The Walled City
June 2, 2006
For the first time in human history, today more than half of the world's population live in the cities, so we were told from the opening comment of Suketu Mehta, who moderated the panel on the global city. The Panelists in this discussion included Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building), Paulo Lins (City of God), Melania Mazzucco (Vita), Carlos Monsivais (Mexico City), and Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul). Each panelist read an excerpt of his/her book, and we heard beautiful passages about Cairo, Rio de Janiero, Mexico City, New York City and Istanbul.
Before reading his excerpt from Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk stated that there were two types of city books: those by people who actually live in the city, and which therefore resemble a memoir, and those by people who come from outside the city, and which are like "exotic" books. In Istanbul as well as in his speech, Pamuk talked about his living in the same city (and the same building) all his life, and how the book is more of a combination of the two types of city books: it's a memoir about his early life as well as meditation about the city.
Pamuk was a very rare case among contemporaries; I imagine Istanbul is a different city to those who live outside the city in Turkey and who would, like many people migrating from countryside to urban areas, look forward to a city life in Istanbul. Carlos Monsivais compared Mexico City to Los Angeles, and said many young people in Mexico City made LA their destination; Melania Mazzuco read an excerpt about New York City from two young outsider's viewpoint — an exotic city indeed, like Pamuk said; Cairo and Rio reminded me, as the other cities did too, of Beijing, where I grew up, but unlike Pamuk, I've become one of those who migrated across the world and live in another city.
Migration and immigration are significant marks of this age of globalization. What draws people to leave and set down new roots for themselves? Pamuk talks about nostalgia in his book about Istanbul, and nostalgia is, sometimes I think, a luxury for immigrants because we move out of the hope for the future, not the love for the past.
In Chinese we have this expression, "walled city" — coming from a novel by scholar/writer Qing Zhongshu, who might have borrowed a tale from French. In his novel, a character talked about marriage as a walled city — those who are within wanted to get out, and those who are without scrambled to get in.
The metaphor aside, sometimes I think indeed America may be on the way to become a walled city. America, if one looks at it, could be a mega-city that draws millions of people into its brace, but this city wants to build a fence around it, and once a city is walled, it takes on more allure, perhaps, but it becomes also a prison, in a sense.
