MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Alexander
Chee
When I was five years old and
we lived in Guam,
I had a fantasy that my real family were dolphins, and that I had been
left
behind with humanity to teach them something about the dolphin’s world.
I had
been watching a great deal of Man From Atlantis, and even taught myself
to swim
like he did, with my arms at my sides, doing a dolphin kick.
I wanted to live underwater. I
would stand at
the edge of the ocean and command my imaginary dolphin family mentally,
glaring
at the ocean surface. Please come back
for me! I want to go home!
Nothing came of it. Except
that I developed a
great deal of lung power, able to hold my breath underwater in high
school for
75 yards.
Everything in the air always
seemed a little
less beautiful, a little worse. Everything underwater felt beautiful,
right,
lovely. And to this day, I still feel happier when I sink below the
surface of
the water and the sounds in the air can't get at me so quickly. Each
movement
to the surface to breathe feels like a relief and a betrayal.
It's always amused me—the
feeling of being
alien, the delusions of grandeur, the personal mythology of that
childhood
fantasy. Years later, I understood it a little better—the year before
my father
had been living on the Tektite II Underwater living experiment. He was
an
oceanographer, and the project wanted to see if humanity could live
below the
sea. He sent us postcards while down there—my brother, who was just 1
year old
at the time and couldn’t read, received one that said “Dear
Christopher” and
then was covered with hand-drawn fish, signed “Love, Dad”.
I think my desire to see my
father and his
living under the ocean without me, it turned into this. But now I can
never
think of a place as really my home without thinking of the sea. And it
doesn't
explain how I felt when I first saw the bones inside a dolphin fin, the
way it
looks like a hand. I felt the nick of a recognition. I wanted to reach
out and
take it, clasp it. Swim away with it. I thought of the myth of the
sailors
Dionysus turned into dolphins, Etruscan pirates he surrendered to the
water
forever after they tried to trick him, turned into messengers for the
god of
the sea. But we've speculated as well that dolphins are more
intelligent than
us--we know they have a larger brain to mass ratio than humans and that
they
have their own language and communities.
What if they're the next step?
What if we're the
aberration, the ones who should have gotten in the water and we didn't?
And
what if they're what we're meant to be, once we finish melting all of
the polar
ice caps and the surface is too warm for us to live on? Will they
welcome us,
or will they meet us with anger, for the long years we've polluted
their ocean?
We think we're the smartest of the earth's species, but is it smart to
poison
the planet? Is it smart to render the place you're born unlivable?
Perhaps the dolphins know
this, and are just
biding their time, waiting for us to make the earth uninhabitable for
ourselves. And when we pack ourselves off in the ship we'll have to
build to
reach the next planet we'll poison, will they rise to the surface to
celebrate?
Alexander
Chee was born in
Rhode
Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of
the
2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and
fellowships
from the MacDowell Colony and the VCCA. His first novel, Edinburgh
(Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW
Lit
Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s
Weekly Best
Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine
honored
him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays
and
stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become,
Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys
Like Us.
He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
and has
taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. He is
currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western
Massachusetts. His second novel, The Queen
of the Night, is
forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.