July 23, 2007

Pete Shanks
Author, Editor, Activist

  After a history lesson of what it was like to live as one of the last colonialists from England , local author and son of the last British Attorney General of Singapore, Pete Shanks, began a discussion of the concept of home. “Home is myth,” said Shanks, who spent his first 7 years living full-time in Singapore until being sent to boarding school in England . He would return to Singapore for the next two summers during breaks from school. The year Pete turned ten, Lee Kwan Yew, better known as Harry to Pete’s family and others who had known him before he reinvented himself, became Prime Minister and eventually the first Dictator of Singapore. He was voted in by those who believed, as Pete’s liberal-minded parents did, that he was going to be a man of the people. He had joined local unions and supported the freeing of political prisoners. Once elected, Lee,  who had only learned Chinese after graduating from Cambridge University, made Singapore “…very prosperous, VERY straight-laced,…” according to Pete. People literally would have their hair cut short for them if it was too long and be required to obey many other very strict rules or suffer severe consequences. So the place where Pete was born in 1949 and lived an idyllic childhood, was no longer home. Pete’s parents, Ernest and Betty Shanks who had met in the closing days of WWII, spent the next year depending on the kindness, and sometimes the sofas, of friends and family while they tried to rebuild their lives. In 1960, Pete’s dad found a job as a government lawyer on the independent Island state of Guernsey , where his parents lived until their deaths in the early 1990’s. So, Guernsey was Pete’s new home. His parents would live there for the next three decades. After his parents died, Pete decided to go back and possibly settle on this little island that enjoyed the protection of England without being beholden to it legally. He found that he literally could not go home, once again. They wouldn’t let him, unless he was born there or was very wealthy and could afford the millionaire life-style and real-estate. That was when he decided the place he had discovered and moved to in 1974 truly was his home. “This seems nice. This place seems comfortable,” he said. Then he asked the jam packed audience, “Does that make it home?”

 There was a stunned silence when not one person raised their hand after he asked how many of the people in attendance were actually born in the Santa Cruz area. Not one single person in that jam packed audience was from the area. There were quite a few from New York ; almost enough to represent every borough and into upstate. A few from New Jersey, one woman from Ireland, a man from Germany,  a few from Los Angeles, and even one or two from the mid-west and heartland. One person jokingly claimed to be an unofficial fourth generation local because his great-grandfather had built a family cabin not far from where this event takes place and it has stayed in the family all these years. But even he was not actually born here.

 So what is home and how do we know when we are there?  There was an overall sense from what people said, that home is either where our parents are or the place we come from or lived during our formative years. One woman said that when her mom died, she suddenly felt like she was free-floating, an idea shared by many in the audience who had lost their parents and in a sense lost their way back home. A woman who was originally from the Bronx , talked about home being the place you are from and the people who influenced you. That place stays with you wherever you go and whoever you become in life. As someone else pointed out, home is “…much more of a spiritual concept,” when she referred to the archivist of the Joseph Campbell library, Jonathon Young’s theory that Dorothy’s clicking her heels together in The Wizard of Oz represents the idea that home is an intangible place. Another person said that to him, “home is a time, not a place.” After spending 3 decades in Nepal , he went back to his birthplace, the Bronx , New York , and found it was no longer the place he once knew. The same with other places he has lived, from the lower east side of Manhattan to San Francisco . They had all been transformed into places that were no longer recognizable from what he had known.

 We all live with this myth of the idea of home, according to Pete. “The myth is still around, fact is not.” Referring to marriage, family, and home, he claimed that “all myths are breaking down. Maybe there’s not enough to replace them with.”

 When Lee Kwan Yew reinvented himself and created a new home for himself, that was the beginning of a long journey for Pete. A journey for the search for home; its location and its meaning. In that search he did come home in a sense. Even though his parents are not here physically, it seems to be a place that embodies the ideals and the eventual life-style that his parents lived. Not to mention, Santa Cruz is, in a way like a little Island unto itself with independent minded leaders and activists who can wear their hair any way they choose.