Identity

My Airports

This post is for my sister Shauna, whose affinity for airports matches my own.

I saw Don Muang airport for the last time when I was in Bangkok last August. I thought of how many personal tragedies that airport had witnessed. Mourning for friend who died too young. Temporary exile from Hanoi for reasons that still befuddle my adult brain. It was always comforting in its consistency, its rigorous disclipline: up the escalator, into the long line to have your passport stamped by a frowning immigration officer, down the escalator into the warmly lit baggage claim, through the green customs maze, out past the foreign exchange desks, and into the greeting area. Finally the shock of walking through the sliding doors, each marked with a giant circular sticker, into the hot, viscous air of Bangkok.

I sat in the departure lounge and said a silent goodbye to the glittering wat that housed a shop and to the boxes of cut orchids that I would beg Promila to buy for me as we rushed to catch our flight. Just follow the big yellow signs. How strange it was that our airport was still there, virtually unchanged, and she was gone. Just knowing that we had been there together made her feel closer. Friends were gone, a whole city, a whole identity ripped out from under me, but this airport remained. But not for long, I thought. It too would disappear, become an empty shell at first, then maybe a warehouse, or a shopping mall, or god knows. Perhaps they would just tear it down.

Calcutta airport, in a way, was always a place of pain. It would greet me with sad familiarity that evoked my pity as I grew, got my eduction, lived fully and richly, elsewhere. I would arrive with guilt and leave filled with sad nostalgia as I left Takurma behind, never quite knowing if she’d still be there when I returned. At some point, I just stopped returning, and now, she’s truly gone. Calcutta was the IMH building and being doted on by, apart from Takurma, a flock of nursery masis, drivers, cooks, and the cleaning staff. My sister and I were the princesses of International Mission of Hope, and the IMH building on 2 Nimak Mahal Road was our palace and our playground; we rarely left the compound, unless it was to eat Phuchka or buy comic books. With all that gone, how can I return? I was born in Calcutta, and yet it’s a place I cannot quite own, perhaps because of the overwhelming sense of loss I feel when I think of it. It is a black hole. Maybe one day I can return and say, like Prospero of Caliban, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

For all the memories my airports hold, Taipei was sadly nothing more than a smoking lounge. Not even a lounge but a booth, for “lounge” conjures up images of indolent luxury, and this was just a garishly lit glass cube where visibility (and breathability) was reduced to zero from all the cigarette smoke. I quit smoking a few years back, and it was strange being in Taipei last year and not having to book it to the smoking lounge to suck down a quick cigarette before boarding my flight to Hanoi.

The old Noi Bai airport was like all of Hanoi then: rough-edged, painted yellow, moldering. But it gave what for me was the warmest welcome, that distinct Hanoi scent of mildew and rain clouds. Immigration, baggage claim, and customs were all housed in one big space separated by glass, and you could see the waiting crowd as you stood in line to have your passport stamped, if you weren’t distracted by the giant advertising billboards that slowly encircled the room over the years. The new airport is also a reflection of the new Hanoi, attempting to become more polished, but not quite there yet. The place felt cold, and I couldn’t help but think that it was supposed to evoke the Mausoleum in its solemn greyness. But I chuckled at one nha que, erroneously translated English sign and took comfort.

On arrival, Denver International Airport (and Stapleton before it) was always the gateway to the surreality of being back in America. It was comforting, in some ways, to not be seen after months on end of being a novelty. But when leaving Colorado, it was also the gateway back into the real world, and I still get excited whenever I’m back there to drop someone off or pick someone up. Just being in an airport gives me a taste of the outside world, of travel and international life, which is so scarce here in boxed-in, closed-off, isolated, dead-to-the world Colorado.

We TCKs like to collect airports, don’t we? They are places that seem to remember when everything else forgets.