Borders

            Borders were magic when I was a kid.  They were the deepest mystery of any road trip.  Driving south from our hometown in Minnesota, my parents would warn my sister and me when we were approaching the border, so that we would be ready for this transcendent moment, a break in the monotony of hours in the car.  The sign marking the border approached, getting larger, appearing to accelerate toward us, until it zoomed past the car, and then, not knowing exactly when, we would be in an entirely new place.  There was something exotic about the Iowan cornfields compared to our native Minnesotan ones.  The quality of the interstate improved noticeably, and the license plates of neighboring cars were unrecognizable.

            Like all childhood magics, this magic wore off, and, by the world-weary age of ten I understood that state borders in the midwest were meaningless.  Sometimes crossing a border involved a bridge over a river, which was about as exciting as it got.

            My obsession with world geography kept my fascination with borders alive for a while.  The stark difference between the Soviet and post-Soviet era globes, and the dispute over the Kashmir region between India, China and Pakistan all provided interesting border trivia for me.  More importantly, I imagined that when one crossed an international border, the stark differences of the cultures were always immediately apparent.  Borders between countries, unlike those between states, actually meant something.

            But even this conviction began to wear down with time.  I learned that the borders of many countries were blurry.  Dialects, accents, ethnicities, and customs change across geography without regard for borders; two communities on either side of a border are often more similar to one another than they are to the cultural capital of their respective countries.

            The Basque and Catalan peoples of northern Spain and Southern France are an example of groups who occupy two countries but are in some ways nations of their own, with their own languages and cultures.  Other examples with less historical and political turmoil exist as well, like the Tai people of southern China and northern Laos and Vietnam.  Borders between these countries feel like mere formalities, with few restrictions on comings and goings across the border,

            After learning that even international borders weren't always powerful enough to neatly separate peoples and cultures, I was truly jaded.  What was the point of memorizing all of those political maps that I had obsessed over?  Why did the world have to be so nuanced?  How could I ever hope to understand people and geography?

            I got over this disappointment eventually, and realized that it's impossible to have a perfect understanding of the world.  I even began to enjoy the knowledge that borders are just socially instituted norms, and I felt wise for knowing it.  So when I went on a trip last year to the border between China and Myanmar in the small city of Ruili, I knew not to be too hopeful about glimpsing a Myanmar that was vastly different than the tropical parts of southwest China that I had already seen.  I expected to travel through a subtle gradient of culture on my way to the city, see some signs of cultural mixing, but ultimately find that Chinese cultural influence had chipped away at anything too "other".

            But the border checkpoint I found separated two worlds.  On my side, the Chinese side, were generic department store buildings like those you would see in any Chinese city, with duty free shops selling Louis Vitton and expensive jade.  Taxis circled a roundabout and Chinese tourists milled about.  The checkpoint itself was an imposing building with Communist insignia.  And peering through the gates, behind that building I saw unfamiliar architecture, drab white apartment buildings, Burmese people in sarong-like clothes speaking Burmese.  Suddenly I felt something like the feeling I had as a child, zooming through cornfields after just entering Iowa, a rush of excitement and wonder that I hadn't expected to ever feel again, because I had learned that that's not how the world actually works.

            A vain attempt at a metal barrier branched out from the checkpoint building, marking the border. Burmese children stared out at me from the other side, and one darted out towards me.  He gave some kind of greeting, and suddenly was on his knees, his hands folded one over another in the universal sign of a plea for money, and before I knew it he had grabbed ahold of my leg and wouldn't let go.  Dazed and with no way to communicate, I leaned over, gently shook his shoulder and croaked "no".  As I bent over, my sunglasses fell from my shirt where they had been hanging.  He grabbed them and was gone.

            The scene felt like a cliché; white male's brief brush with "South Asia", complete with aggressive child beggar.  And part of me liked that, the child in me that wants borders to be meaningful and the world to make sense and be simple, and, embarrassingly, for people of different cultures to reinforce my internalized stereotypes of them.

            Naturally, the college-educated-liberal-millennial in me didn't like the scene very much at all, with all of the loaded colonial implications.  Walking away, I felt like I shouldn't be at the checkpoint, that I was seeing something someone wouldn't want me to... the clear poverty of Myanmar likely had something to do with that, as well as the fact that this border was not well patrolled for the illegal trafficking that makes it famous in China.

            But I think I was most uncomfortable with the picture I had just seen.  I didn't know how to feel about a border that, while porous, also seemed to segregate two places so thoroughly, and that seemed to embody a clear power dynamic between the two countries.  What did it mean for the lives of the people living on either side, and their ability to communicate with and understand one another?  I had found a border that filled me with wonder and curiosity, and it was ugly.