It's 1 o'clock on an Easter morning (does 1 a.m. count as part of Easter morning?), and I'm in the middle of grading, but I was looking through materials from the travel writing course I taught in the fall of 2020 for an essay I wanted to forward to a friend. And of course, I got sucked into other parts of the course materials. I can tell that even though we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were enjoying the class and each other's (virtual) company. (Unfortunately, the English Department doesn't seem to want to let me teach the course anymore. Departmental politics. *sigh*)
Anyway, I wanted to share one assignment from early in the semester and my response to it. I've had to fix some links in it, and one reading I can't legally share online:
Watch "Pico Iyer: A Portable Life" and read Lola Akinmade Åkerström's "When Home Morphs into Space" and Alain de Botton's "On Anticipation." Use the questions below to form a response to these three pieces. (Note: it isn't necessary to respond one by one to each question--in fact, I'd prefer that you not try to answer all of them. But consider them as you think about your response.) In your letters, include quotations from the passages you are responding to.
- As you are watching the Iyer video, write down some of the things that he says that connect with you, either through similarity, difference, or some other kind of relationship. What does he say about travel, home, place, and the self in motion that evokes a feeling of recognition in you?
- What is your definition of "home?" How does it compare with Akinmade Åkerström's definition of home as "the space where I’m allowed to exist without explanation"? What parts of her essay did you find compelling or did you resonate with?
- With what parts of de Botton’s chapter do you resonate? Looking back on your own travels (including, possibly, coming to Boston or NU from your hometown), write about your experiences of anticipation, reality, and memory, with de Botton as your “guide” (as he does with Huysmans). In other words, write about the experience, showing how it reflects the connections (or disconnects) with de Botton’s descriptions.
- What points of intersection (comparison, contrast, extension, …) do you see between de Botton, Akinmade Åkerström, and/or Iyer? Try to lay out some of these connections with an eye toward thinking about how they might influence your own views concerning the relationships among preparing for, experiencing, and reflecting on travel. Try to use specific examples from your own experiences to illustrate your responses.
I think the first thing that struck me about Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s essay was the way she opened it up with her Swedish husband sending her photos of cuts of meat while she was at home, pregnant, craving Nigerian food. I was in the position of her husband when we were expecting our son--I was the one texting her pictures of Taiwanese food from Kam Man in Quincy to find out if I had found the right thing. One difference, perhaps, from Akinmade Åkerström’s experience was that I had spent almost two decades in Taiwan before we came to Boston, so I approached the experience of shopping in an Asian market with a combination of familiarity and nostalgia. I remember when we first found Kam Man several months after arriving, the familiar Chinese packaging lining the shelves, combined with the Mandopop playing in the background, took me out of my immediate surroundings and back to the Taiwanese supermarkets I used to frequent.
It’s probably hard, though, for someone who hasn’t lived abroad to identify with someone’s impressions about something as pedestrian as grocery shopping. When I was living in Taiwan, my parents would sometimes mention in letters “trips” that they had taken by going to slide presentations or watching Rick Steves programs: “We took a boat cruise on the Rhine this evening and didn’t even have to leave the house!” It was like des Esseintes with a vengeance, as though they were asking me, tauntingly, “What [is] the good of moving when a person can travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair” (De Botton 11)?
Part of the difficulty of sharing my experiences of Taiwan, then, seems to come from the mundanity of my life there as compared with the “distilled” nature of the travel experiences my parents got through Rick Steves and the slide shows. Pico Iyer says of his ordinary life in Japan, “Every day when I wake up, it seems as if the day lasts a thousand hours,” making that sound like a good thing. But sometimes standing in line in another country is not that much different from standing in line in your home country. De Botton suggests, though, that over time, the tedium might disappear from travelers’ memories, possibly leaving them with more interesting stories to tell as a result of everything they had forgotten (14-15).
But that “interest factor” also raises in my mind concerns about how faithfully I’m representing that life abroad. I find myself identifying with an often-repeated saying that those who visit China (or anywhere else, I'd say) for a week write a book about it; those who visit for a month write an article; and those who live for a year or more write nothing. The longer you're there, the more nuance you see, and the more tongue-tied you feel. How do you write about a society--any society--that is in constant change, without oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, or relying on clichés like, “X is a land of contrasts”? What authority do you (I) have to represent others?
It’s this hesitance to publish my impressions of Taiwan that makes travel writing both intriguing and intimidating. It comes not only from the worry about “getting it wrong” (it’s always going to be wrong to someone), but also from the feeling that what you say is permanent and has effects on people in ways that you might not imagine. One summer Sunday, a minister at my parents’ church announced to the congregation that I was visiting them from Thailand, and I found myself having to argue with an older woman who insisted to me that I was living in Thailand and not Taiwan because that’s what the pastor had said. Iyer declares, “The first rule of travel is, the minute you arrive somewhere, all your plans go out the window.” I’d add that the minute you write about somewhere, all your intentions go out the window when your reader gets hold of your text.
Works Cited
Akinmade Åkerström, Lola. "When Home Morphs into Space." Modern Adventure, November, 2018, modernadventure.com/magazine/november-2018/home-the-art-of-lagom. Accessed 23 August 2020.
De Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. Vintage, 2004.
Iyer, Pico. Interview by Don George. NG Live!: Pico Iyer: A Portable Life, n.d., youtu.be/I6GB1uAy3gE?feature=shared. Accessed 23 August 2020.
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