Originally Posted by
shivana (to scale)
I met Anthony Bourdain only once, while waiting in line at a food festival. Instead of hello he said "hey kid, you hungry?" and it was like I'd bumped into an old friend. He spent the ten minutes listening to me talk about the home country of my parents, Trinidad & Tobago, with the utmost engagement. Like an ambassador studying up, ready to go. I wanted him so badly to visit there. I felt I could trust him to see what I saw in Trinidad, as if the heart of the country would be safe in his hands as a person and traveler. You trusted him with Your Heritage.
We left the line with longanisa in hand. He clinked his beer bottle to mine and thanked me for my time like he'd had an appointment with me all along. I watched him slope off to happily try another line hoping so hard he'd visit my people. He did, ultimately. My whole family watched it. Practically the whole island did. It was like the president visiting your home country. We all watched as Tony Bourdain spoke of the island as if he'd fallen in love with it. I hope he did.
I think many of us trusted him to do that, to fall in love with the places we came from and to understand why we lived there or why we left there. We trusted him to see us as people first. Not curiosities.
Sometimes I like to pretend that my ten minutes convinced him to visit. But that was his charm, really, that he met passion with passion. That he understood the complexity of people just as well as he understood the complexity of food. Sometimes the strange thing about the architecture of fame is that you almost feel someone you admire is the totality of their being. The parts of them that change you are the parts you focus on, and whatever pain he battled was not part of that.
I'm sorry that such levels of pain is a country we shared. We have all lost an ambassador today. Anyways, I guess that's all I wanted to say. Goodbye, Anthony Bourdain. Thank you for visiting my beloved island.