Gone Missing In America

Ellis Henican

September 15, 2001

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

"My little brother is Robert Chin," Suk Tan Chin was saying as she stood in the drizzle on East 26th Street, clutching a single, moist piece of paper. "We are desperately looking for him. He is missing."

This was outside the Lexington Avenue Armory, a giant redbrick building that, despite its sky-high ceilings and its vast open hall, is bursting at the joists from grief. Suk Tan Chin did not seem to notice the rain.

"Robert is 33 years old," she said. "He is not a high-level employee. He is just a support person. He works for Xerox but he was stationed at Fiduciary Trust. They were in the World Trade Centers on several floors."

But those are not the facts that matter now. The fact - singular - that matters is this: Since shortly before 9 in the morning on Tuesday, Robert Chin has been missing.

Ellis Henican Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

That's the word, missing, that everyone uses in New York this weekend.

And present is the tense. "Robert is missing."

We're still - all of us - trying to avoid the harsher tense, which is past. "Robert was 33 ... He worked for Xerox." We're trying to postpone, as long as possible, use of the harshest word of all, which is getting increasingly difficult to avoid. It's days now since two planes slammed into the towers of the World Trade Center and - who knows? - maybe 5,000 people went missing real quick.

That word, of course, is dead. And I hate even to write it down.

For another day or two - maybe three or four at the outside - Suk Tan Chin will say of her baby brother:

"He is missing."

And we will leave it at that.

The piece of paper she holds in her hand is another of the small "missing" signs. Tellingly, almost all of them say "missing" at the top. Not even "gone." Just a hopeful "missing."

Hers has a picture of her brother. He is serious-looking with deep-set eyes. Most of all, he is her brother.

These signs are hanging - not just Robert Chin's but literally thousands of others too - all over town.

The way the military government that once ruled Latin America created whole societies of "the disappeared," New York has become a city of "the missing." But that is better than the city will be a few more days from now, which is a city filled with that word that I don't even want to write.

For now, the missing signs are on lampposts. They are at subway entrances. On bus shelters and pay phones. As the week came to a close, more than anywhere else they were held in the hands of friends and relatives who turned up at the Lexington Avenue Armory to register their loved ones missing.

That's as optimistic as anyone can get.

You can't call these friends and relatives "grieving" yet for they are hanging still to the tiniest shreds of hope.

And don't be surprised with a name like Chin. So many of the names are like that. These Garcias, these Zinzis, these Lums, these Brilos and Clarkes, whose families come from all over the globe to settle and work and - don't say "die" - to go suddenly missing in New York.

You know, for many years, we have been hearing from people across this country that New York is not quite America - and America is not quite New York.