Urban Ephemera // Adrian De Leon

In this guest edited month, Adrian De Leon has challenged writers to "re-animate the ephemeral urban worlds in which we live."

Long before I had heard of Toronto’s Bathurst and Wilson corridor, I found my Little Manila in a Scarborough hamburger. At many poor and low-income street corners in Manila, one might walk up to a rickety metal booth called a Burger Machine. Unlike the nuclear-red Jollibees, a Burger Machine didn’t attract long line-ups and blare theme songs that interns changed every two weeks. Instead, they were umami-flavored oases in the eggy funk of runoff ditches. At barely my mother’s waist height, and with the benediction of her change purse, a magical arm handed me an immaculately-wrapped burger like manna from heaven. The bun was crispy and a naturally sweet char to the patty was seasoning enough. A few years later, mowed sod and fresh buss-up-shut replaced Freon and smog in my lungs. My parents and I flew across the Pacific to the rolling concrete hills and hushed streams of Scarborough. Here, you could line up eight Burger Machines in a row and still come up short of the width of Victoria Park Avenue. The suburb’s quiet was a blank canvas to the bwuh-bwuh-bwuh of my dad’s first car, a geriatric station wagon that I named Monster. When my torso grumbled, we sputtered that sucker up Victoria Park to a radioactive orange box called Johnny’s Charcoal Broiled Hamburgers. The counter was no lower than the ones that handed me my burgers in Manila. I bit into the bundle handed to me from above, and the crunchy vegetables and sauce stuffed me with mouthfuls of homeland. Once, I brought a Johnny burger on the Scarborough RT, hoping to enjoy myself through a muggy commute. In the middle of summer, those white trains became poltergeists. The screeching of the sweating metal wheels suffocated my eardrums. And right around that railway bend, between Ellesmere and Midland, the eggy funk of the Midland recycling plant punched my nostrils. It seems to have sucker punched everyone else, too; we grimaced in sync with the eastward veering of the train, finding release only at its halting brakes. At Midland Station, mid-frown, I ate my burger across from three children sharing their Warden Station beef patties. Little bites of home along the rusty RT line.

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Cities tend to be written as self-contained things. We draw the lines around area codes and denigrate establishments for being on the other side of cartographic limits. (Being an obnoxious Raptors fan from Scarborough, I, of course, am guilty as charged.) Even the “global city,” supposedly synonymic with the cosmopolitanism of a diverse and immigrant place, treats our variety of experiences merely as ingredients to the larger dish of the city. But those ephemeral experiences can bring us back to our place of origin. Or in the collective experience of wincing at piercing train tracks forty years past their expiry date.Some of the biggest culprits are the online forms of urban tourism. We know their names and see their branded mugshots in our minds: Yelp and TripAdvisor, Facebook feature videos (“Toronto’s got a BRAND. NEW. [LUDICROUS FOOD HERE.]”), and beyond. But could these not be literary forms, too? Take, for instance, Johnny’s Charcoal Broiled Hamburgers. A scan of the burger joint’s Yelp page reveals a plethora of literary forms that capture these urban experiences. Sure enough, you have amateur ethnographies in flavor profiles, both at a first try and over time (“I can’t help but think that they changed the type of potatoes,” Erika writes). Do these not resemble field notes from long-term participant observation? In Yelp, we also find reflection and personal history. Places like Johnny’s capture the quotidian rhythms that we compile together over time as family “tradition.” Amaryllis writes that their “grandpa used to come here and the tradition is passed down … we come from Mississauga for these delicious burgers.” Are these not the seeds of memoir, or better yet, local histories? Finally, in Yelp and other media, we find an elusive perspective in the most prosaic forms: the second person. A literary rarity and a darling for choose-your-own-adventure fans, “you” can be found aplenty in Yelp reviews. For the tourist entertaining these online forms, language seems to offer a snapshot of worlds far away. These imagined frontiers might be at the downtown hipster’s doorstep, or paces away from some arduous commute. But what if we could introduce that “you” voice to even more overlooked experiences that everyday people face in a city—the smells of a recycling plant, the glimpses of security cameras, missing persons photographs in traffic, the way that people open doors for each other, or the wrecking ball on the walls of a bookworm’s love?As every poet, or ethnographer, or novelist, or popular essayist knows, well-wrought words, too, have the power to reintroduce the lifeblood of ephemeral experience onto the page, through pen or pixel. Behind the curtains of urban tourism, millions of everyday people, moving about and sensing the city in everyday ways, offer a truer map than the petrification of tourist pieces. And instead of ascribing pre-made forms, we might be well-served to watch for ephemera and treat it as found poems, or as mundane fodder for larger meditations altogether. During this month of Town Crier, I asked writers of all kinds—poets, public historians, ethnographers, essayists, pop culture writers, and more—to re-animate the ephemeral urban worlds in which we live. What are the forms that can bring us closer to the fleeting but unforgettable worlds that cities make for (and with) us? Some of us start with the Yelp form, breathing vitality into the shortcomings of culinary tourism. Others take to memoir, or to ethnography, or to the walking tour. And others still find lyrics in the acts of watching and walking in the streets around us. There is no right way, except to go out into the city and crystallize new forms out of the senses that flit by us.

 Adrian De Leon is an Abagatan (Southern) Ilokano writer and educator from Manila by way of Scarborough. He is the author of Rouge (2018) and co-editor of FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology (2020). After finishing two degrees at the University of Toronto, he is now an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.