I remember feeling grateful that we never said “Merry Christmas.” We didn’t say it on Christmas morning when we awoke in Virginia, during a layover at the world’s most desolate Hampton Inn & Suites, and took long showers and poured too much batter into the waffle machine. Or at Washington Dulles International Airport, 1,400 miles from our cul-de-sac in Houston, where, at 8 a.m., bright, deserted corridors seemed to me pleasantly indifferent to the calendar. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, we had wished for a shuttle in lieu of a sleigh, making our plea with a dead-eyed driver who we’d been told could take us to the Hampton Inn. His broad white vessel didn’t have a ramp for Dad’s electric wheelchair — the one that chirped like a repair droid (meep murp) whenever you turned it on — and was too far above the ground for us to maneuver him out of it and into a seat. The driver suggested that my sister Adaeze and I ride the shuttle with our bags while Mom and Dad follow in a taxi. But Mom threw me a look that even I understood meant “I don’t want to be alone,” and so Adaeze rode with the bags while the three of us stayed behind, waiting by the curb at passenger pickup as the cool black night ticked into morning.
We were traveling to Nigeria in an ostensibly holiday-themed edition of a pilgrimage my family has made infrequently since 1991. But I hardly thought of Christmas once and called it mercy. That it was the most wonderful time of the year didn’t cross my mind at the boarding gate at Dulles, where we waited for one in a series of progressively smaller airport wheelchairs that would deliver Dad to his seat on the plane. Nor when the chair eventually materialized, bringing with it the special airline staff that assists you when your body is broken and uncooperative and the experience of standing on your own feet, let alone walking, is an unapproachable memory. These people, distinguishable by their self-serious demeanor and uniform of dreary polo shirts and Dockers, are well-trained to minimize airline liability and flight delays; less so, it became clear, to mitigate the routine suffering and indignity of the humans in their care. Mostly, they shared the grace and tact of their counterparts in bag handling, and whenever one seemed intent on wrangling Dad and his chair like an obstinate mattress, we intervened and took care of him ourselves, using all the little tricks and techniques each of us knows but never wanted to learn.
When we were finally in our seats, belts buckled and seat-back trays securely fastened in front of us, I focused my mind and vanished stubborn memories of our cul-de-sac, and the lit Christmas tree, and the framed photo of my younger brother, Chidi — not more than 10 years old in a baggy T-shirt and white high-tops — that he had fashioned into an ornament with glue sticks, green and red glitter, and yarn. I steered my thoughts away from The Last Good Christmas two years ago when Chidi was 21 and Adaeze and I spoiled him like we usually did with a flight to visit me in New York, a trip that marked both his first time flying alone and the last time I would ever see him alive. And I allowed myself to forget the Christmas the year after, when I had insisted (to be normal? To be “strong”?) on trotting out the tree, and the lights, and the glitter-encrusted ornament, and quickly, tearfully, pitifully regretted all of it. We never said “Merry Christmas” as the plane arced fitfully over the Atlantic and then Africa for 15 hours and across six time zones, while day bled into night and into day again. And I was grateful for that.
I wish I could tell you this was a story with a silver lining, that the trip to the country of my parents’ birth was ultimately restorative for my mom, dad, sister, and me. If I could make the illusion stick, I’d say it was a trip worthy of the movies, a cathartic, third-act coda that brought our lives full circle and filled our hearts with sober gratitude. And the house that greeted us there? Dad’s decade-long obsession that we’d been building (in keeping with tribal tradition) in the lush, sun-baked village of my late paternal grandfather? It was finally completed, standing even as I write this as a shining monument to triumph over adversity and the immortal legacy of mankind’s struggle on earth, or something. Yes, we had fallen on hard times, to be sure. But somehow, during those two blistering weeks together, all of the ordinary and devastating tragedies that have fractured my family in ways both sudden and inexorable were put in proper perspective, their greater meaning climactically revealed as we held each other and wept under a mighty acacia tree. I would not be above telling a story like that if only any of it were true. But, of course, that's not the way it happened.
After a transfer in Addis Ababa, our plane began its descent toward Enugu, capital of Enugu state, the Seattle-sized southeastern city where my father was born and with which my family shares both historical and etymological bonds. (In Igbo, “enu” = “top,” “ugwu” = “hill.”) By random coincidence, we discovered that we were sharing the flight with the gallant Nigerian-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, star of 12 Years a Slave. Adaeze and I spotted him across the aisle chatting and laughing with what must have been a brother or cousin. We poked each other and spent idle minutes furtively guessing at the reason for his travel. (A later Google search solved the mystery: a sister’s wedding.) It was the kind of imaginary kinship with a celebrity that is customary in America, but all too rare when you’re the child of immigrants, born into the wrong color skin with a wrong-sounding name. It was exciting. But if I harbored any hope that Nigeria’s most famous living international movie star was an auspicious omen, it was extinguished before we left the Enugu airport.
My sister is shorter than me with long, glossy black hair. At 32, she’s three years older, though her unreasonably faultless skin makes people think I’m the older one. At baggage claim — a Darwinian gauntlet even in countries with space programs — we were sentries, each standing watch at one of two carousels in a hot, un-air-conditioned room. We stood shoulder to shoulder with dozens of flustered-looking men from the plane, all of them sweat-soaked and combustible after a long flight. They erupted into shouting matches in Igbo and broken English whenever a foot was smashed or an elbow jammed. A stifling aroma of dust and body odor lingered in the room like burnt rubber at a stock race.
It was too risky, we decided, to be sensible. So we chose to be reckless.
Given the length of our trip, Dad’s suite of medical equipment, and the assorted small gifts Mom brought for very extended family, we were traveling with so many bags that a Kardashian would have blanched at the excess. Even though on an intellectual level we recognized a certain recklessness in checking so much luggage across three flights and 7,000 miles, we had never dwelled on airline operational efficiency, just as we had never dwelled on the lack of cultural or infrastructural accommodations for disabled people in Nigeria, or on the vague assurances from relatives that our house in the village was in a habitable state, more or less, despite the fact that construction had been beleaguered and none of us had seen it in person in over six years.
You could say that we were delusional, that we weren’t sufficiently cautious or fearful. And I guess you’d be right. But the truth is that we were afraid. In fact, we were terrified. But our greatest fear wasn’t to do with luggage, or transportation, or housing, or any of the real and upsetting consequences that could and did await us for being reckless with such things. Our fear, the one that we couldn’t live with, was of what would happen if we weren’t — if we were sensible and stayed home, or waited for more convenient flights to present themselves, or for the house to be perfect. We were afraid of failing to act with appropriate urgency, of not pulling together even in all of our brokenness before it was too late. “I don’t want to die in this country,” Dad had said when he first showed us the blueprints of a house he hoped to retire in, before the stroke had robbed him of the chance. No. It was too risky, we decided, to be sensible. So we chose to be reckless.
After several minutes, the carousels at baggage claim whirred to life. Dad’s electric wheelchair was among the first wave of luggage to round the circuit. I exhaled. We had broken the chair down into three parts, which cumulatively weighed about 110 pounds. I plucked the black leather office chair–like seat from the track first, then the race car–red base, which was emblazoned with a manufacturer name that I had never noticed before. The name, “Pride Mobility,” struck me as both patronizing and a little on the nose, like a nightclub called Sad Dark Sex Preliminary. I set the base aside and noticed that the battery, a 10-pound brick with a handlebar that drops into the base, wasn’t with the other two pieces. Maybe it would come out later. Adaeze and I focused on retrieving the rest of our bags, quietly rejoicing whenever one would turn up, as if our number had been drawn in the Powerball. But after everything else had been accounted for, after we had searched the baggage claim area corner to corner, we were forced to accept the simplest conclusion. The battery was lost.
Reggie Ugwu / BuzzFeed News
The author with his father in Nigeria in 1991.
Courtesy of the Ugwu family
When I think of my dad walking, I think of his shoulders. They’re broad and slice purposefully through the air on a course just a couple degrees shy of George Jefferson. I see him and his aviator eyeglasses coming through the door of our brick house on the cul-de-sac after a long day of work, wide print necktie and white dress shirt exposed by a freshly unbuttoned suit jacket. The suit is gray and slightly oversize — the kind that has somehow never gone out of style in the South, with billowing fabric at the ankles — and he clutches a boxy leather briefcase firmly in his right hand. I see him at his gym, where he used to take me when I had hoop dreams and was in urgent need of bigger calves, pedaling relentlessly on a stationary bike in his white singlet and striped white tube socks. Beads of sweat accumulate on his hairy chest and on the top of his head, which is shaven so smooth that a reflective glare clings to it always like a tiny cap. I see him making the rounds in the church foyer after service — the only true extrovert in our family — smiling and gregarious while talking with the Greggs about their new car, or the Kobiljaks about their boy in Iraq.
In 1967, when he was 16 or 17, Dad lied about his age and ran away to fight for the Republic of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War. He went through the hell of basic training and worked his way up to lieutenant. He became acquainted with death — the way it looks and smells and sounds when life leaves the body. Men were razed like ripe sugar cane to his left and right. Once, in a firefight, a bullet struck his rifle and thwacked it right out of his hands. More than a million were killed or starved to death before the Biafrans were defeated, but, somehow, Dad made it home and his story continued. He finished secondary school with distinctions in math, or, as they called it in the Queen’s English his late parents never learned, “maths.” Through an application mailed from the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, Dad won a chemical engineering scholarship to Michigan Tech, of all places, and was overjoyed. He bought a plane ticket in 1974, using money he had earned by convincing his brothers and sisters to sell one of the family’s plots of land. When he arrived in Michigan, with about $100 to his name, it was winter. He got clobbered by the cold; gobsmacked by the snow.
The Ugwu family in 1987.
Courtesy of the Ugwu family
Dad went back home to Enugu the summer after graduation triumphant, a job offer in tow from the chemicals manufacturer Union Carbide in Indiana. That summer, he met Mom and vowed to make her his wife. He was a golden child, blessed by God Himself. Dad worked as many side jobs as he could get in preparation for a family, and to put Mom through school. They would both become Ph.D.s (“Dr. and Dr. Ugwu”), but first he was a part-time ice cream truck driver, and semitruck driver, and door-to-door textbook salesman. My older brother Chiugo was the first of the kids, in 1980. Adaeze came along three years later; and then me, six hours into her third birthday (she still razzes me for crashing the party). Chidi was the last of us, in 1992 — born with sickled blood cells and a bum liver, but ridiculously cute. By that time we were in Elyria, Ohio, a suburb outside Cleveland, living early ’90s Midwestern childhoods: Huffy mountain bikes and Super Soakers and Mario Kart for days.
Dad got an administrative job at Galveston College, but moved us all to Houston, a 30-minute commute away, which had better school districts. The weather was amenable, much better than the Upper Peninsula, and there were other Nigerians around — the highest concentration of any city in America. Life was good. Dad and Mom bought us boomboxes and put us in YMCA leagues and took us to Rockets games to see Hakeem “The Dream.”
It was a dark sort of symmetry. One son taken, one returned.
In 2000, when I was 13 and finishing middle school, Dad announced a grand plan to send me back to our homeland for a year, to get a sense of where we’d come from and, perhaps, some discipline — tricky to teach in the Land of the Free. He hadn’t been able to afford to send his other children back when they were still young and pliant, but he’d be damned if he didn’t send at least one. I fought like hell but returned from the experience with my world a little larger. I told myself I’d leave Houston on my own odyssey one day. By then Chiugo had moved out, following an epic dispute with our parents over college and the direction of his own life. He rarely spoke to them for 14 years; didn’t set foot in the brick house on the cul-de-sac again until after Chidi died. It was a dark sort of symmetry. One son taken, one returned.
We left the airport in search of a hotel that might accommodate us. The house was still being cleaned. Dad and I were chauffeured in a small Peugeot sedan by my cousin Obiora — thirtysomething, tall and clean-shaven with black, rectangular glasses — while Mom and Adaeze rode with another cousin, Emeka — even taller and albino with sherbet-tinted skin and light hair. Both had been among a familial welcoming party that warmly received us after we emerged battery-less from baggage claim. It had been over six years since Dad and I last visited home, nearly a decade for Mom and my sister.
I didn’t remember there being so many hotels in town the last time I had visited. Now they seemed to have sprouted up everywhere, especially in Independence Layout, the prosperous capital district that was home to Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi — the newly elected governor of Enugu state. His fat cheeks and stilted, gap-tooth smile beamed from a legion of billboards as we drove around the city in 94-degree weather on a December afternoon.
Enugu, Enugu, in the dry season, December 2015.
Reggie Ugwu / BuzzFeed News
“Day by day, we are making Enugu state better.”
The billboards were imprinted with a fine layer of rust-colored dust — a side effect of red, iron-rich soil — as is everything in Nigeria during the dry season: roads, cars, buildings, palm trees…even the air. The entire visible world often took on a red-orange tint, as if someone had replaced my contacts with blue-light filters.
We drove to four different hotels before we found one that could work. This wasn’t a matter of pools or Wi-Fi or complimentary breakfast. It was the stairs. Each hotel telegraphed its suitability to wealthy foreigners with grand staircases at the entrance framed by Greek columns, or stone sculptures, or manicured hedges — ostentatious displays that suggested aspirational if not literal distance from the poorer, less developed sectors that composed most of the city.
The entire visible world often took on a red-orange tint, as if someone had replaced my contacts with blue-light filters.