Where is your ID?

I’ve been thinking a lot about ID. I own so much of it, and now I am a father, I have to also carefully acquire and safeguard pieces of ID on behalf of my daughter.

My first identity document was a passport. My eyes were immediately drawn to the ornate coat of arms on the cover. My father’s passport was much older than mine and had a black and hard cover. The burgundy one issued to me that day somewhere in the late 1980’s was consistent with the UK’s then-new branding as a member of the European Union.

When our family moved to Canada in 1989, my passport was fattened up by an important insert — immigration papers. I had traveled on the plane alone, and because I was a minor — not quite fourteen — the papers asked to know the name of the guardian fetching me from the airport. I remember looking at the word STEP-MOTHER. It seemed impersonal and harsh. Ever since the age of four, a few years before the death of my birth mother, I had called my step-mother Mum. Not even my closest friends back in England knew that we weren’t blood related. The ID document, unambiguously yet discretely proclaiming the truth about the relationship, persuaded me that I should also start to be more truthful.

Immigrant status, while very arduous to acquire, can nevertheless be lost. When I was eighteen, I traveled outside of Canada for eight months. When I flew back home, the immigration officers at Edmonton International Airport told me I didn’t have the right to re-enter the country. I was stunned. “My parents live here!” I said. I was finally able to convince them that I was not much more than a kid and had made a genuine mistake. They cautioned me to be more careful in the future. That was the beginning of a very long journey toward taking full responsibility for myself.

*

In The Passport by Herta Müller, published in 1986, the inhabitants of a little village in Communist Romania are forced to make sacrifices and suffer numerous indignities for the sake of obtaining a passport. The central character, Windrisch, a miller, is told by the mayor that a passport can be had in exchange for five sacks of flour. When the book begins, Windrisch has already delivered twelve sacks, and later still, we learn that the price is likely to become higher — he might have to pimp out his own daughter.

*

Since my warning from the immigration officers at Edmonton International Airport, I’ve been extremely careful about ID papers. When I moved to Quebec, one of my first orders of business was to obtain a health care card. I went to a government building on Boulevard de Maisonneuve in the heart of downtown. The building was grey and a bit oppressive, like many such buildings the world over. I took a number. When my turn came with the middle-aged bureaucrat, I was given a lecture. Didn’t I understand that it was pointless to get a health care card? All my health care needs would be covered by Concordia University where I was a student, explained the bureaucrat. After graduation, I could go back to Alberta and resume coverage under the provincial plan, he said. That wasn’t good enough for me. I had convinced myself I wanted to leave Alberta for good. I argued with the bureaucrat for a while and after I’d solemnly promised to never move back west, my request was granted.

*

Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) opens at the Nigerian consulate in New York. The Nigerian-American narrator learns quickly of a scam: processing a new passport is supposed to take only a week, but a bureaucrat tells him it will actually take four, and to speed this up, an extra fee of $55 (for which no receipt is given) must be paid on top of the requisite $85. Our narrator complains to a fellow traveler, who responds: “Hey, hey, young guy, why trouble yourself? They’ll take your money anyway, and they’ll punish you by delaying your passport… Aren’t you more interested in getting your passport than in trying to prove a point?”

*

For me, having access to a public health care system is just as vital to one’s sense of official “belonging” as having a passport. But in Quebec, getting access to health care, even with the requisite ID, is difficult. I’ve been asked to leave a clinic, even after a consultation with a nurse, because I was apparently, in the wrong clinic. I’ve also walked into an open clinic, greeted the two receptionists at the desk, and been told the clinic is closed. I’ve waited in line for a clinic to open at 8am, only to be told I was ninth in line and the clinic is only taking eight patients.

Then there was the time my wife and I lost our daughter’s health care card. This was in February, just before the descent of covid-19. Our daughter was sick with what seemed to be the regular flu — fever, cough, and extreme fatigue. Anticipating that a visit to the clinic was going to be a headache, I brought every single other piece of ID in my little daughter’s possession: registration of her birth, the official birth certificate, Social Insurance Number. And, feeling clever, I wrote her health insurance number on a piece of paper. Surely that number would be all we needed given the gravity of her illness?

Nope. The receptionist at the clinic told us we wouldn’t be admitted for the doctor’s appointment that had been scheduled. We were guilty of not knowing our daughter’s health care card’s expiry date. It was impossible to reason with the receptionist; she had woken up that morning with a zeal for saying Non. My mind scrambled frantically for a way around this impasse. Everyone in the waiting room was witnessing the pleading and the stonewalling. My daughter was crying and my wife was heartbroken. Finally I figured it out… I called our family clinic and asked if they knew the expiry date. To my relief, they did. Those two numbers — year and month — persuaded the receptionist, where the seriousness of my daughter’s sickness had not.

*

I won’t give away the ending of The Passport and reveal whether or not Windrisch finally succeeds in obtaining his ID. But I will give away the ending of Chapter 1 of Every Day is for the Thief. The Nigerian-American is given his travel document. The bribe is paid. Otherwise, of course, there wouldn’t be a journey and there wouldn’t be a story.