Travel Lessons

With my visits to Egypt (my first time in Africa!) and Turkey last year, I’ve now travelled to over 25 countries. And while the number itself is meaningless, the fact that I’ve spent a significant portion of my life so far outside the countries where I was born and raised (China and the U.S.) isn’t. In fact, I feel some pressure (mostly self-imposed) to give meaning to my travels.

Philosopher and author Alain de Botton is a wellspring of quirky, captivating ideas, some of which I find questionable. But count me among the fans of his contemplation on travel’s intimate, deeply personal power in The Art of Travel. He believes the magic in traveling lies in our removal from familiar surroundings, which imbue our lives with structure and rhythm that can easily become mechanical and stultifying. However, free from these restrictions on the road, in the air, or whatever, we can fully get back in touch with the parts of ourselves that lie dormant and buried in our work lives. In other words, we can understand ourselves divorced from our day-to-day responsibilities—ourselves in the truest sense, perhaps.

I channel my inner de Botton when I turn off email and social media notifications during my travels. On a more serious note, I think I’m channeling my inner de Botton right now. After all, trying to make sense of my travels is taking a step towards understanding myself.

Perennial travel documentarian—or more sexily, perennial adventurer—Anthony Bourdain is another inspiration. The man was a juggernaut in the fullest sense of the word: an unstoppable force mowing down everything in its path, which, in his case, were conventions. He jettisoned the tropes of safe, boring travel documentaries by venturing into Parts Unknown with No Reservations, to steal the titles of his two hit shows. If his camera crew missed him greeting his guests, he’d refuse to reshoot and reenact a fake greeting. When he failed to catch fish on one of his show’s segments, he called out his crew for planting previously caught fish to make the expedition seem successful. Hell, he relished eating sheep testicles in Morocco and cannabis pizza in Cambodia, and he even had bun cha with President Obama in a no-name (now a big name) hole-in-the-wall in Vietnam on an episode that made me tear up. The man was all about authenticity.

There’s a lot to learn from Bourdain’s travels, but I’ll share just one of his nuggets of wisdom now. In one of his episodes, true to his spirit of authenticity, he remarked that the best way to travel is to put yourself in the right place at the right time to maximize your chance of experiencing something extraordinary. That’s it. Isn’t that great? Even an unrepentant planner like me, who picks out breakfast, lunch, and dinner spots for each day of my trip two weeks in advance, admits that my best travel memories are unscripted.

If you’re expecting some profound insights from my travels on par with de Botton and Bourdain’s, well, you can stop reading now. I can make some excuses, like how those dudes have 25 years on me or more, how the countries I’ve visited don’t span the diverse patchwork of human experience, yada yada. But the truth is that travel is deeply personal, and while I’ve found great personal meaning in my experiences, I haven’t uncovered any universal truths. In fact, I suspect they exist at all. I recognize parts of de Botton and Bourdain’s philosophy in my travels, but their ideas certainly don’t resonate with everyone, and there are countless other inspirations out there whose experiences fluctuate between illuminating and trivial.

Well, what I can share is one personal realization I’ve made in my travels and, mind you, it’s personal, so I make no claims about whether it applies to you. Having journeyed to over 25 countries, I think I’ve seen enough to accept lifestyles radically divergent from my own as perfectly valid. No, this isn’t some groundbreaking revelation; I’ve read and heard its variants repeatedly in college essays and college interviews. But that’s mostly tokenism. What I’m saying is that through my travels, I’ve accepted that the way I lead my life—the way that my society encourages and even indoctrinates me to lead it—is only one extremely small option among probably infinite valid ways of living. That’s not something I could’ve said when I graduated five years ago.

Born in Hong Kong, raised in a primarily Chinese-American community in NYC, and now working in Guangzhou, I’ve been surrounded for most of my life by firm, inflexible values and norms. Kids find basketball, Supreme, and K-pop “cool” and care about standardized tests and college application to an objectively unhealthy degree. Parents want their kids to work at investment banks, law firms, and tech startups and proactively quash artistic, musical, and other creative aspirations. But it’s so much more than that.

It’s black-or-white thinking. Heterosexual relationships. Sex as taboo. Limited role of religion. Eating using utensils. But can you still defend these values and norms as the only valid or even the most preferable ones when you’ve scooped heavenly Indian rogan josh into your mouth using your hands? When you’ve heard the enchanting call to prayer reverberating throughout an entire city as you cross the Bosphorus? When you’ve hiked the Acropolis at sunrise and seen that glorious monument to mankind—the Parthenon—whose very majesty invokes a past society that celebrated sex, embraced homosexuality, and championed complete freedom of thinking?