Fences and borders

By Alegria Imperial / Peregrine Notes

THEY could be as formidable as stonewalls like these medieval cities: Siena, for one, Cartagena and Intramuros, both fortified, for another; or who isn’t familiar with the Great Wall of China? Or they could invite romantic musings as in curlicued iron grills of palaces like Buckingham and, on a lesser scale, the Frick mansion in Manhattan. A border can also be simply a thick hedge of evergreens, broken by a bower of tendrils, and veiled by rose bushes with their thorns, guarding secrets like some English-style cottages I’ve seen here in British Columbia.

Sometime ago—though some still exist in old towns like those in Vermont—the more common sheer waist-and-elbow-high white picket fences sort of hazed the splicing of sunlight on either side; and as the Bauhaus concept caught on with apartment living, borders shrank to mere double-locked doors facing each other in nothing but an aisle. In many suburban-gated communities like some upscale subdivisions in Manila, borders among neighbors are rather invisible, that which wall them in being a long often winding massive masonry meant to put off whoever who doesn’t belong to them.

In my childhood, fences and gates were but part of home structures. We passed in and out of these as if we had multiple houses in which to play; oh, but then, a whole neighborhood was family—children, indeed, live in a world without borders. The concept, for me, only started dawning when as adults we learned about fights, some among families concerning borders, as petty as a fruit tree leaning over the other side of an adjacent wall, a few escalating into a court case and, of course, as massive as the World Wars, the extent of which I’m unfolding just now.

But nothing like international travel made me wake up to how seriously borders can mean more than just a defining wall, especially in post-9-11 years. That was when I still had a Philippine passport. Many a close-to-midnight landings at JFK, when the cavernous arrival area leading to Immigration would be swathed by an almost eerie light from high ceilings, I had felt like swooning as I glided with a cordoned line of tourists to an official’s window. Though in reality I would have not have gone this far if denied a visa at an embassy in Manila, in each of my arrivals my heart wildly thumped with fear; I could be sent back on the next available flight, and this has happened to some.

I thought it would, once, when I couldn’t seem to convince an official that I wasn’t traveling to New York with the malicious intent of jumping into the woodwork and disappear as many hundreds of Filipino illegals had done. His tone of questioning started to transform me into a slave begging escape from my pitiful state. Even as he stamped my passport and handed me the B2 form, he still seemed derisive.

The same attitude had me melting where I stood below the immigration official’s high window at the US-Canada border crossing in Blaine, Washington, and Surrey, British Columbia, as he flipped through my Philippine passport on a visit to my sister when she had just submitted the petition forms for me. Focusing on my answer to his question if I intended to work in Canada and I had said that I didn’t need to but would wait for the approval of my immigration papers; he thought it was incredible because a sister is considered non-family. The minutes it took him to access what I supposed were online records already horrific scenarios as to where I would end up or how began to scare me—and what would I do with half-a-dozen steamed blue crabs from Baltimore I was bringing as pasalubong?

This border feels the most convenient to pass through, deceptively easy even, either by car or the luxury coach Quick Shuttle that brings one door-to-door wherever one boards it on designated areas in Vancouver—I usually do at YVR’s arrival area—to the departure area of either Bellingham or Seattle-Tacoma international airports or Quality Hotel in downtown Seattle right under the shadow of the Space Needle.

I’ve witnessed how many a youngster, perhaps wanting to spend the holidays in Seattle, simply hopped on it and got screened for hours at the border, especially one Christmas Eve; this has been resolved since; an inspector would now assess a passenger’s documents on boarding. The first time I passed this border with my Canadian passport, I felt like another person, and maybe I was. On a car with a friend carrying a US passport, the immigration officer simply waved us off, and on Quick Shuttle, the officer only wanted to know how long I was staying in New York.

How amazing to realize that borders are actually inner spaces. More than the structures that set people and their countries apart, these are mean layers of realities within us. When I had complained to a friend about those instances that sort of crushed my self-esteem, she told me it had nothing to do with who I really am but with my passport. Indeed, she was right in a way.