On China, and itchy feet
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 @ 03:12 AM
As one of you readers mentioned to me in a conversation a few nights ago, each update here has come to mean that you won't hear from me in a while, and this time it may be doubly true. A week, a day, and a few hours from now, I will be in Beijing, where I will spend two weeks living twelve hours in the future.
My partner in crime:
She has promised the following:
A trip to the Forbidden City, and kite-flying in Tiananmen Square.
Crumbling Chinese architecture, and strolls through the remaining hutongs of Beijing.
A trip to Hangzhou, where I imagine we'll be seeing the West Lake.
I have a long layover in Korea on my way home, and my flight arrives in Birmingham in time for me to (try to) get a good night's sleep, wake up, drive to Tuscaloosa, and move in to my dorm the morning before classes begin.
If reverse culture shock weren't enough, I know from previous trips that within the hour of my homecoming, at least one person will ask why my photos aren't yet online—a task that I will be completing as my sophomore year begins, and I see friends I left in May, some I haven't been in touch with since then.
I begin every trip with flighty passages about how this one will change me, how this will be the summer voyage to remember, to eclipse all others—paragraphs often scribbled in journals over the tray-tables of airplanes. It never stops being true; this trip is the trip to eclipse all others, as I hope will be true of all my future travels. I will be a foreigner who knows little more than "hello"—a redhead in a sea of silky black. For two weeks, I will be an illiterate young woman incapable of communicating with anyone but my fellow traveler, who—if my experience with Rainier and dinner conversation with relatives in LeMans serves as any testament—will likely cease to translate after a few good meals. I will be without phone, without television, without internet, without address. The thought that I will have (or, depending on your perspective, not have) all of this in a little over a week is pure delight, as well as totally unbelievable and completely surreal.
If you're worried you won't hear about this trip, or you're concerned you'll have to wait, rest assured. At this point, I'm certain that my parents decided to cover the cost of my plane ticket (and put aside their fear of non-Western Europe), if for no other reason than the fact that I might write about and photograph half the things I see. Each time the subject of Beijing arises, my father mentions that he "better read about it when I get back," or that the both of them "hope I find some wifi so they can see photos before school starts." My mother requests links to websites and articles about the places I'll go, half of which I don't even know yet, as most of the itinerary will be determined by Missy's aunt, who loves to show people around.
As if it weren't obvious already that I find no relief for itchy feet, I feel that Beijing might confirm that for me. Fractions of my struggle to find a major in school have made it here, but more and more I feel like travel should be a part of it. In my international honors class last semester (a seminar about communication and culture), we read from Best American Travel Writing 2005 and other essays. Pico Iyer, in his essay titled, "Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World," couldn't hit the nail more firmly on its head:
"We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity—and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other."
"Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation."
And this one. My favorite.
"I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York City and lie in bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning—from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament—and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."
So forgive me if upon my return—or even now—I seem smitten beyond any sensible communication. I am drunk with journey and infatuated with wandering, and I doubt I will soon recover.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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Happy travels! Have fun living in the future.
One question first though: if it really is a "Forbidden City", how are you going to visit it?
29 Jul 2007, 9:52 AM.
Have a great trip!
29 Jul 2007, 11:21 PM.