In The Beginning... — Hutong Provisions

The first time I ever really left the country, I wasn’t alone. It was March of 2001. I hadn’t even graduated college a year before. I didn’t really have a secure job. I had been bouncing from temp job to temp job while looking for a job in PR, marketing, or publishing. It was a rough market back then, not like it is now, but rough in a different way. When I finished college, I thought it would be easy to find myself in the world. I had a college degree. That was supposed to mean something, right? It was supposed to open doors and help you get to your dreams, right? In the years following graduation, I would find out how wrong I was.

From the time you’re young, you’re spoon fed this idealistic image of what life is supposed to be from looking at other people and from the media. As a kid, I ate it up. This is what high school is supposed to be like, but it wasn’t. This is what college is supposed to be like, but it wasn’t. This is what it’s supposed to be like as a young adult in the world, but it wasn’t. Time period after time period, my image of the world was shattered, and sometimes it still gets shattered. My life wasn’t like the ones portrayed in Friends or whatever was on TV at the time. At ten months after I got my two bachelors’ degrees, life was already crashing down on me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t really meeting anyone that wanted to date me. I had nothing to be proud of.

At the time I probably didn’t have the money to go, but I made plans with some college friends, who were still in college, to travel for a few weeks to Japan where one of those friends had family. Again, I had never really been out of the country. I had been to Canada with family, and I had travelled most of the United States as my brother ran around playing chess like a good Chinese American boy. But I had essentially been dragged around.

Even in hindsight, the trip to Japan was pretty cool, but because I was with my friends, and because I was totally lost in a place where English wasn’t widely spoken, I was still feeling a little bit dragged around. We went from place to place where my friend knew people and places, which was cool, but I kind of felt strapped to the group. There was a point in Tokyo where everyone else in the group was sick with a cold or the flu or something. I was the lone healthy member, but I was still so new to international travel that I couldn’t really muster up the nerve to leave the hotel on my own in search of fugu, as much as it was on my bucket list. When we were on the go, we were on the go together. There wasn’t any time or space for reflection, even on bullet trains or at night. Their schedule was my schedule. Their itinerary was my itinerary.

My next trip abroad was five months later. At that time, I was still pretty deep into the house music scene, whether it be at clubs or raves. It was around that time that I met a girl that I had an incredible crush on. She was a raver kid too, incredibly smart, and gorgeous to boot. She was always talking about an electronic music festival in Amsterdam called Dance Valley and planned on going with a couple of her other friends.

I had always dreamed of going to some of the big electronic music festivals in Europe like Berlin’s Love Parade, Creamfields in England, or maybe even a week on Ibiza where the music kept pumping all summer long. I loved the electronic music scene with all of the heavy beats, the colorful clothes, and losing yourself bouncing around to the music. I was a weirdo. Everyone else in the crowd seemed like weirdos too.

This trip, I planned it so I had a day or two on my own before and after this girl and her pals showed up. It was my first taste of solo travel.

The first couple of days in Amsterdam, I was by myself at a rather nice hotel that my folks graciously got for me around the corner from the Anne Frank house. It was beautiful, made from several canal houses put together. That first night after I woke up from my post flight nap, I wandered the streets and canals on my own late at night. That began my love for walking around urban areas until the wee hours of the morning. I walked the red light district, peeking into the kamers where prostitutes would sit in the window beckoning passers by to come and get a little bit of action. I passed by coffeehouses where the smell of ganja wafted out onto the street along with the sounds of Jimi Hendrix. I watched people go into FEBO where they could plink euro coins into the wall and pull croquettes from the endless number of windows with snacks.

In the days before I flew home, I found myself browsing through Dutch storefronts with amazingly designed furniture and trinkets and crates upon crates of records. I happily ate my frites with vlaamse mayonnaise while sitting on a bench in Damrak. I walked and watched the people for a day and a half, falling in love with everything that Amsterdam was. There was art and culture, food, style, architecture, green spaces, and life. It was a different kind of life than I had seen in America. It was a different way of being, and I wanted to be living that way. I stayed in a cheap hostel with other travelers, not knowing anything about backpacking as people from other parts of the globe did.

I knew I was an outsider. I didn’t have any friends there. There wasn’t anyone to talk to. But back in America, I didn’t have many people to talk to either. Sure, I had friends, but as I have learned to accept, everyone has their own lives. No one’s lives cluster together like you see on TV. You don’t see people that you love or even like everyday. As a traveler, though, I could accept it. My pals were back home living their lives that probably wouldn’t include me much anyways working nine to five. I was just as alone away as I would have been at home. The difference is that I saw more of the world than what I believed was to be the end all and be all of life.

America, to me, is a very prideful place where the chants of “USA! USA! USA!” and the egotism of all we export culturally, technologically, and economically, is put on a pedestal. The Kool Aid is everywhere. It pours from the faucets. Americans bathe in it. In some ways, people all over the world import it and drink it like Coca Cola on a hot day. In Amsterdam, I realized there was more to drink than Coca Cola and Kool Aid.

It would take me four more years before I was able to leave the country again for more than a week. By that time, the world was a different place. It was 2005. We were living in a post 9/11 world. I had my heart broken by my job and a woman. I had a great disdain for just about everything. Luckily, I had just started cooking and was about to leave the finance industry. I took the four weeks of vacation from the finance job and decided to do something that I had always wanted to do. I bought a backpack from EMS, some Eurail passes, an open jaw plane ticket, and headed out on my own for a month.

That month in Europe started in Amsterdam (somewhere familiar to me), and took me to Prague, Vienna, Strasbourg, Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Cinque Terre, Lake Como, Florence, and Milan. Again, I was alone, but no more alone than I felt “at home” in Boston. I was perpetually single at home (and I guess I continue to be). Everyone I knew were carrying on with their lives, going to jobs, advancing their careers and love lives. They were all getting ahead in a way I have never really figured out how to, but in Europe, I was able to put one foot in front of the other with my life on my back, sleeping where I could find a nice enough bed, meeting random people along the way.

It was on that trip that I met two of my best international friends that I keep in contact with up even today. In Paris, I met an Australian named Jade (Ying-Li) at my hostel. We hung out on the Embarcadero with another woman (I don’t remember her name, because she didn’t keep in contact) eating cheese, baguettes, and apple tarts. We couldn’t have led more different lives. She had two kids at home and was a nurse. We talked about our lives and connected as human beings in a way that I hadn’t found in a long time at home. Years later, she would bring her kids to the States and I would meet her down at Walt Disney World. It was like no time had passed and we were just old pals catching up. A couple of years ago, completely by chance, we bumped into each other on the BTS in Bangkok and ended up having dinner together.

My other international friend I met in Cinque Terre. There were four of us hanging out, all in different transitional parts of our lives. I was kind of in a rough mental state from the past year at home, and Lianne from South Africa really helped me out. We traded stories and iPods on train rides. The four of us stayed at a pension in the hills surrounded by lemon trees. The conversations that we had meant more to me than I ever could have imagined, and helped pull me out of the emotional black hole that found myself in after years of banging my head against a white collared wall and a heart that had been ripped to shreds. Again, years later, she would come to Boston, and I put her and her man at the time up for a night. Years after that, I would meet her, her husband, and her boy in New York City on a long weekend.

Though I was able to meet a few amazing people on this trip, I still spent a lot of time alone, walking around cities late at night, marveling at how they lit up amazingly old buildings that doubled the ages of anything at home. I ate things that I had no clue existed. I tried things that I had only read about, potato dumplings, choucroute garni, tarte flambé, ribbolita, roasted chestnuts in a park…. I ate at Michelin starred restaurants and doner kebab stands. I drank Normandy ciders and Czech beers. I also got my junk grabbed by a gypsy woman on the streets of Prague, which was surprising.

When I returned from that trip, I knew that solo travel was the best way to travel. I wasn’t beholden to anyone. I wasn’t set to anyone’s schedule by my own. I could sleep late if I wanted to. I could leave town after a single night if I wanted to (and I did after one night in Lyon). I could walk right past the Louvre and sit at a cafe drinking coffee and eating strawberry tarts instead of queueing up to see the Mona Lisa if I wanted to. If I was hungry, I could stop and eat. If I wanted to make a reservation for a fancy dinner, I could do that as well.

It would take me another four years before I was able to strap on my pack once again. At that time, I worked seasonally down on Nantucket, starting in April or May and leaving in October or December. Two and a half months in Southeast Asia and two and a half months traveling around China separated my three seasons. Again, I was by myself, but I was much more comfortable with life on the go, moving from place to place by bus or sleeper train. I felt good about booking hostels the night before. I met so many amazing people on the Southeast Asia trip, and even met a Chinese woman I would visit the following year in Shanghai. I saw the amazing temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the rice terraces of Sapa in Vietnam. I got to see my family village in China and the karst mountains of Guilin.

What I loved about these trips is that I would meet people that I would hang out with for maybe a week or so at a time. We would see each other one place, go separate ways, and then meet up at random someplace else. I would have different points where I would meet up with people I knew from before whether it had been someone I had dragon boated with or my uncle. But, is wouldn’t be for any great duration. In the end, I would leave, or they would leave, and I would be on my own again to find my way in a place that I had never been before.

I found things that were completely new to me (mostly food and architecture), and some things that were familiar (like swing dancing or Oreos). I never really got homesick like I had noticed in other people. Some people had been on the trail for six months or more. To this day, I still have no real longing for “home.” Sure, there are things I miss, like a great meatball sub, some cookies, and some proper bread, but I have filled that void mostly with fresh tropical fruit, strange soft drinks, and a lot of noodles and rice.

Before I took this trip to Thailand to see if I could find a job, which has completely failed, I half joked with my friends that I would come to Bangkok and I would simply disappear into the darkness. No one would know where I am or what I’m doing. In a lot of ways, I still love this idea. Everyone I know has their life, as they always had. I have perpetually felt like an outsider, and wandering the world is kind of my way to make myself a little bit more okay with being an outsider. I check in from time to time, but I think about that last scene of Good Will Hunting, and hope that at some point my friends will be okay with me leaving a note saying I’ve gone to see about a job and never coming “home.”