Today marks the third day since the improbable occurred. I had never really entertained that tomorrow I might be returning to a country possibly headed towards fascism, but now we feel shell-shocked. I think maybe more than Eric or Helen I’ve shut out the absurd reality. I feel a million miles away from America, practically isolated in this remote island near the arctic, and emotionally estranged from the country I call home.
Two thoughts have stubbornly bubbled past my repression of reality: the nobler one a concern for the most vulnerable in our society, now facing an emboldened bigotry, the other a guttural survivalism considering moving out of New York for fear of nuclear war and the possibility of finding myself in an internment camp in case of a war with China.
For now, I’m still a world away. We drive across stark moonscapes, moss pastures, and glacier-carved ranges. The other-worldliness of it all matches the bizzaro-quality of the timeline we now occupy, on the other hand the ethereal beauty does not.
As we drive from vista to vista, Helen, Eric, and I slowly let reality seep in. We go through the motions of being tourists; we smile for photos, we acknowledge undeniable beauty around us, we mourn each at our own pace.
I take pride in being a pragmatist, even a realist, but I find my practical constitution failing me, as if I’m dipping my feet in painfully cold water; the prospect of my body adjusting once fully submerged, but I recoil at the pain and the fear that I might drown after all.
I’ve also been making my way through “Extremely loud and incredibly close.” I can’t help but to read it as a parallel reflection on catastrophe, a story of people finding their footing in a post-crisis world (in this case 9/11). While Oskar’s personal trauma is his own, he copes in a world united in mourning, and in solidarity against the perpetrators. Our own crisis, albeit with less personal tragedy, is more troubling in other ways. We awake to a rude reality in which our neighbors and fellow citizens suddenly feel a lot more like strangers.The ugliness we wrestle with is not a grotesque foreign enemy, but an internal sickness in which we each share complicity.
I hope there is a better future yet for the American experiment, and I will not shirk my responsibility in the project towards a more perfect union, but today I am not an optimist.
Jack Wang 