Pass the Nepali guard in the red beret who stands in the center divide of the highway and salutes those passing in their air-conditioned cars. Cross the bridge from the mainland in the hot, wet, sunshine on the island of Forest City. The island itself occupies a space that until five years ago was the seabed.
Where life once teemed in the seabed, and beneath the surface of the water, there is now green foliage and flowers, grass not to be walked on, lagoons between landed homes, shops, and of course the towering high rise condominiums. Reclining beach chairs are arranged beneath palm trees and umbrellas with a postcard-perfect view of the Pacific Ocean, but you can’t go in. The guards by the shore will stop anyone who ventures near the edge. That is the far side of the island. Beyond the edge of the island in the other direction, in the actual mangrove forest, outside the city without a forest anywhere but in name lies another scene.
There is a back way to Forest City hat shows up on Waze, it just isn’t publicized. It leads through the other Forest City, which is where the workers who are building this sparkling clean private city live. It has its own arch. The lintel is painted with the name this separate city shares with its neighbor, Chinese characters on the pillars. Their arch is painted red for luck, in contrast to the white washed arch of the neighboring city, already lucky.
Prefabricated apartment buildings made out of what appear to be thin aluminum shipping containers stacked on top of one another border the dusty road that winds its way through the place. Rickety fire escape stairs lead to the only entrances and exits, and fabric is pinned flat across the surface of windows in faded hues. In my first week here, I was part of a caravan of four or five vehicles coming back from a welcoming celebration. We were stopped by a guard at the edge of the camp. A flash of identification with an index finger pointing our white faces was all that was needed. He was not going to send us back to have another look at the conditions we had seen there.
The guard sent our Malaysian Chinese guide back the way she came. This was our colleague who had guided us all through our first meal together, naming the types of fresh fish laid out on the ice. In the restaurant on stilts in the mud flats, with us being ignorant of the Malay words on the menu, our colleague described the different preparations available for the fish as we stood by the counter. On the way back home, the guard sent her back to go around the long way even though he let the rest of our group pass. White people.
She was sent back through the dusty streets, past the covered open air outdoor kitchen where there were some women serving mostly brown and taupe construction workers. Past all manner of transport, some briefly paused for a moment, mopeds and cars and buses and the dump trucks I have seen from my balcony loaded with dozens of people standing, poking their heads over the sides across the pavement stones laid down across the sand on their way to one of the construction sites closest to the shore. Harder for her to get home to the other Forest City, where she did not appear to belong, even though she is from this country.
Forest City is a duty free world with its own customs station, where busloads of Chinese disembark at the transportation hub to visit the open arena of the Sales Gallery with the sprawling 1/100th scale model of the future city, passing the guards with black epaulets on white uniform shirts and their distinctive berets, standing at attention and saluting passers by out of respect to themselves and their families back in Nepal as much as anyone. Through the open doors of the arena while the air conditioning cools the air outside a hundred feet from the entrance.
There is constant activity all day and all night. The island that was there when I go to sleep is not the same as the island that is there when I wake up. They have placed a palm tree in the mile between the construction site on the shore and my balcony in the middle of the night. Why there? It seems like hardly a place, but perhaps it is some kind of marker, the edge of what will someday be another lagoon? They have added a cement path lined by palm trees and green grass from the high rise condos on one side of my balcony view to the Cerulean tower on my left. Every day something new is added, and the more that is added the less fantastic it seems, like there was always a there there, giving the impression of something that has lasted already, and stood the test of time.
Matter of factly, the Kindergarteners have shared their ideas on the subject. They think the buildings and the island must be very old. They don’t know that they were here before this island and everything on it. How could something so seemingly big have less history than a small child in this world? Thousands have labored and are laboring to give that impression. They are working around the clock in shifts, returning to the camp long enough to sleep a few hours before returning to build a world where they cannot afford to live.
Everyone here is from someplace else, less obviously synthetic. The old organic world. We all have a history that is reflected in the relationships we have with each other here now. In many ways, our old habits of relating with each other have already been established. Take White people for example. When I see a White person outside of Forest City something curious happens. My eyes perk up at what seems like coincidence, the experience of seeing someone who appears to be like myself, perhaps someone who comes from a place where they do not stand out, someone who can relate. “Hey White people!” I want to call out to them. “I’m White too! There are not so many of us! Isn’t it queer?” Our privilege here is extraordinary, different and more blatantly obvious than where we come from, where we deny that we have privilege because things are the way we expect them to be. But there is no sense of recognition. More often than not, almost always, they look away.
Where life once teemed in the seabed, and beneath the surface of the water, there is now green foliage and flowers, grass not to be walked on, lagoons between landed homes, shops, and of course the towering high rise condominiums. Reclining beach chairs are arranged beneath palm trees and umbrellas with a postcard-perfect view of the Pacific Ocean, but you can’t go in. The guards by the shore will stop anyone who ventures near the edge. That is the far side of the island. Beyond the edge of the island in the other direction, in the actual mangrove forest, outside the city without a forest anywhere but in name lies another scene.
There is a back way to Forest City hat shows up on Waze, it just isn’t publicized. It leads through the other Forest City, which is where the workers who are building this sparkling clean private city live. It has its own arch. The lintel is painted with the name this separate city shares with its neighbor, Chinese characters on the pillars. Their arch is painted red for luck, in contrast to the white washed arch of the neighboring city, already lucky.
Prefabricated apartment buildings made out of what appear to be thin aluminum shipping containers stacked on top of one another border the dusty road that winds its way through the place. Rickety fire escape stairs lead to the only entrances and exits, and fabric is pinned flat across the surface of windows in faded hues. In my first week here, I was part of a caravan of four or five vehicles coming back from a welcoming celebration. We were stopped by a guard at the edge of the camp. A flash of identification with an index finger pointing our white faces was all that was needed. He was not going to send us back to have another look at the conditions we had seen there.
The guard sent our Malaysian Chinese guide back the way she came. This was our colleague who had guided us all through our first meal together, naming the types of fresh fish laid out on the ice. In the restaurant on stilts in the mud flats, with us being ignorant of the Malay words on the menu, our colleague described the different preparations available for the fish as we stood by the counter. On the way back home, the guard sent her back to go around the long way even though he let the rest of our group pass. White people.
She was sent back through the dusty streets, past the covered open air outdoor kitchen where there were some women serving mostly brown and taupe construction workers. Past all manner of transport, some briefly paused for a moment, mopeds and cars and buses and the dump trucks I have seen from my balcony loaded with dozens of people standing, poking their heads over the sides across the pavement stones laid down across the sand on their way to one of the construction sites closest to the shore. Harder for her to get home to the other Forest City, where she did not appear to belong, even though she is from this country.
Forest City is a duty free world with its own customs station, where busloads of Chinese disembark at the transportation hub to visit the open arena of the Sales Gallery with the sprawling 1/100th scale model of the future city, passing the guards with black epaulets on white uniform shirts and their distinctive berets, standing at attention and saluting passers by out of respect to themselves and their families back in Nepal as much as anyone. Through the open doors of the arena while the air conditioning cools the air outside a hundred feet from the entrance.
There is constant activity all day and all night. The island that was there when I go to sleep is not the same as the island that is there when I wake up. They have placed a palm tree in the mile between the construction site on the shore and my balcony in the middle of the night. Why there? It seems like hardly a place, but perhaps it is some kind of marker, the edge of what will someday be another lagoon? They have added a cement path lined by palm trees and green grass from the high rise condos on one side of my balcony view to the Cerulean tower on my left. Every day something new is added, and the more that is added the less fantastic it seems, like there was always a there there, giving the impression of something that has lasted already, and stood the test of time.
Matter of factly, the Kindergarteners have shared their ideas on the subject. They think the buildings and the island must be very old. They don’t know that they were here before this island and everything on it. How could something so seemingly big have less history than a small child in this world? Thousands have labored and are laboring to give that impression. They are working around the clock in shifts, returning to the camp long enough to sleep a few hours before returning to build a world where they cannot afford to live.
Everyone here is from someplace else, less obviously synthetic. The old organic world. We all have a history that is reflected in the relationships we have with each other here now. In many ways, our old habits of relating with each other have already been established. Take White people for example. When I see a White person outside of Forest City something curious happens. My eyes perk up at what seems like coincidence, the experience of seeing someone who appears to be like myself, perhaps someone who comes from a place where they do not stand out, someone who can relate. “Hey White people!” I want to call out to them. “I’m White too! There are not so many of us! Isn’t it queer?” Our privilege here is extraordinary, different and more blatantly obvious than where we come from, where we deny that we have privilege because things are the way we expect them to be. But there is no sense of recognition. More often than not, almost always, they look away.
Comments
Post a Comment