Borderlines
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Hong Kong. We thought about booking a fancy American-style Christmas brunch, but … nah. We’re going out for Chinese food instead.
Borderlines
I’m in a Facebook group of people who want to get their passports stamped in every country. It’s an interesting and enlightening group—among other things, they spend a lot of energy trying to decide how many countries there are. Do you know, without Googling, how many countries there are?
Yeah, me neither. It’s close to two hundred, but if you want to be more specific than that, you have to understand the definition of country, which is ultimately an exercise in futility and abstract thought that has nothing, but everything, to do with real people who are trying to figure out how to pay the rent, or get the kids to daycare before the morning meetings begin, or care for an elderly parent.
We’ve been to some tricky spots this year: Kosovo is not acknowledged by its next-door neighbor Serbia, which has kept the area in a steady state of barely-restrained tension for the last fifteen years. Transnistria isn’t acknowledged by basically anyone (except a few other rebellious regions—but wasn’t that us, a couple of centuries ago?). Taiwan, home to 25 million people, is a vibrant, wealthy democracy (and the leader of the global semiconductor industry, which kind of matters), but their right to exist as a sovereign nation is—literally—a controversy that threatens to suck in the entire globe.
Back in February, Lee and I visited the World Expo in Dubai. 192 countries participated, each with a pavilion or display promoting their national identity. It was a high-tech, high-glam, show-your-best-side tour of the world that made me want to visit all the places.
I was standing in line to enter the Palestinian pavilion, and the family behind me—mom, dad, and three 20-something women—were chattering away in American English. I asked where they were from, and they all burst into huge, excited smiles. “Here,” one of them said, pointing at the pavilion. “We’re from Palestine!”
What I actually wanted to know was where they were from in the US—Wisconsin, it turned out, but the daughters were living in various places around the world, so they’d all met up in Dubai for a family visit. Been there, done that.
Seeing the excitement on their faces when they said Palestine was fascinating. It was a weirdly meta kind of moment: Americans in Dubai, all coming from different places, all reaching out to each other for familiarity, but also to these kind of nebulous past heritages and histories. For what it’s worth, there wasn’t a Scottish pavilion (yes, I checked; it’s where my ancestors came from), because that distinct border/culture/history was absorbed by another centuries ago.
Lee and I talked a lot this year about what makes a country, a country. Transnistria says it’s a country—the government gives its citizens something that looks more or less like a passport—but no other country honors that passport. So is it a country? There are interesting little communities like that in other places—Christiania comes to mind, in Copenhagen—but Christiania doesn’t put troops at the ‘border.’ It’s more a commune, I suppose, than a country.
See? Definitions are tricky and slippery and complicated and entirely dependent on one’s perspective.
What’s not complicated is this: in 2022, we visited 30 ‘countries’ (some for a few weeks, some for a few hours). In every one of those places, we met ordinary people going about their business. We had more in common with those people than not.
I don’t know what makes a country a country, but I know what makes a person a person. And in this season of peace and goodwill, even though it doesn’t look especially peaceful this year, I’m sending you all my best goodwill vibes.
Happy Holidays, friends, whichever you happen to celebrate.
Take care,
Lisa
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