Maeve in America Page 15

  So the airport was where I needed to be. I checked my recorder batteries in the taxi on the way. As we took the turnoff to SFO, the Lyft driver asked, “Where are you off to?” I replied at once. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” I told him. “I’m staying right here.” It felt like a profound thing to say, but, as is so often the case, it was unhelpful. “Okay. Well, I need to know which terminal, like departures, arrivals, just ballpark where I gotta drop you off.” Mortified, I checked Twitter but couldn’t get a clear idea of where people were gathering. I asked him to drop me at whichever terminal was closest. The airport felt strange. At first it seemed like business as usual, people milling around, hauling their luggage, chatting on their phones. Then I heard it, a swell of sound coming from downstairs, outside. It was the sound of hundreds of people chanting, and I followed the chanting as it got stronger and stronger, floating up the escalators, booming through the elevators, an irresistible magnet pulling all of us together.

  Airport police stood aside as the sidewalk outside the terminal filled with hordes of people holding banners and signs. There were old couples, children, disabled people, of all races and creeds, listening to hurriedly assembled speakers proclaiming the injustice of this ban. More and more people continued to pour in, chanting, “No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all.” Lawyers were arriving, worried-looking young women in suit jackets, as was the media, mics charging and laptops plugged into power outlets around the terminal. Cameras crowded around a weeping man as he waited for his pregnant wife. She should have been out by now; he was growing frantic. The crowd soon surged into the terminal, crying, “Let the lawyers in, let the families out.” At a certain point I stopped taping and just stood and shouted with the rest of the crowd.

  That night, I had to be funny again. I was booked to do some shows at Sketchfest, a comedy festival that takes over the city every January. Jolted into a new realm of awareness, adrenaline high from that day at the airport, I felt very odd preparing to go out with my old routines about dating and bolero cardigans. (Those are two different bits, in case you’re wondering; I would never wear a bolero on a date.) I couldn’t do that, I had to talk about what was happening to immigrants. I felt bad going onstage in front of an audience who’d bought their tickets weeks in advance and talking about the ban, about how lucky I was to be a European immigrant, to be white, about how bigoted this government was. They had just come for a giggle, to put aside whatever their own troubles were for a bit. They didn’t need some newly right-on foreigner telling them her half-formed thoughts. But, thankfully, they were good-natured about it—my real blunder was yet to come.

  The comedy festival had a family car waiting to take us back to the hotel, with two rows of seats. After the show, three of us sat in it, one per row, waiting for the headliner, who’d been accosted by fans and was getting her photo taken on the street outside. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world, to sit waiting for the star to finish with her public sparkling so you can all go back to the hotel, and the mood was cranky. I read aloud Twitter updates about the ban. “Looks like Iran is retaliating by banning U.S. citizens.” The white woman in the seat in front of me rolled her eyes. “Okay, but I mean, it’s, like, clearly bad for international relations or whatever, but it’s not like I want to visit Iran. Who the fuck wants to go to Iran?” My heart started to beat faster, and I went in. I had been to Iran. “Wow, I do! I want to go back there. It’s an incredible place and it smells like bread and roses and there is history and poetry there that Americans don’t even get close to. Maybe that’s why they’re scared of it.” She looked sufficiently chastened and I felt quite pleased with myself.

  Filled with a newly lit sense of my own importance in this historic moment, I went back to updating the car. “Okay. Okay, so the latest is a judge has ordered a stay on deportations but the DHS was still holding people! Lawyers are trying to get the people out but the cops won’t let them! How are they going to defy the courts like this? It’s just unprecedented.” The black woman in the front seat, quiet until now, heaved a sigh and turned to face me. “Right, unprecedented. Okay. So I guess that whole school segregation thing passed you by, huh?” The thing is, it had. Filled with righteous indignation, I had not thought about how this ugly moment fit into the string of ugly moments that make up U.S. history, something I had been allowed to do because of my privilege. Mind blown open, the ignorance enjoyed by my whiteness exposed for all to see, I sat back. When I glanced at the rearview mirror I met the quizzical eye of the Sikh driver. He shook his head a little, smiling, not unkindly, and turned the radio on.

  There was no one moment when I realized that I would have to confront my broken promise of a super-fun podcast about immigration, no showdown where I had to face the consequences that would jeopardize my show and career. It seemed that things were happening, both in the news and in my relationship to it, that I was not prepared for. I could not ignore the spasms and pain being felt by the country I lived in. I had to follow the pain, which meant putting aside the jokes and the artifice, for a while at least.

  That January in L.A. was full of rain, bringing an end to the drought that had plagued the city for years. Later I’d be back to witness the incredible beauty of the “Super Bloom,” when the deserts of Southern California erupted in color. Every spring the annuals that grow in deserts come to life, and because of the drenching rains, that year there was a far greater than usual explosion of wildflowers. The L.A. hills, usually so bare, came alive with vibrant greenery, purple verbena, orange poppies, and beautiful little white and yellow dune primroses.

  Getting soaked by the January rain, I didn’t know then that an explosion of color and beauty and nature was to come. I’d given up on the idea of finding a celebrity immigrant, and my chances of making a super-fun second season were fading with every encounter. The studio where I was interviewing my final L.A. guest, the Romanian cleaning lady, was difficult to locate. It was in the basement of a university, and the rain came down in stinging sheets as I wandered around the campus looking for the door. My guest had the same problem, and arrived cold and wet and furious.

  Liana Ghica has thick black hair and brown eyes that flash with intelligence. She was dressed all in black and was loudly condemning my team in her fabulous Eastern European accent. “You need to be more organized—how am I supposed to find this place? And it is late now. And my shoes, look, they are soaked!” I apologized and showed her that my shoes were soaked through too. She unwrapped her scarf and looked at me. “And for you, it’s no problem. For me, I get sick one day, I lose my job. I have no health insurance, okay? It’s not the same. You people have messed around with me before.” It turned out Liana had spoken to reporters before about her life as an undocumented immigrant, which, aside from being difficult and sometimes painful to discuss, is risky, too. And those journalists were not always respectful of her time and her story. They sometimes ended up cutting it for a “better” one, which felt to her like a betrayal.

  I assured her that I would do no such thing. I was not looking to exploit her. No, I created this show as a platform for immigrants to tell their own stories. I promised her that we would treat her story—and when I said story, in this case I meant her entire life as an undocumented immigrant—with respect and care. In that moment, I was not thinking about the promise I’d made back in a New York diner to jazz up the show. If I had thought about it, I’d have known I was breaking it once more. Now here I was making yet another promise I was not sure I could keep, telling Liana we would definitely use her story, assuring her it would meet her expectations exactly.

  We began taping, and it didn’t go very well. Liana was reserved and cautious, and I was hyper-aware that my tone did not match hers, and that jollying her along wasn’t going to work out well. The interview revealed the bare bones of Liana’s story. She grew up under the Communist authoritarian Nicolae Ceauşescu; she came from an academic family, many of whom fled the regime in the 1980s and were gr
anted asylum in the U.S. She and her parents stayed behind, living in the shadows of a government that was always watching them. She eventually married a neurosurgeon and had a little boy, Vlad. They divorced when Vlad was two. Liana was now a single mother, a label that carried huge stigma with it in 1990s Romania. A teacher at her son’s school took her aside and said, “Vlad is exceptionally bright, but it is a pity that being the child of a broken home is and always will be a handicap.” This despite the fact that Liana had gone to law school and worked her way to becoming, at twenty-nine, the chief of staff for the deputy of the Department of Justice.

  Liana soon secured a job offer with a lobbying firm in Sacramento, and decided to go for it. She entered the U.S. on a visitor’s visa a couple of weeks before 9/11, after which the company decided against hiring anyone from outside the U.S. and rescinded their job offer. Her visa expired, but she decided to stay for her son’s sake, as well as her own.

  We wrapped the interview, and while I felt that hers was a strong voice for the undocumented community, I didn’t feel like I knew her very well at all. Before she left, she told me that her son, Vlad, a DACA recipient and graduate of UCLA, worked as an immigrants’ rights activist, and was helping to host an exhibition the next day. Liana suggested I stop by to meet him, and perhaps have lunch in her house beforehand. So, on my last day in California, fresh out of ideas about how to seduce celebrities onto the show, I happily sat in Liana’s spotless and pretty one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood she called “bad at night.” Paintings of Romanian Eastern Orthodox saints and shelves full of tchotchkes watched over us as we ate a delicious chicken stew with a baguette followed by a creamy yogurt cake, made by Liana that morning.

  She seemed much happier to be in her own space, a congenial empress welcoming me into her little palace. Liana was less guarded with the mics off, funny and warm, and excited about me meeting Vlad. I suddenly wondered where he slept, and she pointed to a fold-out bed, tucked away now to make room for the table and covered in a rose-colored chenille blanket. I asked her how she would describe their relationship and she said, “He is my rock and my motivation in everything I do.”

  As soon as we got to the exhibition, organized by the Labor Center in UCLA, I spotted Vlad. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and very white, wearing a blazer and slacks and a smart pair of spectacles. He looked like a Young Republican among the other activist kids, who were predominantly Latinx and Asian and black. He showed me around the exhibition, which was stunning: multimedia and still photos capturing the vibrancy and strength in the undocumented community. There were gorgeous images of graduating college students standing in orange groves, arms flung around their proud parents who worked through the long hot summers in those very groves, their graduation caps decorated with butterflies—the unofficial symbol of the Dreamers—and phrases like GRACIAS MAMI Y PAPI and UNDOCUMENTED AND UNAFRAID.

  Much has been written about the Dreamers—the generations of children brought to the U.S. by their parents, who grew up undocumented—and, more often than not, know no other country but the U.S. They are Americans without papers and, while I want to avoid the “good immigrant” narrative, it’s impossible not to point out that they really are exceptional people. They were offered a scrap of an opportunity by the Obama administration in the form of DACA and they grabbed it with both hands. As well as working and going to school, they often support their families, not just financially but with paperwork, language translation, and deciphering other codes of life in the U.S. that are unfamiliar to their parents. The larger story of the Dreamers is a feel-good story, beloved by many a media outlet. But there is a flip side to that level of perfection, and in my new wide-awake state I couldn’t help but ask about it.

  I asked Vlad about this pressure, to be good, to be perfect. He said that as a child he was simply in survivor mode. “The focus was on doing well at school, that was my train of thought for a long time, doing what I could to prove we deserved to be here.” He started working after school as soon as he could, painting houses, dog-sitting, tutoring, and doing more than five hundred hours of voluntary community work in high school, determined to make the case that he and his mother belonged here in the U.S. Now, at twenty-four, he has a more measured view. “It’s ridiculous that people have to earn their humanity in this country. But it’s a reality; many folks are fighting to prove themselves.” He and the other activists were preparing for the worst—that is, the end of DACA.

  When the DACA option first became available, it took Vlad almost a year to convince his mother that he should sign up for it. Liana did not trust the government not to use the information provided by the recipients against them and their families, particularly when a new administration came along. Now, of course, we know she was right to be wary. But even as he argued for it back then, Vlad had reservations about DACA and the way it separated people into categories—kids from their parents, the worthy from the unworthy. “I look back on it and realize there is a bigger systemic issue at play, and it strikes me as backward that there is less value on the life of my mother. I’m elevated because of my education, and she is ignored.”

  There was so much consideration in everything he said, a caution many undocumented people, even those with DACA, have no choice but to practice. They cannot be flip. This is not to say they can’t be joyful, or funny, or smart-mouthed. It’s just that, because of their precarity in the U.S., they are deadly serious about it. I asked what it was like growing up with Liana, and he said he felt that they were a little team, despite the fact that he spent a lot of time alone as she worked two or even three jobs. He also said she was relentless in making sure he got his education. I laughed a little and said I could imagine that—after all, she is so fierce. “That’s who she has had to be—as much as that is a beautiful quality, I think we can’t overlook the fact that, how do you put it . . .?” He thought for a second before continuing. “Forging steel requires a lot of hammering, a lot of heat, and a lot of pressure. It’s admirable, but it means people have scars and they’ve been through a lot.”

  I’ve long been fascinated by the multiverse theory, in which physicists examine the possibility of a cosmos in which there are multiple universes. Each alternate universe carries its own different version of reality. Rarely, if ever, do we get a glimpse of the shape our own lives may take in the multiverse. That evening at the exhibition in L.A., I met a woman who may well have been Liana, existing in another universe in the same cosmos, living a life that veered close to Liana’s until it took a few small turns in another direction and emerged wholly different.

  Like Liana, Marina Andrei is a small woman, with thick black hair and eyes that flash with intelligence. She grew up in Romania and went to the same university and the same law school in Bucharest as Liana. They had the same professors, and ambitions, and both have one child. But their universes diverged at some crucial moments; Marina has a happy marriage to a Romanian husband who supported her when they moved to California and she studied for the bar exam there. She is now an immigration attorney in L.A., with her own practice, and a sharp sense of how much chance is involved in all of our lives.

  Marina did not know Liana until she moved to L.A., and the ebb and flow of their parallel lives is something she feels keenly: “Knowing the potential she has, it breaks my heart thinking that she doesn’t have the same opportunities I did.” As we stood in a doorway, holding little warm glasses of sparkling water, Marina told me of the dangers faced by Liana and her other undocumented friends and clients. “You don’t have an identity, tomorrow someone might knock on your door and you’re gone.” It struck me then how brave Liana was to tell her story publicly, as I’d asked her to. The dangers are so great when you are undocumented; I don’t believe I had appreciated the risk she was taking until that moment. I asked Marina how it felt to look out from her own neatly ordered universe, with little piles of paperwork all in place, over to Liana’s universe, one swirling with uncertainty. H
er throat caught. “I have no words. She poured everything she had into her relationship with her son. I look at her and I think that raising her son the way she did, and preparing him for this battle, that is her victory.”

  Liana’s story was my story, and it wasn’t one that I could dress up in a neat little narrative, let alone tie with a super-fun ribbon. Her story was the one I cared about now, the one I wanted to share and amplify as my own small way of opposing the wrongdoings forever unfolding here in the U.S. I looked at Liana, posing for a photo with other parents of Dreamers, physically embracing her undocumented community, face flushed with pride. She was not a cleaning lady, a former lawyer, a devoted mother, an undocumented immigrant. She was the super-bloom.

  Back in New York, there was no good way to dress up my broken promise. There was no super-fun show with celebrities and jokes. Reviewing my material, I could see there was a series of voices, real and urgent, bursting out with stories that I knew were not told enough. The ice-cold gap between reality and entertainment was not one I could bridge. Back at the office, my producer had not given up. He was upbeat that now, with the travel ban in the news, there was a possibility of booking one of my high-profile comedian friends to talk about Syria, or maybe getting a YouTuber with over a million followers to do a spot on the podcast—that way we could maybe get a shout-out in one of his videos. I couldn’t even pretend that I thought this might work. I said it wasn’t possible, and explained who I had lined up in the coming weeks: an actual Syrian asylum-seeker, a luggage salesman, devoted father, a man desperately trying to quit smoking but worried about putting on weight if he succeeded.