why i travel

and left everything behind for the road

for those who have asked, in one way or the other: why did i leave everything behind in hawaii to travel? why have i been traveling for so long? why travel, specifically, over anything and everything else?

caspar david friedrich, moonrise over the sea

we’re driving down an empty forest road in blue mountains national park, two hours outside of sydney. e’s at the wheel, her brows knitted into a tight knot as she attempts to navigate the potholed dirt road like a trucker with a bad case of cramps. i try not to wince at every bump that shakes me off my seat, or think about the fact that the handlebar-mustached campervan rental guy had made it very clear: your insurance doesn’t cover anything that happens on non-paved roads as he handed us the keys.

the campervan is quiet, save for the sound of some local radio we’ve turned down low. outside, a woollen fog hangs off the forest canopy like an overgrown moss; flashes of dark branches pierce the misty veil, slender monsters looming with their claws. from the safety of our van i watch the rain fall like snowflakes onto the windshield.

earlier this morning, e had asked me over breakfast: why is traveling so important to you?

what do you mean? i respond between bites of pie. who doesn’t love traveling?

you know that’s not what i mean, she grumbles. e has a very good way of furrowing her eyebrows and glaring at me when she suspects i’m not being serious. you left everything behind in hawaii for – she waves one hand in the air, gesturing to the empty town corner we sat at – this.

all so you could “travel the world,” she wags her fingers.

why does it mean so much to you?

hmm, i murmur as i wipe my fingers on a paper napkin. that’s a good question.

she raises her eyebrows expectantly as i chew my way through the rest of the pie.

…let me get back to you on that.

e groans and rolls her eyes. i laugh and flick a crumb at her face.

the year is 1970. through the cracked windows of a crowded fifth-floor tenement, a figure carefully rises from a thin pallet on the floor. with weary eyes, my grandmother moves slowly between the sleeping bodies strewn across the room; squatting down in one dim corner, she begins preparing a meager breakfast for her husband and five children.

when my grandparents first arrived in hong kong, the city was little more than a glorified fishing village. they had escaped war, violence and famine for a new chance at life in the tiny british colony on the southern coast of china. and for that chance, they had to rebuild their lives from the ground up: both my parents grew up dirt-poor, crammed into a single, one-roomed apartment with their siblings and family. to lift their families from poverty, my parents doggedly pursued careers that would guarantee them the financial stability they had lacked in their childhood. my father went into medicine, my mother into finance.

of course, they expected their children to do the same: the last thing they wanted was for us to end up in the same conditions they were raised. growing up, my friends and i expected – and were expected – to become financiers, doctors, and lawyers, spend our lives working a stable career.

there was no fog in the crystal ball of our young lives: our futures may not have been written yet, but the paths before them were as well-trodden and established as horsetracks in the winter snow. these paths were all our parents knew, and like folklore passed from one generation to the other, they became all we knew, could ever know.

but then i took my first backpacking trip at the age of 18. i had always been curious to travel on my own, and begged my parents’ permission to take a trip after high school. after months and months of cajoling, they finally gave their blessing; a few weeks later i set off for eastern europe with my best friend.

for the first time in my life, i saw the real world as it was – winding and unruly, unpredictable and so full of life. the path to stability and happiness, i found, took many forms; it certainly did not always look like what my parents had prescribed. nor did it look like it followed any particular set of patterns. as my journey continued, the crystal ball began to crackle and stir.

leaned against the stained wooden counter at a ruin bar in budapest, an artist told me that he had once studied to become a doctor, dropping out of medical school in his final year to pursue his passion for painting. under the stars of the siberian night sky, a girl told me of her father – a man who had left a lucrative banking career in the russian capital to start a small bakery in his remote hometown. i remember these conversations distinctly, the way the artist rapped his knuckles against the bartop, the slow burn of the cigarette in the girl’s hand as she spoke. for it was truly unfathomable to me at the time, to learn that people could seemingly possess the world at their fingertips, and still risk everything to heed a different call.

i met people, too, whose lives revolved around travel rather than work. europeans who worked seasonal jobs for short stints, in national parks as trail-setters and cruise ships as deckhands, saving just enough each time to travel freely for a few months. young people my age that had rainchecked college – something i had always considered a given – and traversed the continents in their first years of adulthood instead, volunteering in hostels and farms and wineries in exchange for food and accommodation. they had traded college classes and frat parties for a truer understanding of the world, and i could see it in their eyes, this wisdom that burned like quiet flame. i’ve since forgotten half of everything i learned in college, but somehow i believe that the wisdom they carried only grew stronger with time.

at every encounter the bounds of what was possible expanded in my mind. the crystal ball of my life, once so clear and defined, began to swirl with a blizzard of options as i began to dream of other lives i could lead. the future suddenly seemed much less certain… and yet that uncertainty invigorated me as i recognized that the world held so much more than i could have ever imagined.

in italo calvino’s invisible cities, there’s a scene where the protagonist sees a stranger in the square of some distant town. in the flash of a moment, he sees himself as that very man, in another, not-so-distant life. he realizes that, with only a few decisions differently-chosen, a few paths walked the other direction – “if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if long ago at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one” – he would be that man sitting in the square at that very second.

why does this travel journey mean so much to me? e had asked.

to travel is to discover all the lives we might have led, the lives we might still lead; the what-if’s of our past and future; all the possible ways our lives could have turned out, can still turn out.

i travel to see all the versions of myself i could have been – and all the versions of myself i can still be.

for the longest time i had expected to become an engineer, build a career in tech, eventually start my own company. but i knew, 3 months into my first job, that it would neither fulfill me nor call to me the way it did others. i saw how some of my colleagues and managers truly loved the work, breathed it, gave themselves to it. i saw their joy and i knew they had found their calling... and that it wasn’t mine.

but if i’m not an engineer, then what am i? who am i?

what was i brought onto this earth to do?

i left everything behind in hawaii to travel because i wanted – no, needed to attempt to answer these questions.

i needed to give myself a chance to see what else is possible for me. to hear stories of other lives, to try new things, to experiment. to discover what i like, what i don’t like, and what i love. to live in new surroundings, new locales, new communities. to explore the other lives i can lead.

and i gave myself a tentative year – not one month, or three, or six – because i knew this journey demanded the proper time it required.

i needed time to strip away the expectations i’ve carried since i was a child, to wash away the layer of stigma and societal pressure that suffocated me like a second skin.

time to remember childhood interests abandoned on the campaign to adulthood, resurface hidden talents, and coax out the parts of me that had tucked themselves away over years of pressure and schooling.

time to uncover new parts of myself that have yet to be unlocked, unearthed, brought to life.

only then, i knew, could i discover who i truly am and attempt to emerge again, anew.

this is why i travel.

thank you for making it this far.

this is an excerpt from a draft of my upcoming book, and the first i’ve shared in public.

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