By Shauna Singh Baldwin
Milwaukee Magazine, Oct 2004.
In 1986, my newlywed husband David ordered wall-to-wall carpeting, and a twinge of sheer panic hit me. Such a big-ticket non-transportable item! "What if we move?" I protested. Like nomads, my immigrant family carried any carpets we could afford wherever my father's business consulting took us, from New Delhi through Montreal where I was born. And wherever I've lived — London, Toronto, New York — my important stuff fit in one bag, a bag always packed and stowed by the door. David teased, "I’m not moving — are you moving soon?"
When I came to Milwaukee in the early '80s, Archie Bunker jokes were in rerun. Milwaukee was as hard on its poor as any other American city, and Grand Avenue was the great hope for Downtown rejuvenation. No cable, no CNN. Fax machines were expensive toys. Like fellow Marquette students, I trolled Gimbel's basement for bargains and used a computer the size of a small building to solve finance problems for M.B.A. classes. Unlike my classmates, I called overseas relatives every time the Milwaukee Journal reported disasters until I learned that most foreign news is disaster news. Once David’s wall-to-walls were tacked down, I began working with a drive rooted in gratitude for opportunities this Indo-Canadian immigrant woman couldn’t find in Toronto or New Delhi.
Perceptions of Milwaukee number as many as the residents of its Metro area — about a million and a half. Mine is of a cautious people, resentful of privilege, nervous when we have or spend too much. Bragging is reserved for salespeople; fast talk for Chicagoans. For my fellow Milwaukeans, violence and accidents happen at a distance — with the exception of Bambi, Dahmer and Big Blue. Barring a few protests over Iraq Wars I and II, we seem content with all Washington does in our name, and ever-surprised by corruption reported anywhere north of Chicago.
I perch on the periphery of downtown — East Side Milwaukee. Successful immigrants who built mansions along the Lake Michigan shoreline rarely returned to the old country, whereas I have telecom and transport that allow me to embrace this city, and this country, without denying ties to the rest of the planet. Streets run at a kink to those on the other side of the Milwaukee river, the result of the competing egos of Milwaukee's first developers Solomon Juneau and Kilbourn. Strong personalities still assert their ghostly presence and wealth at the Lion House and Villa Terrace. Walking by the lake, I delight myself with my adopted city's greatest asset: fresh water. Contrasting memories of baths taken with half a bucket of water in New Delhi heighten my enjoyment, yet nag with feelings of undeserved luck.
So what's an Indo-Canadian American like me doing in Milwaukee? I asked myself this when my religious community, the Sikhs, contended with waves of purism after 9/11/01, and the last time I got taken aside for questioning because I'm “foreign-born.”
It's not the whiff of alewives. Maybe it’s the summer jetskis, the winter skating, ice fishing. Smelt fishermen dipping nets off the pier at sunrise, the pulse and hammer of festival music borne across the water, the spectacle of weekend fireworks spraying over Lake Michigan.
I can enroll at the Wisconsin Conservatory; attend a Ko-Thi dance performance, an IMAX movie, an Admirals game, a play by a Milwaukee theater company. I can skate at the rink on Water Street; volunteer at the Laubach Literacy Services, tutor at a Public Library, take tango lessons. But I could enjoy such activities anywhere in the USA.
But where else would I find eclectic things that, like myself, just ended up here? What is the Black Holocaust Museum doing in Milwaukee? Or the statue of Gandhi by the courthouse? Or the collection of Tolkien's papers at the Marquette University library? How did the best rare map collection in the world end up at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Golda Meir Library? How come there’s a statue of Bobby Burns’ in Milwaukee where people gather on his birthday in subzero weather to read his poems?
Maybe I too have ended up just where I'm supposed to be – harbinger of the feared polyglot, polycultural, heathen face of an America yet to come.
It's been almost eighteen years since David and I bought our first wall-to-wall
carpeting. Relatives in Toronto and California have called in panic whenever Milwaukee
has made national news – that is, in times of accidents and disasters. And it’s Milwaukee
that has done the moving – from static and poor cousin of Chicago to a city that boasts a
building ready to fly. I'm no longer a newcomer dazzled by promises carved on the
Statue of Liberty. Thanks to the Internet, I could live anywhere and have a cosmopolitan
career. But it’s here I've been student, employee, IT consultant, writer and entrepreneur.
Agra silks, numdas, and wool carpets from India and my bearskin rug from Toronto
splash crimson and silver-gray upon David's off-white wall-to-walls. Only deep love,
warm friendships, and happy memories hold them down, or they might take wing and
magically fly away.
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN