Degrees of Reality
It takes a few days after getting back to straighten out my affairs. I visit banks. I sift through the heaps of mail my mom piles on the desk in my bedroom. I wait in line. I make calls, sign forms in black pen, and make photocopies and scans at the public library. I renew my library card at the public library after making photocopies and scans. I go to birthday parties and watch my friends’ ever-growing, now-insanely-old kids turn yet another year older. I text my cousins, who at this point barely know me but still sign their emails with “love.”
Occasionally, I see someone from college, AmeriCorps, or one or another grad school tour. We trip out on how much time has passed, the people who have retired from whatever we knew them from, and the people who have died and thus retired from whatever it is we all know each other from.
I’ve been an expat for six years. I don’t have kids, and I’m not married. I stave off the forces of bureaucratic and social entropy because I like to go home for visits. I do it because I’m almost certain to move back at some point. Despite its endless challenges, the US is too big, too wealthy, and too dynamic to ignore. In my case, it’s also too personal in housing all of my family and most of my friends.
It’s not in my interest to hide. Besides, our hyper-technologized world makes it tough to hide. Everyone knows right where to find you. That is, if they care to find you. If they don’t, then you have to scream and scream to avoid disappearing. You have to post on social media, send out-of-the-blue texts, respond to each and every email. I guess that’s the lacuna at the heart of the panopticon: surveilled if inside or invisible if outside.
When I lived in China, there was a certain segment of questionable folks who’d arrived in the ‘90s before China was what it has become. They hadn’t been home in years if not decades. They were escaping various things—family, failure, responsibility. Some seemed to be fleeing legal issues, but none ever admitted that to me.
They had cell phones—life in China would be impossible without one—but they didn’t use Western apps, which were unpopular and often blocked anyway. They circulated in a different Internet ecosystem, using WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, Weibo, and Red.
They lived in smaller second- and third-tier cities or dodgy rural areas. They kept up with their visas, or they paid bribes, or they just hoped for the best. They paid in cash at glum expat bars. A lot seemed to be English teachers. I had the sense that many saved up to visit prostitutes, but that might just be a stereotype.
These days I live in Bogota. It’s easy to disappear here if you want to. It’s easy even if you don’t want to. Parts of the city are unpoliced, and parts of the country are ungoverned. If I really wanted to disappear, I would need a way to make cash and get paid off the books, but there’s always a way to make cash and get paid off the books, though they’re rarely pleasant.
Like seemingly everywhere now, there’s a big homeless population in Bogota. It’s rare, but every now and then, I’ll see a homeless foreigner. I imagine they’re off the books. Some have tattoos, which for some reason always makes me wonder what their lives were like before whatever happened to them happened to them.
The last time I was home, I renewed my driver’s license. I paid a little extra to have it done at a satellite location, which I was told would be faster. I still had to wait. As I waited, I thought of the expression “degrees of reality” and pictured a person becoming gradually fainter like in a movie about time travel where a character has been written out of history. That was the image that came to mind even though I know that’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality.”
At first, the people at the DMV didn’t want to renew the license because the mail I’d brought to prove my address was junk mail. They changed their mind when I showed them some bill or other, which made me feel weirdly proud. As I walked out, I pictured myself slowly filling in and becoming sturdier like the scenes in time travel movies where the process has been reversed and the character has no longer been written out of history. That’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality” either, but it kind of is, though.