Those Who Wander Mapless

By Rona Wang, January 07, 2018

New Zealand was blue-green, lusher than dreams, and muggy enough to hint at an impending December summer. I shuffled over to customs, limbs prickling from the unhappy stasis of plane flights. Over the past few months, I’d traversed the globe, and each border had its own gatekeeping—visas and cameras and the unwavering symphony of beeps and pings. Each was a formulaic story of authority synonymous with safety.

I’ve always been enamored by the stories we sing to ourselves, the memories that hum in our bodies long after the echo of truth has faded. At the cusp of the new millennium, Kazuo Ishiguro, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature, told CNN, “More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

I mention all this because it explains my affinity for maps. Storytelling is inherently and intricately entwined with cartography. One of the first maps I ever owned was one that illustrated the night sky, with eighty-eight constellations strewn across the page. Nine-year-old me was enchanted by the infinite stories it held. I don’t mean only the myths wrung from the stars: Cassiopeia’s vanity and Orion’s heroics. To a child, the act of weaving a timeless fairytale out of the cosmos was as close to immortality as one could get, and that, too, was another story—one of egotism, maybe, but also one of adventure, the brash courage of claiming an impossible frontier as your own.

It was only later that I learned that these constellations were not universal, even though the sky remained the same everywhere, and the horizon was always a wink beyond our realm. The Lakota Native Americans imagined Orion’s belt to be the twinkle-studded spine of a bison. Scandinavians coined it Frigg’s Distaff, a goddess’s spinning tool. And to the Chinese, it was shen—the three-stars mansion. The night sky belonged to everybody, which is another way of saying it was the property of nobody.

Perhaps there is no greater honor than having a place—a street, a city, a mountain—named after you or your culture, and stars are the most everlasting landmarks of all. As I grew older and began collecting more and more maps, from the solid, colorful lines of subway routes to scrawled landmarks on wrinkled napkins, I became increasingly aware of the multitudes of stories present in each one. Or, more accurately, the silence of some voices and the elevation of others.

In The New Yorker, bestselling author Rebecca Solnit writes, “Almost every city is full of men’s names, names that are markers of who wielded power, who made history, who held fortunes, who was remembered; women are anonymous people who changed fathers’ names for husbands’ as they married, who lived in private and were comparatively forgot­ten, with few exceptions.”

At MIT, you might take a class in the Green Building (named after Cecil Green), swing over to Maseeh Hall (named after Fariborz Maseeh) for lunch, catch up with friends in the Stratton Student Center (named after Julius Stratton), then head to Kresge Auditorium (named after Sebastian Kresge) for a music performance. The story here is clear. Engineering spaces have always been commemorated for and by men.

Of course, the issue of naming is prevalent throughout the world. Navigating Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, means passing through Mount Eden (named after the First Earl) to get to Onehunga (a Maori term for “burial place”) and trekking across Parnell (named after a Plymouth Brethren missionary) to arrive at Remuera (derived from the name of a Maori village). It’s a confusing conglomerate of cultures, an attestment to the bitter history and eventual strained compromise between Maori tribes and European settlers.

Unfurling any map means unveiling centuries of pain and triumph. I don’t mean only electric landscapes and sunlight-dappled seas; some of the most compelling maps aren’t borne out of the geographical. One of my favorite maps ever is an illustration of the body, created by Jennifer S. Chieng, titled Toward a Poetics of Phantom Limb Or, All the Shadows That Carry Us. Readers are asked to engage with the piece by clicking along acupuncture markers, points of entry for the trauma of institutionalized oppression. One landmark, nestled in the ribcage, reads, “To try to locate the specifics of a general sense of haunting is like trying to remember a dream in the saturation of daylight; one suddenly recalls a feeling of weight without being able to place it. When I say that History is like a family member, I mean not dead but half-missing, or an intimacy half-strange and, let’s say, half-asleep.”

The idea of the body being a vessel for inherited oppression is not revolutionary. Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, tells Hazlitt: “Bodies are terrifying...And of course they’re inherently haunted. Haunting is a kind of impression; a lingering effect from a physical act like a shoeprint or a cloud of perfume left in the air. In the same way, bodies carry trauma and choices of our ancestors. Our DNAs are blueprints of the past.” Then, maybe any map is intrinsically haunted, because every cartographer is forging a story deeply rooted in the (often resilient, often triumphant, but also often ugly) narratives of those who came before.

In mathematics, the four color map theorem states that no more than four distinct colors are needed to fill the regions so that no two adjacent areas have the same hue. It’s mostly applicable in graph theory and useless to cartographers, which was somewhat disappointing to eight-year-old me. In elementary school, a map of the United States hung on my classroom wall, our forty-eight continental states distilled down into bright yellows and blues and reds and greens. I wrought meaning out of meaningless colors; I decided Oregon was green because of its lush landscapes, the blue of California was a homage to its surfer heritage, and so forth. Disappointingly, my teacher informed me that there was no connection between a state and its assigned color. Years later, in the 2008 presidential elections, I would learn that colors on maps did tell stories—ones of clashing ideologies, mistrust, and insidious political maneuvers.

My early fascination with maps bloomed out of yearning—to know where I came from, where I was going, and where I belonged in a world that didn’t seem to have space for a young queer girl of color. I chose to attend college on the other side of the country in the hopes of finding my place, and when that didn’t work, I came to a cluster of islands at the edge of the world, a nation so distant that there exists a blog dedicated solely to maps that forget to include it. New Zealand is a dreamscape of forests and volcanoes and waterfalls, but most importantly, it allows me the luxury of being lost. I don’t know what it means to forget about maps, to abandon the stories I grew up with, but I’d like to find out.