Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of PnictogenMy RL father was a fisheries biologist whose coworkers and friends were largely international scientists, and my RL mother was a Chilean expatriate who naturally gravitated towards making non-American friends, read non-American papers and (during my adolescence) preferred to catch non-American news reports over shortwave radio. As a result, both my older sibling and myself learned a somewhat unusual (for kids growing up in U.S. suburbs and schools) perspective on the place of the United States in the world.
I still remember how early in childhood I learned the lesson that borders were governed by Kafkaesque absurdity in the arbitrary enforcement of merciless rules. I think I have always carried that fear with me, since childhood, of getting to a checkpoint of some kind (like, at an airport) and suddenly being informed that I was now persona non grata. I would have been angry post-9/11 if I'd ended up on a no-fly list but I would not have been shocked: I had already been taught, since childhood, that I inhabited a cruel and unjust world in which such things happened.
But I have also been lucky. Privileged, really. I am pale, pasty enough to "pass" under many circumstances, though after 9/11 I got pulled aside for personal searches a lot more often than anyone I was with, when required to fly.
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