ones—the place where they were born or grew up is as irrelevant to who they are as the color of their socks. The “English patient,” famously (and dangerously) isn’t English (and is an agent), and the sapper defusing bombs for the British army is an Indian (and a Sikh, to boot, a sort of Kim in reverse, whose honorary fathers are not Muslim, Hindu, and Tibetan Buddhist, as Kipling’s double agent’s were, but Canadian, Hungarian, and English). Nearly all the main characters are actively involved in trying to escape their names, their pasts, their seeming nationalities—the very differences that can only be the death of them in war—and in seeking to achieve a new kind of order as in the desert, where tribes meet and join and fall apart, and “we are all communal histories, communal bodies.”
Ondaatje is a poet—meticulous in his details—and the whole book is a vision of this new order, an “Oasis Society” that he calls the “International Bastard Club” (which got softened in the film to the “International Sand Club”). He sets the action amidst frescoes of Eden and pieces of Kipling cake, his characters recite Adam’s words from Milton, and read from Kim, their names—Hana, Caravaggio, Kip—tell us almost nothing about where they’re from, and the places where they live, as floating bodies, are mostly temporary: a monastery, a cave, a lover’s heart. At the very time when the very notion of nation-states is tearing the world apart, Ondaatje concentrates on the private destiny of mapmakers (and double agents) who suggest a world in which the individual is sovereign: quite literally a world unto himself, as vast and hard to categorize as a solar system. “Erase the family name! Erase nations!” is their cry: “All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
One of the extraordinary things about reading The English Patient, which sets it apart from all the traditional works of English literature I read at school, is that it has no central figure, really, and certainly no point of orientation; it is impossible—and indecent, almost—to ask whether the author is an “Orientalist” or an “Occidentalist,” and Ondaatje, with siblings on four continents and an American wife in the Toronto where he’s lived for thirty-five years, is unlikely to tell you. Sitting above all provincialisms—and privatizing even the most famous conflict among empires—it dares to suggest a “New Age” in which people can live with a nomad’s (or a monk’s) freedom from attachments.
The other dizzying thing about the book was that it could feel a lot like contemporary Toronto, where there seems to be no ground zero from which everything is measured; unlike a Los Angeles or an Atlanta, it has a downtown, and one that enshrines the notion of a meeting place of wanderers, but the definition of that space will differ radically, depending on whether you address it from a Ukrainian, or a Serbian, or a Taiwanese perspective. In the end, it seemed no coincidence that the novel Ondaatje wrote immediately before The English Patient was about the immigrants who built a great “Prince Edward” bridge to link one side of Toronto to the other.
Because I was caught up in the revolvings of the new here—all the things I’d never seen before—it took me a long while to notice how much of the old remained, implacably, at the heart of Toronto (how much, in fact, of the very heritage I’d grown up among). Walking up Spadina Avenue, in an exhilaration of foreign faces, a Chinese cinema in the place where once there had been a burlesque house (and before that a Jewish theater), a Global Tele-Express stall standing next to Zen Travel and the Club Shanghai (and, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, a Chinese Buddhist monk sitting in the midst of the commotion, knocking clappers together slowly), I saw the Toronto that I’d met in many of the recent novels. Yet only one major block away, University Avenue, parallel to Spadina, defined the center of the city as if it were still a British battle station known as York (and the next main street along, Yonge Street, looked like a junior version of the Avenue of the Americas). Slice Toronto along one north-south artery, and you’d find a seething, spicy, uncategorizable something best described by the Little China restaurant, which advertised “Indian Pakistani-style Chinese food”; slice it a little farther along, and you’d find pure white Highland shortbread.
In all my twenty-one years in England, I slowly realized, in all the months I’d spent in Bombay and Hong Kong and Singapore, I’d never felt so close to the Queen as on the day I spent wandering around the center of Toronto, walking up University Avenue, past the city’s grand financial towers, past the nineteen stories of the Princess Margaret Hospital (and, nearby, a slightly wistful statue of Mary Pickford—even “America’s Sweetheart” had been born here), and then around Queen’s Park Crescent, past the sandstone Provincial Parliament Building, up to the gray Gothic spires of the University of Toronto. The Queen was beaming down at me from every government office I passed, of course. But she was also represented by a letter adorning the walls of Osgoode Hall, the home of the Law Society of Upper Canada (QUEEN’S BENCH written on gold plates outside its courtroom doors, and COMMON PLEAS on others), and even at the top of a nearby department store (CANADA’S STORE / CANADA’S STYLE), where she was sitting with her consort in a photograph, shivering under a blanket in Edmonton in 1951.
Of course the Royal Family would feel more at home in High Toronto, with its English-speaking openness, than in cantankerous Australia or New Zealand, or tropical India or East Africa; the Dominion had not even claimed its own flag till 1965, and for many years the Anglican archbishop had been called Walter Scott (he was now named Aloysius Ambrozic). Surveying the maps at home, the Windsors must have felt warmed by the sight of Kitchener and Waterloo and Cambridge all more or less on top of one another in the suburbs, and when I read the names in the Deaths column of the Anglophile Globe and Mail, I could have been back in my school, in the shadow of Windsor Castle, listening to a roll call in 1972: “Beecroft, Bradley, Buckland, Campbell, Currie, Dimock, Dority, Finlay …”
Yet what I also came to notice, in and around the grand monuments of Empire, and what made the vision of The English Patient seem more plausible, was that something alien was going on here, much as you see African rites and voodoo performed in the old Spanish churches of Brazil. When I went to a department store to inspect a collection of Princess Diana’s dresses (assembled in sacramental near-darkness and watched by thousands in a reverential hush), the girl who gave me my ticket was darker than I was, and called Shivani; next to the Arcadian Court nearby (TASTE OF BRITAIN), my tea and scones were brought to me by a man who, as my housemaster in school would have put it, was “born under sunnier skies.” The signs under many display cases in the Royal Ontario Museum dutifully complained about the “overtly racist” attitudes of Empire (right under ads for an audio tour of a visiting exhibition from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, narrated by Prince Edward), and in a book in which I found thanks given to “the Venerable the Archdeacon of Trafalgar,” further thanks were given—six lines down—to the “Reverend Jane Watanabe.” Outside the backward-looking buildings of the university, there hung a rainbow-colored banner for the Multicultural History Society of Ontario.
This same pattern, of course—Tropical Victorianism in reverse, as I sometimes thought of it—was evident in Britain, too, and in many of its white protectorates: nearly all the staff in the ultraimperial Windsor Hotel in Melbourne came from different corners of South Asia; and the Booker Prize, given to the best British novel to be published each year, had gone to Salman Rushdie in 1981, and, in the next dozen years, to two Australians, a part-Maori from New Zealand, a South African, a Nigerian, a woman of Polish descent, and an immigrant from Japan (the runners-up featuring such modern British names as Mo and Desai and Achebe) before being given to the mongrel Ondaatje. Empire was physically, as well as in other ways, in the hands of its most distant legatees.
But in Canad
a, again, there seemed a sweeter, more optimistic tilt to the takeover, as if it were being conducted more in a spirit of redemption than revenge: Toronto admitted the very Hong Kongers and Barbadians that Britain had rejected, and served up England to her former subjects in a more open, friendly form. The Continuing Education classes offered at Winston Churchill Collegiate, I noticed, were nearly all in Tamil, Farsi, Vietnamese, and Serbian. What had long been known as Lord Simcoe Day, in honor of a former governor, was now generally regarded as Caribana Weekend, the centerpiece of the city’s most exuberant Saturnalia, in which more than a million people danced down University Avenue with no thoughts of boundaries or divisions. When a novel came out here about a British district officer tending to his colonies, it came from the hand of an Indian from Dar es Salaam, born in Nairobi.
I picked up in the Royal Ontario Museum a copy of the newsletter of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, and was greeted by the following: “The Japanese Canadian experience is very much a Canadian story. It is the story of immigration and the difficulty of settlement, denial of rights and citizenship, expulsion from the West Coast and seizure of property during the Second World War, forced dispersal east of the Rockies and the resettlement of many to Ontario” (an unblinking self-condemnation of the kind I’d seen only in such institutions in Australia and New Zealand). The “Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement,” I read at the bottom, was funded partly by the Association of Serbian Women, the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation, and the Toronto Nikkei Archive.