“Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts!” “To this day,” Radu Codrescu said in 2006, “I have a feeling of guilt every time I cross a border. Even when I go from the US to Canada—and I have Canadian citizenship—or come back here [to Redmond, Washington], I feel guilty of something. As if I were…
Tag: Radu Codrescu
Our Borders: The Last Voyage (1993)
“Let’s go look for them right now,” Radu said. “No,” the officer said, “you stay here. We’ll look for them. We know how to look for people like you.” OOCL Challenge, the transatlantic ship Radu Codrescu, 30, was on board of in January 1993, was heading into a storm, and Radu’s friends, Paul and Claudiu,…
Our Borders: A Lucky Break (1993)
Even though they now knew how to get on a ship to Canada, Radu Codrescu, 30, and his two Romanian buddies, Paul and Claudiu, still had one huge risk to consider: that the captain of a transatlantic would throw them overboard if he discovered them. Hubert, the port security officer who had showed them how to elude the guards…
Our Borders: A Bright Christmas (1992)
Early Christmas morning in 1992, the port of Antwerp (Anvers), Belgium was bright with blinking lights of all colors, with flashlights and spotlights and searchlights. At 5 a.m., police, firefighters, paramedics, TV crews, and curious people were all waiting on the main dock for the door of one particular cargo shipping container to open. And when it did, three men…
Our Borders: Gone (1990–1992)
“After all the pain I went through to cross that border, I couldn’t believe that it was finally possible,” Radu Codrescu said in 2006. “For a long time I had this feeling of unreal. My biggest dream had finally come true, but it felt like a dream, not like real life. I had traveled before,…
Our Borders: The Two Ends of the Telescope (1989)
My protagonist and I crossed paths for the first time in 1989, though I only met him in 2001, when we were both half-a-planet away from our native Romania.
Our Borders: What’s in a Name?
Yesterday, the protagonist of my series Our Borders asked me to change his name on this website, for privacy reasons. It seemed like an easy thing to do, just Replace All in each of the ten blog posts I have written so far (including the comments), and I’d be done. An hour’s worth of work…