Jose Antonio Vargas: My Life as an Undocumented Citizen

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In the lastest issue of New York Times Magazine, writer Jose Antonio Vargas (who wrote the sublime piece on Mark Zuckerberg last year) bares it all and reveals the incredible story of how he arrived to America and has been living here as an illegal immigrant.

This paragraph sets the stage, and thumps the heart:

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

His approach to life is one of fear and hesitation:

On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream…But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me…

I can relate to the challenge of learning the language, English, as Vargas explains here (I used to watch Home Improvement as well):

My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated my presence here.

Again and again, Vargas reiterates how difficult the deception was:

For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would get caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and I decided this was the way.

So why come forward like this? Vargas explains:

So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses­ and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

Good for him. I imagine a tremendous burden has been lifted. Earlier I wrote about liberation. I think Vargas feels so liberated now. Let’s hope he gets the chance to stay in America and continue doing great work in journalism. You should read his entire remarkable story, in which he reveals his progression from his work on a high school newspaper  to work at the Huffington Post and Washington Post, to where he stands today. Amazing.

 

The Origin of Cyberspace

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William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, is credited with coining the term cyberspace.

In the recent issue of Paris Review, he reveals how he came about the term:

Gibson: I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

Interviewer: And you knew at that point you had your arena?

Gibson: I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there were all sorts of things I could do there that I hadn’t even been able to imagine yet. But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a really good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling—infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, Oh, that’s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth—I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow… I made up a whole bunch of things that happened in cyberspace, or what you could call cyberspace, and so I filled in my empty neologism. But because the world came along with its real cyberspace, very little of that stuff lasted. What lasted was the neologism

I love how Gibson describes the enlightenment: the feeling in the mouth, as though he is synesthetic.

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Hat tip for this post: Paul Kedrosky.

Related: how Haruki Murakami became a writer. 

David Foster Wallace: “Frightening Time in America”

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A never before published (in the United States) 2006 interview with David Foster Wallace has appeared in The New York Review of Books. I enjoyed getting to know the genius of David Foster Wallace from this fascinating interview.

Two notable quotes. First, DFW on the state of America [emphasis mine]:

Speaking totally as an amateur and not any kind of government expert, I would say America’s now starting to face certain economic realities that we’ve been shielded from for many years. The price of gasoline is slowly becoming closer to what it is in the rest of the world. The awareness that the entire Earth’s climate is affected by all nations, and that the United States as far and away the biggest carbon dioxide producer bears some special responsibility for possible environmental collapse later. Americans are slowly waking up out of a kind of dream of special exemption and special privilege in the world. To use your term, this could result in some kind of volcano and America becoming some kind of nightmarish imperial force trying to take resources from other countries forcibly, or it could result, as I think it does in many countries in cycles, in a kind of slow awakening to the fact that having and consuming and exhausting resources is actually not a very good set of values for living.

So which way it will go? I don’t know. And it’s one reason it’s a very frightening time in America, particularly with the people who’re in power right now—many of us are in the position of being more afraid of our own country and our own government than we are of any supposed enemy somewhere else. For someone like me who grew up in the sixties at the height of the Cold War and whose consciousness was formed by, “we are the good guy and there’s one great looming dark enemy and that’s the Soviet Union,” the idea of waking up to the fact that in today’s world very possibly we are the villain, we are the dark force, to begin to see ourselves a little bit through the eyes of people in other countries—you can imagine how difficult that is for Americans to do. Nevertheless, with a lot of the people that I know that’s slowly starting to happen.

A good exchange between the interviewer, Ostap Karmodi, and DFW here:

OK: What do you think of the modern state of American literature?

DFW: Ugggggghhhhh. Somebody asked me this a couple of weeks ago. I think the truth is that it’s a very exciting period but it’s one that probably people in other countries won’t have as much access to. Because 30 or 40 years ago American literature mainly existed in ten or a dozen giant literary figures, and there are now probably more like 100 or 200 literary figures, all of whom are quite good and quite interesting, but none really of the stature and international reputation of, say, a Saul Bellow or a William Faulkner or an Ernest Hemingway.

The Great Hamster of Alsace and France’s Folly

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The Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the European Union’s highest court, ruled Thursday that France had failed to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, sometimes known as the European hamster, the last wild hamster species in Western Europe.

This from a short (but awesome) New York Times piece on why France is being punished.

So that’s your trivia of the week:

The Great Hamster, which can grow up to 10 inches long, has a brown-and-white face, white paws and a black belly. There are thought to be about 800 left in France, with burrows in Alsace along the Rhine. That is an improvement: the number had dropped to fewer than 200 four years ago, according to figures from the European Commission, which brought the lawsuit in 2009.

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Hat tip: Michelle Legro.

The Man Who Played Rockefeller

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Mark Seal’s “The Man Who Played Rockefeller” is far and away the best thing I’ve read all week. It is a riveting, at times unbelievable, account of how a German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to the United States at the tender age of 17 and proceeded to climb up the ranks of society. But he did it through conniving tactics, playing cool, and always acting the impostor.

You must read the whole thing, but I highlight some notable passages below. If you’ve seen LOST, you remember the mention of the long con. I claim that Gerhartsreiter’s story can be dubbed The Long Con.

Gerhartsreiter’s ascendance followed discrete steps, beginning with his rise in California:

When he appeared in the wealthy, leafy town of San Marino, California, three years later, Gerhartsreiter, now 20, had transformed himself into Christopher Mountbatten Chichester, a self-proclaimed computer expert, film producer, stockbroker and the nephew of Lord Mountbatten. The new arrival was a whiz at Trivial Pursuit, the American pop-culture game, and proved especially popular with women, who were charmed by his royal bloodline and courtly manners. “He knew everything about everything,” one woman told me recently. “He was fabulous.”

His next move was toward the East Coast, where he took a new name, Christopher C. Crowe, which he’d taken from the producer of the series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

For the freshly minted Crowe, the doors to an incredible new career opened at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, an exclusive sailing organization that dates back to 1889. It is a picture-perfect setting, a white wooden building festooned with yachting flags looking out onto Long Island Sound. “Imagine hundreds of people here for a regatta,” said my local guide, a woman I’ll call Samantha. “Nobody would know anything. The guy could sneak in [easily], coming up from the shore.”

To me, one of the most astounding part of the story was his rise through the ranks on Wall Street, where he had to pass difficult tests to become a licensed broker dealer:

But Crowe not only had to get through a personal interview with the shrewd Phelps, he also had to pass difficult tests. Everyone who works at a broker-dealer company must take the Series 7 and Series 63 exams, which consist of more than seven hours of questions. The Series 7, which has 250 multiple-choice questions, takes about six hours to complete; Crowe most likely took his test at One Police Plaza in New York City. “Two three-hour parts, with a one-hour break,” said Samantha. “Some people have to take it two or three times. I’ve taken this test. It’s not easy. He might have been odd. He might have been arrogant. But he’s smart.”

Crowe let Samantha and everyone else at S. N. Phelps know that in addition to being a techie he was also the producer of a new series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” “And if you looked at the credits, you would see Christopher Crowe,” said Samantha. “I asked him one time, ‘Christopher, it’s illogical to me. You’re a producer. And you’ve become a techie at a junk bond shop making $24,000 a year?’ He said, ‘I wanted to try something different.’ “

On Crowe’s lifestyle living someone else’s life:

Crowe was living the life of a Wall Street player: a six-figure salary, an office in the World Financial Center and an estate in Greenwich—or at least a few rooms behind an estate in Greenwich. A list of some of the charges on his American Express card (issued in the name of CCC Mountbatten) from 1987 to 1988 shows he dined in Manhattan’s finest restaurants: the “21” Club, Le Bernardin, the Quilted Giraffe and Bellini by Cipriani, among others. He was a regular on Broadway and at the opera, charging tickets to shows including “Phantom of the Opera” and “Madame Butterfly.” There were numerous charges for clothing, from such stores as Burberry, Church’s English Shoes and J. Press. He bought chocolates or flowers on almost a weekly basis—gifts, presumably, for people with whom he wanted to ingratiate himself.

And for the final, most ambitious metamorphosis, Gerhartsreiter became Rockefeller:

When he entered the magnificent Gothic church in early 1992, the former Christopher Crowe had a new name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep-school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

The newcomer had quite a tale to tell. “He intimated that he was from the Percy Rockefeller branch of the clan—not John D. ultrarich, but plenty rich,” said a member of the congregation I’ll call John Wells. “He claimed to have grown up on Sutton Place [the East Side enclave of some of the grandest townhouses in the city]. He claimed to have gone to Yale at something like age 14. He had the Yale scarf with the blue stripes on it. He said he had one of the J-boats from his grandparents—you know, the classic 1920s, 1930s sailing yachts.”

Read the rest of the story to find out how he was caught. I didn’t mention it above, but interwoven in the story is a murder… This story is a hell a lot more interesting than some of the movies I’ve seen recently, and I am sure you’ll agree when you read the story yourself.

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Note: Mark Seal’s story is adapted from Mark Seal’s book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, which is slated to be released on June 2, 2011.

Amazon Reveals Most Well-Read Cities in America

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Amazon.com came out with an interesting press release today, touting the most “well-read” cities in the United States.

Just in time for the summer reading season, Amazon.com announced its list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. After compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts

2. Alexandria, Virginia

3. Berkeley, California

4. Ann Arbor, Michigan

5. Boulder, Colorado

6. Miami, Florida

7. Salt Lake City, Utah

8. Gainesville, Florida

9. Seattle, Washington

10. Arlington, Virginia

11. Knoxville, Tennessee

12. Orlando, Florida

13. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

14. Washington, D.C.

15. Bellevue, Washington

16. Columbia, South Carolina

17. St. Louis, Missouri

18. Cincinnati, Ohio

19. Portland, Oregon

20. Atlanta, Georgia

This is an interesting list. Most likely, Cambridge is number one on the list because of the dense concentration of universities in the area (Harvard and MIT). I am glad my hometown of Atlanta made the cut.

However, the list bothers me because it’s an indirect measure of reading, as the gauge here is sales of books rather than consumption (i.e., reading of books). I can imagine the statistics are skewed toward college towns where students are buying textbooks in bulk in preparation for the start of their semesters/quarters at college.

I myself purchase books on Amazon in bulk — typically five to ten at a time, once I’ve added these books to my shopping cart over a span of a few days (or weeks). However, if I purchase ten books today, when will I have actually read them? Perhaps well into next year. This confounding factor certainly plays a (major) role in interpreting this list.

Of course, I don’t know of a good way to measure actual reading of books (versus sales of books). What about you?

New Yorker Profile of Joseph Brodsky

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In this month’s New Yorker, there is an interesting profile of Joseph Brodsky and the fortune of misfortunes.

If you aren’t familiar with Brodsky’s story and his exile from Russia, that piece is an excellent primer. I’ve previously profiled a conversation between Brodksy and a judge in this post (scroll down to the bottom), but this exchange (profiled in the New Yorker) was new to me:

Judge: Tell the court why in between jobs you didn’t work and led a parasitic life style?
Brodsky: I worked in between jobs. I did what I do now: I wrote poems.
Judge: You wrote your so-called poems? And what was useful about your frequent job changes?
Brodsky: I began working when I was 15 years old. Everything was interesting to me. I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people.
Judge: What did you do for your motherland?
Brodsky: I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced. . . . I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
Judge: So you think your so-called poems are good for people?
Brodsky: Why do you say of the poems that they are “so-called”?
Judge: We say that because we don’t have any other idea about them. 

Of note is this paragraph about Brosky’s loneliness when coming to the United States:

Brodsky’s poems during his first years in the States are filled with the most naked loneliness. “An autumn evening in a humble little town / proud of its appearance on the map,” one begins, and concludes with an image of a person whose reflection in the mirror disappears, bit by bit, like that of a street lamp in a drying puddle. The enterprising Proffer had persuaded the University of Michigan to make Brodsky a poet in residence; Brodsky wrote a poem about a college teacher. “In the country of dentists,” it begins, “whose daughters order clothes / from London catalogues, . . . / I, whose mouth houses ruins / more total than the Parthenon’s, / a spy, an interloper, / the fifth column of a rotten civilization,” teach literature. The narrator comes home at night, falls into bed with his clothes still on, and cries himself to sleep…

I also thought the author’s conviction on Brodsky’s grasp of the English language was profound (I am reminded of Nabokov in this instance):

His [Brodsky’s] English was able to grant his parents a measure of freedom. But there was one thing it could not do: transform his Russian poetry into English poetry. Inevitably, Brodsky tried, and he wasn’t shy about it. Almost as soon as his English was up to snuff he began to “collaborate” with his translators; eventually he supplanted them. The results were not so much bad as badly uneven. For every successful stanza, there were three or four gaffes—grammatical, or idiomatic, or just generally tin-eared. Worst of all, to readers accustomed to postwar Anglo-American poetry, Brodsky’s translations rhymed, no matter what obstacles stood in their way.

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Hat Tip: @openculture. 

Derek Miller’s (@PenMachine) Last Blog Post

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If you knew you were dying tomorrow, what would you do? And if you had a blog, would you compose a final entry?

Derek Miller, blogger at penmachine.com, published his final post just before his death. It begins:

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who’s 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It’s become part of their lives, alas.

Was Derek afraid of dying?

So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.

If you do decide to read the full post, do have a tissue nearby. It’s heartbreaking. Yet so, so courageous to go out like this:

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don’t look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.

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Related: regrets of the dying.

One Year Later: Deepwater Horizon Explosion

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Today, April 20, marks the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last year, we’ve seen hundreds of headlines depicting the disaster and BP’s recovery efforts to clean the oil. But there’s one article I want to highlight which strongly resonated with me since I first read it. It is “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” published in New York Times Magazine the day after Christmas, 2010. I didn’t highlight the article in my blog as I was traveling at the time, but it’s one of the most riveting pieces I read the entire year. The 2011 Pulitzer Prices were recently announced, and if I had any say in it, I think David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul should have won the prize for investigative reporting.

On paper, experts and investigators agree, the Deepwater Horizon should have weathered [a] blowout.

This is the story of how and why it didn’t.

It is based on interviews with 21 Horizon crew members and on sworn testimony and written statements from nearly all of the other 94 people who escaped the rig. Their accounts, along with thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times describing the rig’s maintenance and operations, make it possible to finally piece together the Horizon’s last hours.

What emerges is a stark and singular fact: crew members died and suffered terrible injuries because every one of the Horizon’s defenses failed on April 20. Some were deployed but did not work. Some were activated too late, after they had almost certainly been damaged by fire or explosions. Some were never deployed at all.

At critical moments that night, members of the crew hesitated and did not take the decisive steps needed. Communications fell apart, warning signs were missed and crew members in critical areas failed to coordinate a response.

The result, the interviews and records show, was paralysis. For nine long minutes, as the drilling crew battled the blowout and gas alarms eventually sounded on the bridge, no warning was given to the rest of the crew. For many, the first hint of crisis came in the form of a blast wave.

I hope you read it. This is truly a must-read piece, and I think it was (significantly) overlooked when it was published right after Christmas late last year.

Roberto Bolaño on Exile and Writing

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I enjoyed reading Roberto Bolaño’s essay Exiles in The New York Review of Books. Exiles was drawn from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003), and translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Here is how Bolaño describes exile:

To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self… Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.

I also really like the thought process here (especially the part I emphasize below):

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

But the passage below is my favourite, about how writers are different from other professions:

No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily—for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc.—but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while. Whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work. What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. And that’s not even to mention poets. Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there are often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions.

Would you agree with Roberto Bolaño’s comparison? Note that you may sympathize with Bolaño’s description of exile (first quoted passage), but disagree with his assessment of writers.

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Aside: on my reading list is Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.