I’ve been thinking about Asia and all she’s given me.
Yes, she. I’ve read plenty about how personification of place is a bit of a no-no in travel writing, but do you know what? I don’t necessarily agree. I think it depends on what kind of writing you are talking about, your relationship to the place and also the window you use to view the world. My window teaches me that all people and things are related and and have effect on each other, relationship. To think that we can be a traveller, and therefore exist on the outside of the things, people and places we experience seems a bit, well, absurd. Everything you do changes you. Are you the same person who graduated from secondary school? Or left your parent’s house to live on your own? Very likely not, but that is not just because of the passage of time. It is because of the things, people and places, ie. the actors, that you have come into contact with. Things, people and places all push change and growth, even the bad interactions.
My parents raised me from a baby to young adulthood. I went to university to begin my transition to adulthood, and that’s when Asia really became a big player in my life. Actually, it didn’t even start that late. When I was quite young, my parents went on a trip to Hong Kong and Bangkok. When they came back they brought me Chinese preserved plums in little papers that I knew I would taste again at their origin. When my Mother said, “You’d really like Thailand“, I knew she was right. How, I’m not sure, but between that experience and my childhood obsession with all things Japanese, I knew Asia was calling me.
I enjoyed my time as an undergraduate and even though I was living in the moment and had no idea who I was yet or even much about what was happening in the world, I always had an eye on Asia. I knew she played a role in my future. That knowledge gave me confidence in some respects. When I saw other early 20 somethings obsessing over boyfriends, I never wanted to get deeply involved in case I got pulled in to a relationship which would lead me to question my call to Asia. I did have boyfriends, but never serious until I met one particular person who insisted that he also wanted to travel. I thought, well…OK, we’ll see how it goes. At the same time I was thinking:
{but I have this Asia thing I have to do so, I’m not expecting this to last}
We are still travelling together and now dragging our son along for the ride.
When I first got to Asia I felt like I’d come home. For someone who doesn’t have a home town, that means a lot. I remember falling asleep in my tiny Hong Kong guesthouse with the TV on. I couldn’t turn it off because it was the familiarity of the Cantonese speaking that was lulling me to sleep. Asia was letting me know that I’d arrived where I was meant to. That I had some connection or reason for landing on this continent. Had I been here in another life? Why was it so familiar?
Over the years I have travelled in many parts of Asia. She constantly calls me back to the point that I feel homesick for her rather than the way in which homesickness usually works. She has taught me tolerance and and how to save face, not only for myself but for others (which also comes back to you, by the way). She’s given me experience with building houses and other people’s immense acts of kindness, like when I got on a bus to the wrong airport when I was headed to a job interview. I missed both the flight and the interview time, but one person phoned both the airline and the interviewer for me, changing my flight and explaining my mistake. The bus driver then let me stay on the bus after we’d arrived and took me to the other airport. I wish we could remember to treat our foreign visitors as well as I was treated by strangers.
Asia has also shown me how very easy life is for some and not for others, how dysfunctional the relationship between the two is, and how important it is to find a role in this dichotomy. She’s shown me how our material things really are that and not “essentials”.
On buses in her highest mountains, she has taught me the value of life and how fear can be confronted either with worry, faith in a higher power or fatalism and that whichever one you subscribe to makes it difficult to understand those who subscribe to the other. Also in those mountains, she’s taught me the importance of water and a hat to keep the sun off when I nearly fainted, young and silly, when tramping without enough preparation.
She’s taught me about personal safety with men hiding in toilets, earthquakes, sticky fingered backpackers, centipedes and snakes. So many snakes!
And she’s fed me. Oh how she’s fed me! She’s shown me how to fill my belly with simple bread and cheese, not to mention how good that cheese tastes when it is so difficult to find. She’s taught me to associate the scent of durian with happiness. She’s gently built up my chilli tolerance so that I could experience all the other wonderful flavours involved in local dishes. In Japan, she showed me how to also enjoy the opposite, no chilli, subtle flavours. And she was with me when after a couple of decades of vegetarianism I began to eat seafood. Thanks goodness, because if there is one thing that is done well in much of Asia, it is seafood.
Perhaps most of all, she has taught me to be a mother. I had no experience with teaching people under the age of 16 until, somehow, I ended up working in a bilingual kindergarten. My students, usually adults, were now all under the age of two. As it turns out, my son came home from Thailand at that very age. How many mothers are lucky enough to get a little hands on experience before their children arrive? It was a gift. It was a gift that helped me with the best thing that Asia has given me, my son.
So, for me, Asia is the being who has opened her arms to me, wrapped them round tightly but let me know when I needed to learn something until finally helping me to wrap my own arms around another little being. I came of age in Asia.
Could I have learnt these things elsewhere? Of course. But in my case, Asia was my teacher, my mentor, my Shantiwallah.
Be assured that sheep in New Zealand are free ranging.
In our daily activities and rhythms we often forget that where we are is a foreign place to others. It looks and smells different and there are very different things that punctuate our day. After dropping my son off at day care, I wanted to go out for a run before settling down to work for the day and so pointed the car in the direction of a place I knew I could don my headphones and listen to some travel podcasts and forget that my legs were annoyed with me for making them move at this hour.
I’d slowed my car to a halt and was waiting to get through when it suddenly struck me that my windscreen framed what some might call “a New Zealand scene”. I was in Corwall Park at the base of One Tree Hill, one of Auckland’s 50 odd volcanic cones. It was fully my intention to run around the cone if only I could get to the car park and set off. But I was stuck, waiting for three sheep to decide which way they wanted to go. One was halfway up a hill and already tucking in to a fresh patch of grass doused in morning dew. I’m thinking this is like a power breakfast for sheep, greens and hydration in one. I had a lot of time to think. Another of the sheep was just looking at me and chewing , like they do. “What are you doing here?”, he seemed to be thinking. The last one was contemplating the cattle stop but finally decided that what lay beyond the stone gate was not something worth treading over narrow metal strips for, at least not today. When they finally inched over a bit I slowly rolled forward enough that they got the idea a flitted up the hillside.
Much of a travel writer’s job is to take up the challenge of describing a place without the dreaded “commodification”. Like salt has pepper, Japan has geishas, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, England has Beefeaters (I never understood that one), and California has the flashy cheesiness of Rodeo Drive (never understood that either). Places get stuck with images, often not actually very representative, and then they are copied and pasted ad infinitum. This is how we package things up to sell the story and sell the place. Perhaps some people actually still want this kind of writing. Perhaps they want to have critical mass of a particular image in their mind so they can tick it off on their list when they arrive at the destination, you know, for reassurance that all is as we believe it to be in the world. Indeed, I’ve had clients request this kind of writing. If that’s what they need, who am I to refuse? But I can say that it is difficult to spin that story in a new direction for the ten millionth time and it still be interesting. Very difficult.
As much as I hate reading the same bloody exclamations of “There are more sheep than people in New Zealand” and “They even have sheep in the middle of the cities” over and over, I have to admit that, in this case, it is absolutely true. There ARE sheep in the middle of Auckland. I’m sitting in my car, the rainy mist is hanging low, the stone walls are grey and the grass is green and covered in sheep. This doesn’t happen in London or Beijing. There may be some people who might want to know. Sheep in cities is sort of interesting… I guess. I suppose I should write about this. Oh, I just did.
Although I dislike getting up for mornings, I do like being out in them. My ideal morning is early, in a hot country, preferably with lots of activity to watch in slow motion while holding a hot drink. I don’t even mind the annoying nights beforehand, sweating and swatting away mosquitoes, by the time morning rolls around because the calm that cool morning air brings on invades the mind to the point that all else falls away. You know that it is soon to be unbearably hot, but right now it’s easier to watch people lighting incense and the cool breeze blowing the smoke into shapes that last a millisecond each.
Milky light is what photographers call it. Everything softened. Even hands seem to be efficient yet somehow graceful and leisurely. It’s as if the thick light can lessen movement without slowing it down. But once the sun hits a particular angle, it is time to go out, start the day, and forget. The magic is over until tomorrow when you see it all again as if you’d never experienced it before.
Bus to the high Himalayas by Felipe Skroski on Flickr
I am perched on the metal bar that has been revealed from worn away vinyl long gone. I’m not really sitting. I’m on the balls of my feet, ready to spring up and jump off this bus if I feel any wheels leave the ground. How many buses have I sat on while the driver has had to finally back down to someone bigger and reverse over a drop that seems a kilometre deep to let the winner pass? Why would I keep getting on these damn buses, I ask myself. This is it. This is the last one. I’m done with this. My heart can’t take it. My partner points out that we also have to get back down off the mountain, and since there aren’t many car hire companies in small Himalayan villages, we’ll have to entrust our lives again into the hands of a bus driver whose vehicle has brakes that are cooled only by a pipe of water leading from a tank on the roof. I always watch the bubbles in the tube behind the driver get bigger and bigger until I know there is no more water in there and hope for a water station to appear around the next sickening bend. I often wish I’d grown up in a more fatalistic culture so I wouldn’t be so fine tuned to imagining what could happen.
No more bubbles. Thank god, a stop. A small chai stand saves my nerves because holding a hot cuppa is the closest I’m going to get to a shot of vodka up here. The scent of the tea masala helps me forget that I have to get back on the bus in a minute, but only until the driver starts shouting and everyone starts running to secure their coveted seats on cold, uncovered bars. OK, I can do this.
“When we get there, let’s stay an extra day or two”, I suggest, “We could tramp to the next village”.
I really don’t want to get on another bus for a while. Mountains have always been calming to me and sitting in thin, crisp air, wrapped in down and wool, helps me remember why I have this never ending goal to get up high.
“Samosa?”, he asks me holding out a couple of triangles splotched in chutney.
Hmm, maybe some food would settle my stomach. In the very least, I can certainly lose myself in a sharp mouthful of chillies. A nice distraction. I think of the young woman I saw him buy these from and wonder about her. What time did she get up to make this dough? What did she roll it out on? Is she sick of eating samosas herself? Did she grow these potatoes?
The edge of the village. Is this it, I wonder hopefully without trying to get too excited. I ask the woman next to me who has only recently stopped vomiting in red plastic bags and tossing them out the window.
“Yes, yes, here!”, she smiles. She’s obviously as relieved as I am .
By the time we climb up to get our bags off the roof, the driver is already filling the water tank for the trip back down and inside the bus, a young boy is punching fresh red plastic bags into the backs of each seat. My blood pressure starts to go down as I enjoy standing in my boots.
Here are 7 frantically typed, unedited, things that my travelling life has gifted to my mothering life.
1) Sleep
It’s not often possible on an aeroplane or when living with a toddler, but do it when you can.
2) Jetlag
Functioning during jet lag is like functioning with a sleepless toddler (see above).
3) Communication
You can’t speak every language in the world but it is polite to learn a few phrases when travelling somewhere new. Likewise, toddlers do not speak my language, but I have learnt how my son says milk, “moo”, and please, “peesh”, and thank you, “krap!”. Well, OK, technically that last one is Thai, but it is toddler Thai all the same. He also tends to get what I’m saying most of the time. We are multilingual like that.
4) Eating and Drinking
Another “Do it when you can just in case you don’t get another opportunity soon”.
5) Muscles
Carrying your gear is like carrying a toddler. You get muscles in places you’ve never had them before.
6) Stuff
Travel teaches you that you really don’t need much stuff to live and when you have a child, the first thing you have to do is clear out all the stuff you don’t want used as a toy (until you can train them up, anyway). Through this process, you start to realise how much of your stuff is not needed anyway. Less is more.
7) Treats
When I lived in the Japanese countryside, it was a treat to have cheese. In New Zealand I took this for granted, but to sit down with a hunk of cheddar and a few crackers in Japan was pure indulgence. Likewise, a really good mango with sticky rice is a treat in New Zealand. Treats for mothers include having a shower longer than 3 minutes alone and indulging in a coffee in a cafe that provides toys.
P.S. I could write about a million of these, but nap times are short and I need a cup of tea.
I’ve been thinking a lot about place and how it can be so important to some people and others can just live where they are and get on with things. I am not one of the latter and it probably seems ridiculous to anyone who knows me that I ever thought I was. I’ve got to keep moving.
I do have big ideas about having a small plot of land on which to grow food without chemicals and whatever other crap we dice with when we shop at supermarkets. And I’d also love to have a house just so that I could have somewhere suitable to cook and to work. I love reading things by 21 year olds who say they are free by living a location independent lifestyle without owning anything and travelling indefinitely, because I thought that too, when I was 21. But, I can tell you that after a few decades of travel you kind of want more than a kitchen space the size of a small chopping board to encourage you to prep real food rather than subsist on takeaways. And anyway, I like food. I write about it.
But, back to place. If I had this house and land, where would it be? For years I thought it would be New Zealand. And, I do like New Zealand, don’t get me wrong. But it is very hard to live here. The houses are full of damp and work is hard to come by. Unhealthy and stressful. Because I spent my childhood moving round the United States, sometimes I think, well maybe I could just go there. I do have family there. Houses are cheap now if you can get work to pay the mortgage and the general cost of living is low. But it’s not that easy, mentally. To go back, I mean. And what about Japan? I love it there, but life can also be difficult not to mention the fact that borne of my own experience is a fear of earthquakes (And, yes, I recognise how ridiculously fortunate I am to get to choose based on this fear). My beloved Thailand? Malaysia? India? Somewhere in Europe? No, I doubt that.
So, to someone like me who has never felt rooted to the ground, it seems like I could just keep looking for that mythical land where things are perfect, well… better. But, do I just keep looking forever? And, even so, the idea of committing to one place for.ev.er. is just scary as hell. I don’t think it’s going to matter where it is. I guess if I could find a good place that also provided enough income for me to keep travelling, maybe…just maybe, I could be content with being tethered to a mortgage.
Where am I going with all this? Dunno. I’m just feeling fed up with the rain leaking into my house and clearing mould off the walls and not being able to utilise the wasted space in my house because it is rented. It’s just a great big, get it off my chest, gripe, I guess. I want to do something.
I’ve travelled to visit family and to move my life to a new country. I’ve travelled to build houses or present at conferences. And, I’ve travelled just for the sake of it. Travel to see what there is to see. But I’ve never travelled with such purpose before. Packing involved thinking ahead to what one person could carry in case the other one had occupied arms. It involved guessing what sized clothes I need to bring for a person of whom I had no idea how big he’d got. Does he need shoes?
Bangkok! We can get everything there. No worries.
Now that I am sitting in a taxi all of those preparatory thoughts fall behind. Driving through the big posh areas of Sukhumvit and Silom with all the trendy girls with nail polish and tourists taking photos of giant golden spirit houses only to enter the old towns in the West of the city. It’s like slipping into a comfortable blanket. People are doing normal things like bathing children in buckets, disassembling jackfruit and pounding som tam. The other Bangkok is fun, but I love this Bangkok. I feel comfortable and at home here and we usually stay out here in old teak houses cooled only by fans and sips of nam manao. But not this time because this time we are travelling with purpose. We’ve rented an “aparthotel” in Lumpini with a swimming pool downstairs and a kitchen and cot in the room. We wanted all three of us to be comfortable.
The taxi driver, my husband and I team up as we enter the narrow sois and try to spot the tiny, handpainted, sign for the orphanage. There it is! I tell him, “We can walk from here, kaaa” “No problem”, he says, “I can take you there”, and we finally stop at the end of the driveway. My husband told me in the taxi that he felt nervous, but I hadn’t felt that until now. Looking at old Bangkok calmed me, but now we have stopped moving and all I can hear is a bird and some clinking dishes as someone in the neighbourhood is washing up. We have to straighten our legs, stand on them, and go and meet our son.
I almost catch a glimpse of children playing as the director warmly greets us and takes us to her office. We are offered a drink and a biscuit as we talk about so much in so little time. We want to know what his routine has been so that we can keep that comfort going for him. She shows us a stack of photos and other little things and puts it all in a giant folder for us. 20 months of life summed up in a tiny parcel that we will carry home. We ask a million other questions and are happy that we have written down the answers because we already know that we are not taking anything in any more. It’s time to go and she wants us to leave quickly so that the children don’t confuse us with the volunteers who come and go. Our son has been prepped to know that we are forever…if forever is and understandable concept to an under two.
As we enter the sala one boy shouts out “Hello!” but they all seem to be moving in a blur as we try to spot the one who is coming home with us. The director jokes that we must identify him before we are allowed to take him home. As we haven’t had a photo since his first birthday this might seem impossible with all these little pairs of eyes looking at us, some children cosying up or showing us toys. But then I see a little boy sitting on the floor as his carer puts on his blue Crocs. He is looking and pointing at us. He knows it’s us and we know it’s him. He walks a little way, hand in hand with the carer, until someone picks him up and puts him in against my body. My mind switches locations and I am picturing those little kiwis we take to give to students in other countries, the ones that clip on to things and don’t let go. He is a limpet with eyes on me, so close. He’s just looking. We expected crying or pushing away but, no, just looking. Someone says “Mama, Mama!” and then points to my husband and says, “Daddy!” and his eyes flit to and fro until the director ushers us out to the taxi.
The taxi affords us a good amount of time to check each other out until he finally starts crying and then changing from one person to another. Holding* a biscuit calmed him but he never took a bite. He liked looking out the window, just like us, but in between spotting interesting things he started to cry more for what was missing. “Kaw thort” I apologise to the taxi drive for the noise. “Mai bpen rai”, no worries, he says back and I think about how lucky we have been with both drivers today. And then it dawns on me that we are about to get out of the taxi, at our hotel, as a family of three.
I have a very good friend whom I knew for a few of the most exciting years of my life. He was just discovering who he was, as we all were in those days, and I love the fact that he is living his true life now. However, I lost touch with this friend quite a few years ago. Many years ago. I’ve always wondered what he was doing and what his life had become. And then about 6 or 7 years ago I managed to get in touch again through a mutual friend. I was so happy because I found out about quite a few nice things that had occurred in his life. Sadly, he was about to leave his job. The email address I had for him was through his work and so I knew he would no longer be using it. He said he would be in touch as soon as he got his own email address set up. This didn’t strike me as odd because I know plenty of people who lead their lives without using the internet on a daily basis. And back then, it wasn’t as common for everyone to have multiple email addresses, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I just hoped for the best. I never heard from him again.
In our brief email exchange, one of the things he said to me was that the reason he hasn’t been in touch was because he was jealous. I should clarify that this is not an ex-boyfriend. He was apparently jealous of my life. I just think this is amazing. He has made up a scenario based on the few facts he still knows about me that has led him to believe that my life is a fairytale. Yes, I have travelled a lot, but that is not all that happens in my life. I feel a little bit angry, but mostly sad about this. He has no idea about the difficult things I’ve been through. He has just chosen some random ‘facts’ and gleaned the rest, and then used that non-reality as a basis for discontinuing the friendship.
But it makes me think. Do I do this? I must do. It seems quite common. There are certainly people I feel jealousy towards. And, I have to admit, there have been times when I’ve avoided those people because I didn’t feel I had anything more to offer than what they already have. But, eventually you see things. You start to see that the things you are jealous of are only on the very surface of their being. Over time, these things change or fade and you begin to see more of the real person. If you stick with these people, you find out that they are struggling in life just as you are and we all need allies. I wish my friend could see this, but if nothing else he has left me with the ability to weigh up my trivial jealousies before they cause me to lose something that could be really important. Well, at least I try.
Subscribe via email
