Reflections on traveling and living abroad
With all my trips and my time spent living, studying, and working abroad, you, dear reader, may think that I really like travelling. Actually, not really. Travelling is annoying as hell, especially on a tight budget and through less-developed countries. Some people love travelling so much they will devote their lives to it. I met a European girl who had been traveling through Asia for 11 months. I met an American man who was at the beginning of a 7 month trip. And I met a Dutch man who was a few weeks out of the Netherlands, and he had no return ticket but a list of places in Asia and Africa that he was planning to visit before going home. I think most travelers will tell you that they enjoy the challenge of traveling or even that traveling does more good for the world than harm. Both of these reasons I have read in Lonely Planet, the most popular series of travelers’ guidebooks. LP are also the books I have always used for traveling, even around the United States.
I myself am not so positive about the benefits of travel. I spend so much time reading about the world – I mean, I spent the past year studying Asian and English law, as but one example of my reading menu – and when it’s abstracted into words, the world can sound like such a beautiful place. The truth is: it is and it isn’t. It’s beautiful how the constraints of local resources create unique cultures that even differ across countries. For instance, in north China, the climate is better for growing wheat, so they people traditionally eat more noodles and pancakes. Beijing duck is but burnt slices of duck wrapped in a pancake. In the south of China, the climate is more suitable for rice, so the traditional cooking would feature more rice and less wheat. In India they use coconut oil. In the U.S. we use corn oil.
I have never actually read the book, but in Republic by Plato, it was written that necessity is the mother of invention. A people need to eat. They are able to grow rice very well, so they invent dishes using rice.
When read in books, the differences between cultures sound beautiful. But in traveling across regions and countries, my eyes see glaring disparities in economic wealth. I can’t get over how unfair the world is. It’s not fair that I was born middle class and will always live a middle-class lifestyle. It’s not fair that any given person in this world was born into poverty. No wonder that as I travel across southeast Asia (also, India and Ethiopia) my white skin attracts scammers, robbers, and touts. For the past 200 years, Europe, the origin of white people, and the other white countries (U.S., Canada, Australia), have had a net surplus of economic wealth, and Asia has much higher rates of poverty. A scammer, robber, or tout sees white skin, and he assumes the white person has excess wealth that can be transferred morally or immorally to himself.
Plus, the people have been very rude. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t met some very gracious people. Especially in India, I met people who were very kind to me personally, but on a daily basis, people are unhelpful, aggressively competitive for goals as simple as being first to board a bus, and rude. In southern China, I heard a dozen hacking balls of snot per day spit from the mouths of men and women. Of course, different cultures, different standards of hygiene and politeness. That’s fine. My standards are only right for me and my own culture, not for other cultures. But I don’t find the rudeness and grossness beautiful. I find it annoying. Wait until you read my forthcoming entry about my overnight bus ride from Hong Kong to Xiamen, Fujian.
And the poverty makes me feel disillusioned with our whole purpose as human beings.
So why live abroad?
Good question. All I can say is that I like living abroad more than I like traveling abroad. There are good people to meet in the world, but like any person in the world, you have to spend time with them before you know them. Traveling is an introduction to a culture, and even if you were to spend an extended period of time in a place along your travel route, you cannot wholly know the people or a place until you integrate into the local way of life. This means you have to work or study or do something more than just visit and look. There is a daily routine of the people or a place that has to become your own. Learning happens more effectively through doing, rather than watching. Playing basketball is a better way to become good at the game rather than just watching the NBA finals.
If you’re interested in the world, and you want to learn about foreign cultures, travel is but a substitute for living in a place. I’m sure that the whole world, despite its ugliness, is worth visiting. If I ever meet a person from Beijing, I’m sure she would know Beijing better than would I, but because I have spent two weeks in Beijing, I have a rudimentary understanding of the place, and she and I have some common ground on which to relate. Just because I don’t have the opportunity or Chinese language skills to live and work in Beijing doesn’t mean that a visit there is worthless. It just means I will never know Beijing with the same amount of depth that I know St. Louis.
So here is the justification for traveling: some people are interested in the world, and for those people, traveling to a foreign place is the best method available to learn more about the place. I read so much about the world, and for me, traveling is useful because I can attach experience, however slight, to the facts I’ve taken from books. For people interested in the world, integrating into the daily life of a foreign place is an even better way to learn more about the place.
Of course you can’t integrate into every culture in the world. If you are interested in the world, you’ll be lucky if you even get to move across your own country, let alone to a foreign country or even multiple foreign countries. And then if you do get to move to a new place (foreign or domestic) there is the eternal problem of missing your family and the place where you grew up. Being a middle-class American, I can afford to visit my family every summer and every Christmas, but especially in the old-days, before jet-travel, many people would leave home and never see their friends or family again. It is not the case for all, but I know foreign students at Carnegie Mellon University who will go at least two years before going home to India or Taiwan to visit their families.
The world is an interesting place, but getting to know the world has its advantages and disadvantages. Americans are stereotypically famous for refusing to take any interest outside their own country or even outside their own home region. In foreign countries, we’re faulted for this. Maybe some Americans couldn’t even point to China or Asia on a map. The United States is a big, rich place.
Everything that the average person needs for their life can be had easily near their home. A person from St. Louis never has to go to Chicago. If a person from St. Louis has no interest in Chicago, he is not wrong for not wanting to visit. Just as I think it’s gross for a woman to blow a big, snotty wad of spit out of a bus window in China, someone else may think this isolated person in St. Louis is gross for maintaining a purposeful ignorance of the world outside St. Louis. But in both cases, this involves one person imposing his values on another person. This sounds like cultural imperialism, which is a complaint a French person would make when he sees an American movie selling more tickets in Paris than a French movie.
Ok, so why live abroad?
In the U.S. we are taught that we can do with our lives what we want. Some people become bankers. Some people become lawyers. Some people sell carpet. And some people like living abroad. They like getting to know people from foreign cultures who view the world in a way they themselves would never be able to imagine, having only the experiences gained from the culture of their home place. I grew up reading about places as exotic as China and France, and I would be unhappy if I didn’t learn more about them. I also grew up during a period where there was a constant adjective attached to world events: globalization. Our t-shirts come from Sri Lanka or Cambodia. Children’s toys come from China. Our diamonds come from South Africa. Our coffee comes from Brazil. It has to be somebody’s job to see that these goods are moved across the world. This is just what I’m interested in.
I don’t think it’s an absolute good that a person should travel abroad, learn a foreign language, or spend his or her time reading about foreign culture. I don’t think it’s an absolute bad that 50 American engineers on a conference call would express shock and incredulity that one of their coworkers would do something as bizarre as travel to Bangkok for a vacation. (“Why in the hell would you go there?”)
To each his or her own. Some people want to visit Bangkok. Some people want to spend a year travelling on a budget through Asia. Some people want to be a lawyer in Singapore. Some people want to sell carpet in Florida. Who can say that one of these people is wrong in his or her desires and one person is right? May we all be so lucky that we get to do in life what we want.
I myself am not so positive about the benefits of travel. I spend so much time reading about the world – I mean, I spent the past year studying Asian and English law, as but one example of my reading menu – and when it’s abstracted into words, the world can sound like such a beautiful place. The truth is: it is and it isn’t. It’s beautiful how the constraints of local resources create unique cultures that even differ across countries. For instance, in north China, the climate is better for growing wheat, so they people traditionally eat more noodles and pancakes. Beijing duck is but burnt slices of duck wrapped in a pancake. In the south of China, the climate is more suitable for rice, so the traditional cooking would feature more rice and less wheat. In India they use coconut oil. In the U.S. we use corn oil.
I have never actually read the book, but in Republic by Plato, it was written that necessity is the mother of invention. A people need to eat. They are able to grow rice very well, so they invent dishes using rice.
When read in books, the differences between cultures sound beautiful. But in traveling across regions and countries, my eyes see glaring disparities in economic wealth. I can’t get over how unfair the world is. It’s not fair that I was born middle class and will always live a middle-class lifestyle. It’s not fair that any given person in this world was born into poverty. No wonder that as I travel across southeast Asia (also, India and Ethiopia) my white skin attracts scammers, robbers, and touts. For the past 200 years, Europe, the origin of white people, and the other white countries (U.S., Canada, Australia), have had a net surplus of economic wealth, and Asia has much higher rates of poverty. A scammer, robber, or tout sees white skin, and he assumes the white person has excess wealth that can be transferred morally or immorally to himself.
Plus, the people have been very rude. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t met some very gracious people. Especially in India, I met people who were very kind to me personally, but on a daily basis, people are unhelpful, aggressively competitive for goals as simple as being first to board a bus, and rude. In southern China, I heard a dozen hacking balls of snot per day spit from the mouths of men and women. Of course, different cultures, different standards of hygiene and politeness. That’s fine. My standards are only right for me and my own culture, not for other cultures. But I don’t find the rudeness and grossness beautiful. I find it annoying. Wait until you read my forthcoming entry about my overnight bus ride from Hong Kong to Xiamen, Fujian.
And the poverty makes me feel disillusioned with our whole purpose as human beings.
So why live abroad?
Good question. All I can say is that I like living abroad more than I like traveling abroad. There are good people to meet in the world, but like any person in the world, you have to spend time with them before you know them. Traveling is an introduction to a culture, and even if you were to spend an extended period of time in a place along your travel route, you cannot wholly know the people or a place until you integrate into the local way of life. This means you have to work or study or do something more than just visit and look. There is a daily routine of the people or a place that has to become your own. Learning happens more effectively through doing, rather than watching. Playing basketball is a better way to become good at the game rather than just watching the NBA finals.
If you’re interested in the world, and you want to learn about foreign cultures, travel is but a substitute for living in a place. I’m sure that the whole world, despite its ugliness, is worth visiting. If I ever meet a person from Beijing, I’m sure she would know Beijing better than would I, but because I have spent two weeks in Beijing, I have a rudimentary understanding of the place, and she and I have some common ground on which to relate. Just because I don’t have the opportunity or Chinese language skills to live and work in Beijing doesn’t mean that a visit there is worthless. It just means I will never know Beijing with the same amount of depth that I know St. Louis.
So here is the justification for traveling: some people are interested in the world, and for those people, traveling to a foreign place is the best method available to learn more about the place. I read so much about the world, and for me, traveling is useful because I can attach experience, however slight, to the facts I’ve taken from books. For people interested in the world, integrating into the daily life of a foreign place is an even better way to learn more about the place.
Of course you can’t integrate into every culture in the world. If you are interested in the world, you’ll be lucky if you even get to move across your own country, let alone to a foreign country or even multiple foreign countries. And then if you do get to move to a new place (foreign or domestic) there is the eternal problem of missing your family and the place where you grew up. Being a middle-class American, I can afford to visit my family every summer and every Christmas, but especially in the old-days, before jet-travel, many people would leave home and never see their friends or family again. It is not the case for all, but I know foreign students at Carnegie Mellon University who will go at least two years before going home to India or Taiwan to visit their families.
The world is an interesting place, but getting to know the world has its advantages and disadvantages. Americans are stereotypically famous for refusing to take any interest outside their own country or even outside their own home region. In foreign countries, we’re faulted for this. Maybe some Americans couldn’t even point to China or Asia on a map. The United States is a big, rich place.
Everything that the average person needs for their life can be had easily near their home. A person from St. Louis never has to go to Chicago. If a person from St. Louis has no interest in Chicago, he is not wrong for not wanting to visit. Just as I think it’s gross for a woman to blow a big, snotty wad of spit out of a bus window in China, someone else may think this isolated person in St. Louis is gross for maintaining a purposeful ignorance of the world outside St. Louis. But in both cases, this involves one person imposing his values on another person. This sounds like cultural imperialism, which is a complaint a French person would make when he sees an American movie selling more tickets in Paris than a French movie.
Ok, so why live abroad?
In the U.S. we are taught that we can do with our lives what we want. Some people become bankers. Some people become lawyers. Some people sell carpet. And some people like living abroad. They like getting to know people from foreign cultures who view the world in a way they themselves would never be able to imagine, having only the experiences gained from the culture of their home place. I grew up reading about places as exotic as China and France, and I would be unhappy if I didn’t learn more about them. I also grew up during a period where there was a constant adjective attached to world events: globalization. Our t-shirts come from Sri Lanka or Cambodia. Children’s toys come from China. Our diamonds come from South Africa. Our coffee comes from Brazil. It has to be somebody’s job to see that these goods are moved across the world. This is just what I’m interested in.
I don’t think it’s an absolute good that a person should travel abroad, learn a foreign language, or spend his or her time reading about foreign culture. I don’t think it’s an absolute bad that 50 American engineers on a conference call would express shock and incredulity that one of their coworkers would do something as bizarre as travel to Bangkok for a vacation. (“Why in the hell would you go there?”)
To each his or her own. Some people want to visit Bangkok. Some people want to spend a year travelling on a budget through Asia. Some people want to be a lawyer in Singapore. Some people want to sell carpet in Florida. Who can say that one of these people is wrong in his or her desires and one person is right? May we all be so lucky that we get to do in life what we want.
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