Maeve in America Read online

  I would usually spend lunchtime teasing Erika about her devotion to The Halal Guys food carts, and she would crack me and our editor Matt up by telling us stories about her doorman dad and what he saw going on around him, or her mom’s new business making balloon decorations for christenings and the inevitable pitfalls involved in such an endeavor (e.g., babies are scared of balloons). This lunch was different. It was initially dominated by me freaking out over my upcoming trip, and how I didn’t know where to get in touch with Nicole Kidman, and how I could make a meaningful show that told the truth, while also making the show I’d assured my boss I’d make.

  Around about then Erika sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and reminded me of the show’s original mission, to amplify voices that were not usually heard: those of immigrants, people like her parents, who had moved from Colombia to escape political violence and had run out of legal status. They were in the shadows until Erika and her twin sister, both U.S. citizens, were able to sponsor them when they turned twenty-one. In the usual stories she told about her parents, she didn’t bring that up. Now here she was, going full Queens on me. “Being funny is cool and all, sure, but there were long years we spent frightened of a knock on the door, and I don’t think people appreciate how messed up that is.”

  You know how it’s rude to eat when someone is relating something sad or frightening to you? Well, I definitely recall not knowing when it was okay to take a bite of my burrito again right after Erika had relived one of the most harrowing moments from all of those years her parents spent undocumented. “Maeve, this shit is real. I was maybe fourteen years old and there was an ICE raid on the floor above us, right in my building, they took our neighbors. My mom was just shaking, looking out the peephole, whispering to me, like, Erika—they’re inside—they’re inside.”

  I flew out the day President Trump was inaugurated and watched the TV screens at Kennedy Airport with my fellow travelers. The rain came down in Washington, D.C., as Trump boomed that he would put America first, that he would end this “American carnage” and protect our borders from “the ravages of other countries.” He sounded, to me, like a dark-hearted and frightened old man, but he was our new President, and everyone was listening to him. The only sliver of power I thought I had was to make a podcast about immigration so that people could see how wrong it was to dehumanize others, so people could understand one another better.

  A battle began in my brain. It felt grandiose that I, a comic, would deliberately set out to make a self-important piece of work with the goal of changing hearts and minds. Comics taking themselves seriously have always made me laugh. Be that as it may, making a conversation around immigration super-fun struck me as inadequate at best, irresponsible at worst. But that was what I had promised to deliver. I reasoned with myself on the flight: I would keep my promise by making something light and fun to listen to. That would please my bosses, a mild-mannered and sweet show that would gradually change the temperature on how immigrants were perceived. By the time I arrived in San Diego that evening, I was determined to be bright and bubbly the next day during my visit to the border wall with Tijuana, and I’d put in some fifteen more requests to interview celebrities in my upcoming L.A. stay.

  The next morning, my contact who was taking me to the border wall, an immigrants’ rights activist named Dan, texted to say he was going to the Women’s March happening in San Diego before we made our trip, and asked if I’d like to join him. I didn’t know what to expect from the Women’s March in San Diego. Although San Diego had voted against Trump, I’d heard it was a conservative-leaning town compared to other parts of California, and I didn’t know anybody who lived there. On the tram to the city center there were small groups of people clutching signs and posters and wearing pink hats. The posters were funny and scathing and tragic:

  THIS PUSSY GRABS BACK;

  GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN-DAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS;

  and

  WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS

  with a hastily scribbled

  AND NATIVE PEOPLE

  at the bottom.

  I met Dan, a soft-spoken man with a black beard, and stood beside him as he wrote his sign in Spanish. Unfamiliar with the city and the plan, I wasn’t sure which direction to walk in, but we got buffeted along by little streams of people that turned into rivers and eventually, as rivers always must, into a sea. A sea of thousands and thousands of people who didn’t know what else to do except get out onto the street and shout and organize against their own leader, people I’d never met but I shared a cause with now. I checked social media intermittently and saw my friends marching in D.C. and New York and L.A. There were hundreds of marches across the country, with more than four and a half million people taking to the streets. It was an extraordinary feeling, to be this one drop in this ocean of people rolling in waves across the nation, and it was a wild contrast to where I was headed that afternoon, a place that would wash away any chance of me keeping my promise.

  Friendship Park is a small park that straddles the U.S. border with Mexico, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The park was opened by First Lady Pat Nixon on August 18, 1971, as a symbol of friendship between the U.S. and Mexico, where Thinkprogress reports that she said, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long.” Today, it’s the only place along the almost two-thousand-mile border between the countries where people on both sides can meet. When I say meet, I mean they can see each other. Visitors are allowed to see each other every Saturday and Sunday from ten a.m. to two p.m. That’s almost all you can do, see each other. You can talk, too, and squeeze the tip of your baby finger through the fence to touch the person on the other side, but that’s it.

  The park is really just a patch of scrubby land rising up from the beach. Dan, my guide, visits often, and tries his best to keep some plants alive, but it looks quite bleak on the U.S. side. There are some public toilets now, which he said was a huge improvement for all the families that make the trek there to see loved ones on the other side of the fence. When I say fence, it’s not so much a fence as a pair of eighteen-foot-high metal walls constructed by the U.S. government. It’s extraordinary to see the walls and know that there was only barbed wire there when First Lady Pat Nixon visited; in fact, she asked that the wire be cut so she could cross into Mexico and say hello to the people there.

  Under President Carter, the barbed wire became a chain-link fence, and as immigration policies hardened throughout the years, so did the fence. It became a ten-foot wall of hard wire mesh in 1994. The holes were large enough to hold hands through, but that changed when the federal government reclaimed Friendship Park from the state of California and the George W. Bush administration began the major reinforcement to the border that exists today. In total, the Obama administration deported 2.7 million people, more than the three previous administrations combined, and The Guardian newspaper reports that in 2012 alone the U.S. government spent $18 billion on immigration policing—more than it spent on all other federal law enforcement combined.

  For a few years after its latest renovation in 2008, the government closed Friendship Park, only opening it back up to visitors following pressure from churches and humanitarian groups, like Friends of Friendship Park, of which Dan was a member. It’s a hugely valuable place, being the only one where you can see your family and friends on the other side, but the walls, vehicles, and guards make the little park look like a militarized zone, with giant metal arms that stretch out over the hills to the east and right along the beach into the sea.

  There’s an eerie contrast between the beach on the Mexican side of the wall, with picnickers and music and swimming, and the beach on the U.S. side, deserted except for a couple of Border Patrol dune buggies buzzing along the sand, a wheeling seagull above in the sky, and a wheezing Irishwoman trying to catch her breath in the wind as she trudges through the sand. There on that lonely beach, surrounded by armed Border Patrol agents and that eighteen-foot w
all, I felt a cold lack of humanity that could not have been more opposed to the jostling purpose of the warm crowd of people I’d experienced that morning.

  I met a man at Friendship Park, Enrique Morones, sturdy and smiley, from an organization called Border Angels. I had not planned to meet him, he just happened to be there, bringing around a British journalist and camera crew. It seems to me that not a lot of Americans even know about this park—two friends of mine who grew up in San Diego had never heard of it—but international media have profiled Friendship Park and the people there a number of times. Another irony about the British crew there struck me later, when I realized with dismay the damage Brexit could do to the border in my own country.

  I asked Enrique for an interview and, since taping is not allowed inside the park, we sat on the ground outside the gates, sheltering from the wind behind a low wall. Among other advocacy work, Border Angels puts water in the desert to prevent more migrants from dying of thirst. Sometimes their water jugs are slashed by U.S.-based vigilante groups, or rogue elements within the U.S. Border Patrol guards.

  In the first seven months of 2017, the International Organization for Migration reported that 232 people died trying to cross the border. They added that this fatality calculation is likely to be an underestimate on their part, because the areas people are crossing are so vast their bodies are often not found. This 2017 number is higher than usual, despite the U.S. Border Patrol reporting that only about half as many migrants were apprehended during border crossings in the first six months of 2016 compared to the first six months of 2017—down from 267,746 people to 140,024 people. The higher death toll may be because, historically, stricter immigration policies in the U.S. have driven people to take more dangerous routes.

  There was no doubt in Enrique’s mind. “The new President wants to build more walls. That means more death.” He described the inauguration day as the saddest day of his life, not just for what was to come, but for the damage already done. “Here’s a person that made his entire campaign by first attacking us, attacking Mexicans. Had he started with another group, Jewish people or black people, they would have shut him down, but he started with us, that’s how he got his traction.” Enrique said that just three months beforehand, two people had attempted to swim across the border from Mexico but had drowned, and their bodies had washed up on the U.S. side of the beach. I knew that this tragedy would not fit on my promised comedy podcast about immigration, and I also knew that I would have to put it in the show. My promise lay snapped at my feet, and I would leave it there, for now.

  I wrote quickly in my notebook—maybe one-off special ep dealing w/border wall and racism then back to super-fun—then went back into the park.

  Along the wall there were small clusters of people huddled in to talk to corresponding clusters of people on the other side, more than likely family members. One young man on the U.S. side of wall, who’d taken a bus from L.A., was leaning in close to talk to his mother in Mexico, who’d been deported three years previously because she was undocumented. He was a DACA recipient, so at that time he was safe, but he was unwilling to risk leaving the U.S. even for a trip. His mother had taken a two-hour flight and a five-hour bus trip to see her son at the border. Her hair was in a high bouffant, her makeup bright and pretty, from what I could make out through the tiny gaps in the wall. I spoke with them for a moment, admired her lipstick, and let them get back to their low, rapid conversation.

  I could have asked the son to join me outside the gate for a quick interview, but I didn’t want to intrude on their limited time together. Another reason I didn’t interview him was because I had a lump in my throat just looking at this mother and child, inches away from each other, unable to hug, as the clock ticked on toward two p.m., when the park would close and the border agents would kick the families out of the U.S. side. I felt oddly ashamed leaving the park, nodding to the Border Patrol agent, a handsome Latino man in his thirties with a dapper haircut. Dan led us back across the white sandy beach and the dark muddy trail to the road, and I asked him if he had any fun stories about things that had happened at Friendship Park. I was clutching at straws, imagining perhaps a wonky camaraderie between Border Patrol agents and community groups, or some defiantly witty take on who would pay for the wall. Dan thought about it for a moment before answering, “Not really, it’s kind of the most heartbreaking place in America.”

  Whatever cute idea I had about a show celebrating this great melting pot of a country, with feel-good stories of fusion food and cosmopolitan couples with bilingual children, seemed hollow to me now. Without dealing with the very real issues of militarized borders and racialized immigration policies, whatever I had to say would be as empty and windy as that beach in San Diego. The next morning, I should have come clean with my producer and accepted whatever was to come. I did not do that. I was still hoping to salvage some part of the promise I’d made, hoping to somehow square the reality with the aspirational, hoping to keep my job.

  So I spun what was definitely not a super-fun experience into something I could pitch to my producer, and emailed a breezy note suggesting a short, extra episode about the border. It won’t be as lighthearted as season two is going to be but deffo worth discussion—thanks so much! I called my junior producer Erika back in New York and asked her if any famous people had agreed to be interviewed, reminding her that my week on the West Coast was running out. Not yet, she told me, but our Romanian cleaning lady in L.A. was getting a little cranky that we had yet to confirm a location and time for her interview. She needed to make sure she could organize time off work, and she had been messed around with by the media before.

  I agreed we needed to set a time, and asked Erika if she knew how far away Orange County was from me right now, and in turn how far away Orange County was from L.A. “No clue. But I used to watch The O.C. and it seemed like they rarely went into the city.” More confused than ever, I hung up and tried to figure out how I was going to get ninety miles up the coast without driving a car. Three buses later I found myself in a Vietnamese sandwich shop, sitting at a table under a mural of James Dean, waiting to interview the owner of the shop and creator of the mural, Lynda Trang Dai. Lynda is known as the Vietnamese Madonna, and she arrived at the table like a whirlwind, a whirlwind with the USA flag painted on her toenails.

  Lynda and I had a great interview; she was charming and chatty. She arrived in the U.S. as a three-year-old and adores her life here, a life that’s equal parts glamour and hard work. She runs the shop and is a pop star in her spare time, playing shows to huge crowds of people from the 1.2-million-strong Vietnamese-American community, making music videos, and even touring back in Vietnam. Here was someone fun; the interview was the bones of an entertaining episode more in keeping with what I had promised. I should have been relieved—but instead I felt even more confused.

  I found it difficult to focus on Lynda’s smooth assimilation into U.S. society while still holding on to her own cultural identity, a success story by all accounts, because my mind kept returning again and again to the most heartbreaking place in America. I reminded myself that immigration adds vast swaths of color to any self-portrait of the U.S., and it incorporates a multitude of tones. There are funny stories and sweet victories in among the struggles and injustices, and surely I could honor those lovely parts too. Perhaps this was the happy mix my producer would accept: a pleasant interview with a charming immigrant, fair ballast to the heavier parts of the story of immigration into the U.S.

  After the interview, I stood in the parking lot waiting for my taxi when Lynda’s father arrived in his pickup truck. A small, wiry man with a shock of gray hair, he reminded me of my own father, particularly when he bent and whipped out a tiny thistle that had just emerged to disrupt the little strip of planting along the front of the restaurant. We talked, taking time to understand each other’s accents. In 1977, Dinh got his three children out of Communist Vietnam on a boat, through a typhoon, an
d washed up on an island off Hong Kong. “What was that like?” I asked him, as casually as asking someone how their trip to the post office was. He cleared his throat and blinked hard, getting upset.

  What did I expect? A confident sound bite, a neat little answer to my question? My question which was basically, Um, hi, I know I just met you in a parking lot in Orange County, but can you, like, fill me in on the worst moments of your life? He was gracious enough to keep talking, after steadying himself for a few seconds. He told me he made it to the U.S. as a refugee, built up a construction and landscaping business, and “can’t say no” whenever one of his seven grandchildren asks him for anything. I asked him if he had any thoughts on our new President, and he looked down with huge sadness. “I can’t bear to look at him.” Without this man there would be no Lynda, at least not as the world knew her. Without his stark choice, terrifying journey, and brave actions in escaping with his little girls, followed by a life of hard work, she would not be able to have that super-fun life. And here he was, devastated by the second country in his lifetime to betray him. Omitting his experience from this wider immigration story I’d decided to tell, particularly after he’d shared it with me, after I’d asked him to share it with me, would be a broken promise too.

  Checking into my hotel in San Francisco the following day, I noticed a group of people crowded around their phones in the lobby, looking aghast. One woman sat with her hand over her mouth, just staring blankly, her phone on the sofa beside her. I sat next to her, and before I got a chance to ask her what was happening, she asked me, “Did you see what they did? This is not America.” It was Executive Order 13769, titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” The new administration had suspended all refugees for 120 days pending review, and Syrian refugees indefinitely. Travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries were barred, thousands of visas revoked, and hundreds of people detained at airports.