Sometime in the early 90s, a bright-eyed, idealistic young man, fresh out of high school and his mandatory two years of military service, packed up everything he had to his name and crossed the ocean for the very first time. The almost thirty-some-hour quadruple flight from Singapore to Tokyo to Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin must have been draining in and of itself, but added to that the fact that United Airlines had lost all his baggage along the way it must have been soul-crushing. What it must have been like to step out into that tiny Midwestern town, its streets, buildings, and lampposts caked in layers of lake-effect snow, the bitter Wisconsin cold like a sucker punch to the face.
Alone in America at the end of history. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union but recent headlines, recent memories. And a bright-eyed twenty-one-year-old, complete with his signature round glasses, alone, free, alive.
It mustn’t have felt that way at the time, on that dark night in Madison when that distant friend of a friend of a friend of a friend failed to show up to fetch him from the airport, when the stores along State St, lining the path to the University of Wisconsin campus, holding the essentials he’d need to survive the cold long shut for the night. A single empanada, on W Gorham and State, the only thing he could find to eat. Perhaps it never felt that way to him the whole time he spent at UW, never quite occurred to him as he took to the Interstates in his early-80s Yugo, spending every second he could, free, in America.
I spent today with that man, now much older, but just as gentle, thoughtful, kind, idealistic, ambitious, drunk, whether he knows it or not, on that love of freedom, that willingness to bask in something commensurate to the human capacity for wonder. Today, we took the 3 bus down Main St to just along 22nd, where we had some Dim Sum, and he ordered his favourite deep-fried dishes he isn’t supposed to eat much of anymore. We walked down Main checking out bookstores where I purchased all my course texts for the coming semester, and though he was never much of a reader I could tell he was fascinated flipping through all the titles. We talked about my grandmother, my uncle who passed when I was very young, how much I would have liked him. We checked out some donut shops, stopped for ice cream, walked slowly back to the apartment. It was a sunny day in Vancouver, the January light casting everything in gold, the clouds gathering along the North Shore mountains, and it was a good day.
There are few things that I find so powerful, so close to my heart as to render me almost immediately to tears. Chief among these is a love of freedom, one of many things I share with my dad. On a brisk autumn day in November, I wandered along the banks of the Hudson River in lower Manhattan and stared out across the water, looked up at the Manhattan skyline cast in early-morning sunlight, watched the city wake up, spring to action, saw Lady Liberty out in the distance. That testament to everything that was possible, that everything we could do if we set our minds to it, that home for all who wander, for all who dare to do, to live free or die trying.
I realise today that the countless sacrifices this man made for me were for this. This love of freedom. For him to leave a well-paying job, a stable social circle, a life of material bliss and comfort, to cross the ocean once again and to start anew, and to risk it all doing it, all so that he might give me that gift that so defies description, the gift of freedom. He saw it once, along those icy roads in Wisconsin, and he thought it so wondrous as to leave, to spend his life elsewhere, no doubt dreaming of all that great Midwestern space the whole time, such that he might bring me here, grant me what he never had. He saw that freedom once, held it in his hands, only to let it go, to give it to me instead. That is the greatest gift I could ever receive, and to the man who gave it to me, who gave me everything, I owe all my life, and more, ever more.
ansel
vancouver, british columbia
line of best fit 