How losing my permanent resident card felt like losing my home

As part of CBC's What's Your Story campaign, we're asking Canadians to tell us about the one object they would submit to a collection of national treasures: objects that contain the strongest feelings, personal histories and vivid memories of our diverse population. For Canada Reads author Madeline Ashby, it's her passport and permanent residency card. 

I can recall the precise moment I realized I'd lost my permanent residency card.

"Lost" is the wrong verb. It was stolen from me, along with my wallet and U.S. passport, in San Francisco. I was there for the Intel Developer Forum, and at a private event I looked up and away from my bag, and poof — gone. I didn't realize this until I reached my hotel afterward. It was the closest I've come — since a long night with some tequila and a well-placed rosebush — to throwing up in public. I bent double, sucking air, squeezing my eyes shut and forcing them open again. I had no ID. No way of proving who I was. No money. No way of returning to my partner, my cats, my bed, my books. No way back into Canada. 

No home. No identity. I was supposed to fly back the next day.

It sounds melodramatic now. But in the moment it was the trigger for a thing I distantly recognized as a panic attack: the all-encompassing terrified certainty that I would never be allowed to come home, that it was never really my home anyway, that a wall of arcane rules and regulations would keep me from Canada. That night the border seemed impossibly thick and thorny, like the bushes that overgrow Sleeping Beauty's castle. I imagined border guards doubting my story. I imagined small rooms with bright lights. I imagined being judged and found wanting.

I had no ID. No way of proving who I was. No money. No way of returning to my partner, my cats, my bed, my books. No way back into Canada.

The hotel allowed me back into my room when I signed into my laptop with my name and photo on it.

"Is that good enough?" the security guard asked an invisible voice. On the other end of his curly wire headset, someone approved, and he let me stay in the room. "Good luck," he added, as the door closed.

Thus proceeded my two weeks in Los Angeles. It was an odd sort of homecoming — I was born there, after all. The only Canadian consulate for tourists (not traders) in California is in Los Angeles. It's a two-hour flight, but you can't enter a plane without photo ID, and I had none. My only option was Greyhound. They took cash, and they verified the ticket that Intel graciously bought me with a security question. This kind of cloak and dagger stuff should make you feel like a spy. What it really makes you feel like is a fugitive.

My mother had to wire me cash, because the transfer of Canadian funds would take 48 hours. "I'm sorry," I sobbed to her on the phone. "I'm really sorry. I'm almost thirty. I should be a grown up."

"You should keep that cash in multiple places," she told me. "And never flash it around."

I slept on my former roommate's couch for two weeks. She was good enough to take me in, and I slept ensconced in the comfort of silky avocados, watermelon-basil elixirs and a love-starved cat. I was well looked-after. The Canadian consulate — the one next to the Los Angeles Public Library, a temple to literature — told me simply to get my old PR card and go home. My immigration attorney said I didn't have enough documents. I filed a police report in L.A. for a crime committed in San Francisco. I talked about writing sci-fi, to the consulate. ("What do you do?" they asked. "I'm a science fiction writer," I said. They gave me a look. It's still hard for some people to believe they make us in female models.)

It was an incredibly difficult couple of weeks. Waiting on documents, verifying documents. But it's nothing compared to what actual refugees face. Two weeks on a friend's couch is nothing compared to two years in a tent, dependent on aid, cut off from friends and family, divorced from dignity. That awful night of sick terror I experienced? Families all over the world experience that for years at a time. All they want is to do the responsible thing, to go somewhere else, to find the right life and the right opportunities. All they want is to find a home. To make a home. To be at home.

That awful night of sick terror I experienced? Families all over the world experience that for years at a time…. All they want is to find a home. To make a home. To be at home.

Canada is a wonderful place. I believe that even more firmly now than I did in my panicked moments, years ago. Now I've seen more of it — Vancouver and Calgary, Cobalt and Temagami, Gander and Glovertown, even the sad little stuffed lobsters at the Halifax airport. I feel more Canadian now, more accepted by Canadians, than I have since first moving here. I have two graduate degrees from Canada. I'm married to a Canadian. I've worked for Canadian companies and Canadian universities. My barriers to citizenship are things like cost and procrastination. (And yes, anxiety.) But I understand that these barriers are nothing compared to those faced by others. I recognize my privileged position for what it is.  

My hope is to someday carry a Canadian passport. I share that hope with so many others, who have gone through so much more, for whom the stakes are much higher and the despair much deeper. I believe that Canada is big enough for all of us. I believe that the woman who said "Welcome home," to me, as I finally passed through customs, truly meant it. And I believe we can extend that welcome even further.

Madeline Ashby's Companytown  is in the running at this year's Canada Reads. Measha Brueggergosman will be defending Ashby's book in the debates that take place March 27 to 30. Catch them on air on CBC Radio One at 11 a.m., live streamed on CBCbooks.ca at 11 a.m. and broadcast on CBC Television at 4 p.m.