Liza Monroy - Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon to be on Fire: Essays

ebook ISBN 9781619028586

Copyright 2016 by Liza Monroy

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Cover design by Jennifer Heuer

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

SOFT SKULL PRESS

An imprint of Counterpoint

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For all the mothers and daughters

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love.

bell hooks

Nothing is a bigger burden on children than the unlived life of the parent.

Carl Jung

W HEN I WAS fifteen, my mother got my boyfriend deported. Its like the famous Tolstoy quote about families: every laid-back mother is the same, but every controlling one is controlling in her own special way.

Im a profiler, she is fond of saying. Its what I do for a living.

In assignments at U.S. consulates and embassies around the world, part of her job entailed deciding whether applicants were qualified for a visa to enter the United States. Were they legitimate students, travelers, or businesspeople? Or were they lying, seeking to enter the country to work illegally? She sat at a counter in an open office in the 1980s, meeting applicants. After terrorism became a concern, she sat behind bulletproof glass, asking questions into a microphone. Visa interviews entailed a series of tests designed to allow her to quickly deduce whether applicants really were who they said they were. Could the surgeon describe equipment used in the operation? Could the chef break down the recipe and equipment used to make his special cannelloni? Could the car repairman explain how a carburetor works?

Every day she caught people trying to trick her.

I see youre applying for a P-3 performers visa to sing opera in Miami?

Yes maam.

Interesting. Where did you study music?

In... my school. And the opera house in my town.

I see. Can you demonstrate an aria, please?

But I am not warmed up!

Do your best.

(Cue off-key Gloria Estefan impersonation.)

With that, her hunch was confirmed, and down came the big red REJECTED stamp. The opera singer turned out to be a cleaning woman working on Albanian trains.

So little in your savings account? REJECTED. Employment: taxi driver? REJECTED. And prebulletproof glass, Youre not a bank teller, sir. I smell sheep. You are a sheepherder in Michoacn. But you should know you can qualify for an H-2 visa under a special program for agricultural workers.

She preferred stamping APPROVED on applicants paperwork. Though she and I empathized with people trying to make it to the United States for a better life at any cost, the consistent attempts at deceit brought out her suspicious, mistrustful nature. And I, her teenage daughter, certainly wasnt helping.

This mistrust, along with her outsize tendency to worry, spread to my love life as soon as I was old enough to have one. She evaluated and rapidly assessed the suitability of my suitors, an effort eventually culminating in a diplomatchmaker side project that hit its frantic peak in my early thirties. Standing amid the wreckage of another failed serious relationship that had seemed promising at the outset, I turned agency over my romantic pursuits to her. But I trace her habit of applying her job skills to my love life back to my teenage years, given that I was choosing the wrong men even when they were boys.

My petite, charismatic mother was a driven achiever in her youth. She went to Stanford and learned to speak six languages. In 1974, on her way to study in a PhD program in languages in Florence, she met my father, the matre d on a transatlantic ship. They married after three months together and moved to Seattle, my mothers hometown. I came along five years later, and she became, briefly, a Full-Time Power Mom. But travel and professional ambition called again when Foreign Service recruiters came through Seattle seeking more women applicants. My mother took the exam and, against the odds, she passed.

Our small familyshe, my Italian father, and I, a scrap of a girl at fourmoved to Washington, D.C., for her three months of training. Her first assignment took us to Guadalajara, Mexico, where she became known for having conducted the most visa interviews in a day. By evening, she chatted up local dignitaries at cocktail parties for Mexican government officials and other international diplomats. She easily disarmed people and got them to open up with her chatty, vivacious nature. Later, Id wonder if her visa chief job was a cover. The Profiler wouldve made an excellent spy.

A YEAR INTO this new life, my parents divorced. I suspect they were more in love with each others passport countries than each other. My father, permanent green card in hand, returned to Seattle. I followed my mother to her subsequent postsD.C. again, then Rome.

Over spring break when I was nine, our first year in Rome, we traveled to New York to visit my great-uncles, a couple who lived in a loft in Chelsea. My mother took me to see the Woody Allen movie New York Stories. One of the segments, Oedipus Wrecks, is about a man whose mother is so annoying he wishes she would disappear. She does, only to reappear, looming large in the sky over Manhattan, observing and commenting on her sons every move. On the street outside the theater my mother said, If youre ever tempted to do anything you shouldnt, just rememberthats me, The Big Mom In The Sky.

THREE YEARS INTO her Rome tour, in 1992, Mount Etna erupted. Since being my mothers daughter meant participating in adventure tourism, we packed our weekend bags as if off to the beach.

But one cannot simply walk up an erupting volcano. Military barricades surrounded Mount Etnas base. Ever a problem-solver, The Profiler convinced a curly grayhaired newscaster to transport us in his helicopter to where the rocky lava tumbled into farmlands. The newscaster delivered his report on Italian TV, interviewing devastated farmers. I walked the perimeter of a destroyed farm, black lava rocks hot beneath the rubber soles of my white Keds. As night fell, the alien terrain glowed red behind the newscaster, sweat glistening on his brow from the heat and bright camera lights. My mother had a spark in her eye for him. They spoke animatedly in Italian on the helicopter ride back to the bottom of Mount Etna. Numbers were exchanged, but as with many of her romantic interests, nothing panned out. Love was beyond the realm of anyones control, even hers. At work, though, The Profiler always nailed it.

When we moved from Rome to Mexico City the following year, the country was in economic and political turmoil. The peso decreased in value from three to a dollar to twelve. Colosio, the ruling PRI partys presidential candidate, was gunned down in Tijuana while giving a speech. In pop culture, the rise of the grunge era meant I no longer had to point to a map to explain to my international classmates where I was bornSeattle was firmly on it.