Home » Opinion » Foreign Views
Every traveler is a pilgrim on a quest
Print Edition
I do not know where the impulse to travel comes from but I have always had it bad since I was four or five.
A Vietnamese child living in the Mekong Delta, I remember listening to my French-educated father’s stories of snow on the gilded bridges across the Seine; in the well-groomed parks of Paris; across his bunker’s window when he was a military exchange cadet in Denver, Colorado, and on barren trees and moss-strewn rock gardens and temple roof-tops of fabled Kyoto.
I remember standing on tiptoe, afterwards, on a chair next to the opened fridge with my hands in the freezer compartment scraping at the frost until my fingers were numbed.
Even then, with eyes closed and a modest snowball in my palm, I had begun to travel; or perhaps I was trying to commune with my worldly father.
Travel stirs the imagination like nothing else. Away from home and hearth, ingesting in a new landscape, the traveller’s concepts of his own identity, borders and nationhood are all up for dispute.
Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but a matter of scheduling. My imagination, once bound by a singular sense of geography, expanded its reference points across the border towards a cosmopolitan possibility.
Indeed, we live now at a time when freedom of movement is recognized as a basic human right and the business of travel — hotels, transportations, tours, cruises, restaurants, conferences — has evolved to become the largest industry in the world. Tourism is the No. 1 source of foreign revenue for many countries (including the United States), employs more than 200 million people worldwide — about one in nine of all workers — and accounts for 11 per cent of all consumer spending.
Swift flow of information and border-less economies may be fusing globalization but the phenomenon is created in large part by the unprecedented movement of people. Here, in San Francisco where I now live, the international airport saw more people going through it each year than there are people living in the state of California.
Why travel?
Every day, cable cars climb up and down the street fronting my house on Nob Hill, and the cling-clanging noises they make echo through my open window as I write, reminding me that I live in an era of unprecedented mass movement in human history. Chinese have replaced Japanese as the Asian country with largest traveling population.
But, why travel?
Why trudge abroad when we can be, as Paul Russel puts it, “stationary tourists” logging onto the Internet and surfing the world in the comfort of our bedroom? The cynics would contend that the going is not worth the fare anymore, that paradise was lost long ago.
We travel out of necessity, of course. To trade, to proselytize, to discover new homes. But, most importantly, we travel to find ourselves.
One’s place in the world
The world may have been discovered long ago, but not one’s place in it. One watches gorillas play in their habitat or one descends into dank and dark tunnels of other ruins to imagine one’s own life lived otherwise, elsewhere.
But some of us travel for a deeper reason, the deepest perhaps. Ultimately, a traveler is a pilgrim on a quest.
The outer space explored is the metaphor for the inner life expressed. Every trip thus becomes a story, and every new passport with its pristine pages is, essentially, a novel waiting to be written. The traveler emerges a bit wiser from the experience, with a story or two to tell if and when he or she comes home.
A few years back, a homeless man in his 40s with a little monkey moved into the front step of an out-of-business shop near my office and we became friends. I always caught him with a thick book, and, unlike many other dispossessed, he displayed a remarkably sunny personality.
One day I asked him, “How long have you been homeless?” He laughed and said: “What made you think I’m homeless? No, I’m a traveler.”
When I returned from a trip to Southeast Asia a few months ago, the man and his little monkey were gone. Those who knew him told me that he had decided to go to Mexico to check out some new sites and did not know when or if he would be back.
Though I shall miss him, his friendly smile, his sunny disposition and his funny pet in a vest, I’m glad that he picked up and went.
The man and his monkey reminded me strangely of a childhood hero, a monk in the famous Chinese 16th-century epic, “Journey To The West.”
On a quest to find the sacred Buddhist text, he had to journey through a thousand exotic landscapes with his band of misfits, with the Monkey King as his guide.
Home for them became anywhere and everywhere, its logistics translated into a beatific vision of freedom.
They turned the cold hard ground into a soft bed and tugged the night sky into a blanket filled with stars.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and author of the “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora” and “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” His latest book is “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a short story collection, published in 2013.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
