Lost in Canada

There’s this bit in the movie No Maps For These Territories, the documentary about William Gibson, where he talks about the “eerie, post-geographical feeling” that life at the dawn of the 21st century so often involves. The last few months, the self-same sense of post-geography seems to have settled itself firmly over Toronto. Or maybe just over me.

My laptop, which was a screaming IBM in 2004, finally kicked the bucket about three months ago. So, after a few (read: 8) weeks in the shop, it was returned to me, no better for wear, with the advice that I strip it for parts and try to recoup my losses. At the time that I bought it, I remember, IBM was an American company, in many ways THE American computer company. As far back as the fifties, if you wanted a computer installed in place of your basement, you called the high-and-tight, black-clad men at IBM. Before Bill Gates, they were the original private sector Big Brother. So imagine my (short-lived) surprise when I crack open the case to salvage the saleable parts, to find that virtually every component—the hard drive, the RAM chips, the optical drive—are all manufactured by a Korean or Japanese firm in a Thai factory. You’d by hard-pressed to find an inch of circuitry in there that originated in the United States. This all came full circle, the cycle of globalization complete, when IBM spun off their consumer computer division a few years ago to Lenovo, the up-and-coming Chinese computer giant. And voided my warranty along with it.

And so here I am, sitting in a café in downtown Toronto, writing on my brand-new (and screaming fast) Apple notebook, drinking poorly made espresso imported from some God-forsaken backwater of the global economy, made by someone whose parents, I would almost guarantee, were born on the other side of the planet.

It’s that fact of immigration and non-assimilation—it seems like immigrants to Canada don’t feel any pressure to assimilate to the degree that they do a few dozen klicks to the south—that brings about that sense of being nowhere and everywhere. Everything in this city can seem like a facsimile of something else, whether it’s Little Korea, Little China, or Little Italy. Everything comes here from somewhere else—clothes and computers from Asian free-trade zones, records and books from the United States, food and immigrants from everywhere else in between. Styles don’t seem to grow up from the streets of Toronto so much as they seem to arrive at Pearson, slightly overripe from the sidewalks of New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong. Not that I’m complaining. I’d much rather eat sushi with Soviet immigrants in Chinatown, or play soccer with the Razmanaics than eat hamburgers with all-Americans in a suburb of Anytown, WI. It just seems, sometimes, for just a moment, like we’re a few inventions short of diving into a bad cyberpunk novel. Or maybe this “post-geography” is just a conceit of the upper classes, of those who can afford to have problems that necessitate knowledge of a sprinkling of international airports and immigration regulations, of not feeling “rooted” because they’re always on the move, spending on a year of plane tickets what most of the world spends on a decade of food. The Jet Set, reborn in an age of fashionable guilt and post-modern introspection.

Nevertheless, I DO have (at least) some knowledge of various immigration regulations, and while I don’t fly between metropolises, I do find myself in the air—and on layover in some of America’s creepiest regional airports—more than, I think, the average person. And in talking to my friends, I find that I’m not alone. None of us, with maybe one or two exceptions, were born in Canada, a sparse few more were raised here. All of us maintain some form of complex national identity—some are “Canadians of ***** descent,” others succumb to the inevitable hyphen, while others (myself included) see the Maple Leaf as little more than a hockey player.