-C.F. Kettering
Dear friends and family,
Today I am removing my stories from my trip around the world from this website. They aren't gone forever- I am just protecting them for awhile as I work to translate them into book form. I'm optimistic for the results. Aside from the blog entries here, I have a travel journal, a box of memorabilia, and over 500 e-mails (from you!) to stir my memory as I write. Writing a memoir is a tremendous undertaking, but when it comes to fruition I'll have your encouragement to thank for it. Thank you for for writing, for reading, and for wanting to read more. I have a final offering for the moment, a blog entry I wrote in November, about a month after I returned from my trip. It felt too personal to blog from home instead of the road, so I didn't publish it. However, in starting to write my book I've re-embraced something I learned in traveling: no holding back.
Here's to new adventures.
Much love,
Jennie
Taipei and Los Angeles
Bob: "Whatever you like...I'm just completely lost."
Lydia: "It's just carpet."
Bob: "That's not what I'm talking about."
-Lost in Translation
I have very little I feel compelled to blog about Taipei, even though it was a nice city. In a way it was like everything I saw in Asia: bigger, crazier, and more modern than I'd ever pictured. I went to the top of the world's tallest building, the Taipei 101, where I spent a long time wandering from window to window, leaning close to give myself vertigo as the floor curved away from underneath me. In the elevator they play a star-show on the dark ceiling, probably to distract you from how fast the floors are zipping by. I had a momentary flash of Camilo in Koh Tao teaching us how to calculate how long to wait after a dive before flying or otherwise greatly increasing your altitude. I watched everyone clentching their jaws as their ears popped.
The National Palace Museum was another highlight, housing a vast collection of treasures salvaged from the Forbidden City. My favorite thing, and one of the most valuable pieces they have on display, is a piece of jade shaped exactly like a chunk of cooked pork. I'm sure an emperor or two chipped a tooth on that thing.
I've had a lot of people reference the movie "Lost in Translation" when I talk about this chapter in my travels. Although I was far from Tokyo, I have to admit the parallel is an apt one. Or at least, I finally get one of the points of the film. Did you ever notice how quiet that movie is? At least that's how I remember it...even when people are talking and moving, each word and gesture has a muted quality. Now I know why. I never noticed how loud regular life is. Even if I'm not talking, I am still picking up peripheral conversations, reading signs, recognizing logos, all things that trigger inner dialogue. Imagine looking at a word and not having it echo in your head. What I mean is...if you can't read any of the words around you, if they aren't even made of letters you recognize, if the conversation around you is unrecognizable sounds...your world becomes quiet. I stopped hearing my thoughts. I barely even spoke for three days- if I wanted to buy a necklace in the jade market, a bus ticket, a candied fruit from a street vendor, we merely passed the calculator back and forth until both of us were nodding "yes." My English disappeared.
I ended my trip with that phenomenon. The airport restaurant was so crowded I was invited to sit with a wealthy businessman from the States and his two Chinese hosts. Despite their large corporations and worldwide network, and their vacation houses across the globe (I could have seen one from the restaurant in Santorini where Val and I had toasted my final evening in Europe), they were enchanted by my experience and invited me to stay and share their tea and dessert while I waited to go home.
It turns out you don't get home by clicking your heels three times. They were slightly off with that one. You do get home by watching four whole movies, ordering three glasses of wine, and almost dying twice (once by turbulence, once by service cart) on your way to the lavatory. I wish they'd served partridge in a pear sauce, because that would have provided a perfect ending to this paragraph.
At the Passport Control desk in LAX the man frowns at my immigration slip. "Under 'Countries Visited,' you wrote 'Taiwan, Austria, Italy, etc.' You can't just write, 'etc.' in the box."
I tell him that I went to something like 18 countries, and that the box was too small. His face twitches. He looks over my shoulder. "Alone?"
I nod.
..."Why?"
This is a question I have yet to find an elegant answer to. It's complicated. And if you have to ask, you probably won't understand the answer.
"I just, well...I had to."
Oh my God. Nothing more. Please just let me go home.
He looks at me for a second, then back at the slip, then back to me, hesitating. You could stretch my smile between two trees and sunbathe in it. He reaches for the stamp. "Um. Well...welcome back."
Taking my passport back, I pull my best "I don't have 3 bottles of Thai whiskey and a giant box of Asian honey liquor and especially no Grecian Ouzo and definitely not a wooden Nepalese artifact" face, and glide easily through Customs. On the other side, the best surprise ever is waiting for me, in the form of my friend Amanda. The trains weren't running between L.A. and San Diego because of the fires, so she came to get me. On the drive home we see walls of flame and an eerie red sky overhead. I register the strangeness of all the road signs being in English again. None of them say Welcome Home.
Epilogue's Epilogue: San Diego
"I'm a new soul"
-Yael Naim
What happens after a trip like that? The usual things of course: catching up with friends, seeing my family, plenty of laundry-doing, apartment-hunting, replacing the IDs that were stolen, showing off pictures and cool stuff I bought on the road, apartment-finding, moving in, many trips to my storage unit involving my uncle Andy's truck (thank you!), being excited at having more than three outfits that make me look like Lara Croft Tomb Raider...
Then there are the changes that come from my new found, I-can-do-anything outlook. Those who remember my notorious fake-jogs may be shocked to hear I now do real ones. I can suddenly cook, which is good, because the weight I gained on my trip practically falls off as soon as I have my hands on an actual kitchen. I mean, I can wash vegetables. I haven't been able to wash my food in four months. I sign up for cooking classes so as not to jinx my new skills, and throw in a ceramics class for good measure. I think more than anything I realized I wasn't going to be meeting tons of new people every day anymore, so the classes help stave off the weirdness of that. I never craved people this way in my former life. I think introversion never fully crosses over to extrovertedness...but I'm a reformed introvert now. Having ten soccer moms cluster around to coil vases and listen to my stories is cathartic. My adventures get re-told in bars, in grocery lines, to friends-of-friends, to strangers. At home I keep writing them down and wondering if I've got a shot at publication. I believe it, and I'm sure going to try.
Deep down I feel a braveness where once it hadn't been. I feel my new eyes blinking open.
My fire-dancing equipment just arrived from Australia. Who has a big backyard?
1 comment:
your translation was not lost on me. if i were to write the forward to your memoir I would want the readers to know that, although you are writing about your own personal growth, you also made others move on and out and forward with their own lives. thank you.
Post a Comment