what travel does

grappling with my return from Tokyo

Among the many reasons to love vacation, I like who I am when I’m on vacation, almost an ideal version of myself. Free from work, this version of me doesn’t have as much responsibility but doesn’t feel bad about moving slow. This version has free time but recognizes the ephemerality of this time, so doesn’t waste it rotting away in bed. This version feels compelled to see the world without being stressed about it, is less judgmental about eating too much or about working out too little, is just happy to be here.

I’ve never been one to mourn the end of a trip; the novelty of a new place only sustains me for so long before the familiarity of home begins to call to me. It only takes a few days before I begin to daydream about returning to the comfort of my bed, my favorite foods, my friends, and old walking routes through beautiful parks, along coastlines. 

But this time, as I returned from my travels, I took in San Francisco through blurry eyes, the haze of jet lag. I surveyed the land in search of what drew me here in the first place. I could only perceive the deficiencies: the grime, the disconnectedness and inconsistency of the transit, the stark difference in the quality of bathrooms, the omnipresent chill in the air.

So what happened this time? I had been to Tokyo before but excitedly returned home (in part due to a concussion sustained in Osaka). This time, a pit in my stomach formed during my last few days in Tokyo as I realized that the sun would set on my trip soon. Was it that this time, I had found a version of myself that I loved, that I would mourn once the plane touched down back in California?

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The trip over proved to more interesting than my previous one, beginning with a layover in Honolulu so that I could take advantage of a deal to get a business class seat to Tokyo with an airline called ANA. As I boarded the plane, I was welcomed by an enormous seat and cabin announcements in Japanese. In a way, I was already in Japan, subject to the confusion that accompanied being somewhere unfamiliar. The language barrier — my biggest dread when traveling to any country that isn’t mainly English-speaking.

No one enjoys a language barrier, I imagine, but it feels like particularly disquieting experience for me, someone who stakes their identity in language. Isn’t it embarrassing and disorienting to dedicate a life towards communication, studying the written word, only to discover the uselessness of all that work in another country? What good are the hours poring over text, clicking and clacking away at a keyboard in the face of another language?

My love of words stemmed from my inability to communicate. A shy boy struggled to connect with people because of his inability to have conversations or speak directly to people. A shy boy would shelter from other people in books. A shy boy would try to talk and a mental wall would appear and the words wouldn’t come to his head when he had to say something, stumbling over words, the weight of an imagined judgment overwhelming. A shy boy discovered how much easier it was to talk about things that mattered (love & fear, summer breezes, held hands) when they were written down. A shy boy was obsessed with words and slowly shed the shyness, a writing practice turned speaking practice turned lightness.

And then, travel becomes time travel, being in a different country means confronting a new wall — one where the words could never come because they were never known in the first place. New imagined judgments appear, something like Americans yelling at immigrants to speak English comes to mind.  Most of the time, I would ask for my brother to order for me, to figure out the details of a situation, once again a child hiding behind my family members in the face of fear over something that wasn’t so scary. 

But the vacation version of me was malleable, ready to accept that travel is a practice in facing the ephemerality of the trip, of experience. It felt easier to be present, to let my phone stay in my pocket, to just spend time looking around. Eight days in a country stretch much further when you live like this; time spent on trains and waiting at stations looking around stretches out, becomes more vivid. Each day, I saw hundreds of faces in the most populated city in the world. Looking at these people, I’d regularly think, “that’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life” over and over again every day, while noticing all of the lifestyles, ages, cultures bustling through the lively city. There were the different subcultures of youth fashion, the salarymen in their suits, the schoolchildren in their uniforms. There were the different types of foreigners, easily identifiable if not by their fashion then by their language. 

When seeing all of them next to each other, riding the same escalators, eating at the same restaurants, browsing the shelves of the ubiquitous convenience stores, the differences between all of these people felt less and less apparent. When language fails, there are always actions and body language and interactions. Someone in every coffee shop I go to is taking a picture of their latte (me included), on a train a toddler of any culture starts singing loudly just to be hushed by their parents, and every person’s face turns to a grimace when a particularly full subway train pulls up to their stop. At a drum-and-bass show that we go to, a crowd of foreigners and locals pulses and shakes to the fast-paced rhythm conjured by a Dutch DJ and the shouts of a Japanese hype man. The music runs through all of us.

And tourists! All of us stop to take photos when we are awed — every woman around my mother’s age seems to assume the same pose as her when taking a photo, phone raised slightly above the eyeline, back over-arching to try and get a specific angle. A tenderness fills my chest from the familiarity. In seeing the excitement people experience at the novelty of a new place, whether it’s the giant Buddha statue in Kamakura or the lush hills of Hakone, I’m reminded me of the Kaveh Akbar line — “we all want the same thing: to walk through the world in sincere wonder, like the first man to hear a parrot speak.”

Someone picks up my bottle of coffee when it falls on the train and I wonder how I could fear my fellow man. I’m softened by every interaction, in ways that I forgot I was capable of when I was back home. My openness to speaking increases as I get more and more used to using some of the phrases I hear my brother saying, a little more comfortable ordering for myself, with many smiles, many thank you’s, many bowed heads out of respect. It gets easier.

Because ultimately, no one is looking to misunderstand another. Everyone, regardless of language, is just trying to get a good outcome: a finished transaction, a lovely meal, whatever may lay at the end of a moment with a stranger. The journey through these moments can be rocky (rarely catastrophic) and usually banal. What smooths these moments is warmth and politeness — let us remember how sweet it is to be understood, how even the effort towards being understood holds a sweetness. 

On my last night in Tokyo, my brother had to leave the jazz bar early, leaving me alone, inches from the musicians, scribbling in my notebook in between sets. I expected to sit isolated among them, floating in the afterglow of the delicious solos that the performers had conjured with each song and breakdown, passing an invisible spotlight from one to another. But instead, one by one, different strangers started to talk to me — first, the singer from the band, then the guitarist, and then a couple of friends in business casual drinking together. They all had similar questions: what’s a foreigner doing by himself in a jazz bar mostly filled with locals? are you a musician? did you enjoy the performance? 

“I love jazz! I’m not a musician! I loved it! It’s my last night in Tokyo and I’m glad I spent it here,” I enthusiastically told each of them, to their delight and my own. The friends in their dress shirts struck up a longer conversation with me, asked me about Tokyo and San Francisco (recognizing it as the home of the Giants), the one with better English skills (Arata) translating for his friend Daikichi. Yet, Daikichi, despite his limited English, was more than happy to share pictures of his young children and to tell of his gambling exploits when he visited Las Vegas, unfettered by the words that he might struggle to find. He was only four years older than me but he seemed to have it all figured out. I wondered if I’d have it all figured out if I lived there too. And as the band began to play another song, my new friends had to return to their families; they grasped my hand in strong handshakes and headed off into the night.

After the last few songs of the night, I paid my check and slowly walked to the train station. I wanted to catch the last train, but still let the city sink into me. I looked at the people out late at 11pm on a Monday with envy (knowing that I’d be back to a normal schedule soon) and softness (knowing the joy that they ran through the streets with). I crossed Shibuya Crossing for the last time, as construction crews worked on the roads. In the train station, I strolled through the labyrinthine corridors, the quietness that never left, even with thousands of people flying around. In the bricks of the station by my hotel I saw the bricks of the BART stations in San Francisco, the ones that I’d never given a second thought or a second look.

When I arrived in the States again, I found myself glued to my phone once again; like time was no longer precious, like the version of myself capable of being present and finding such joy in everyone around me was suddenly gone like dust in the wind. The teenage boys next to me in the airport seemed unbelievably obnoxious, everyone felt like they were moving too slow, the bathrooms were so filthy. Maybe it’s what Agnes Callard was arguing in her polemic “The Case Against Travel” — that we aren’t really changed by travel, that “we already know what we will be like when we return,” since “travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.” If this is true, the ideal version of myself from the vacation is gone, never could’ve lasted at the end of a trip.

But then tell me this — how could I be the same that I was before after everything? How could I forget Daikichi showing me pictures of his son and his daughter (2 and 1 respectively), exclaiming his love for Las Vegas, or the kindness of Arata to buy a stranger from a different land a drink? How could I possibly be unchanged by these men, by the collective warmth of dozens of people I met throughout my journeys, the children on field trips screaming hello to every foreigner, the music that tied us all together? 

Callard says “travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion,” but that doesn’t explain the way that my interactions with people have seemed different since I’ve returned, pieces of my ideal self still remaining. Conversations have flowed so smoothly since I’ve returned, co-workers more likely to talk to me; there’s an ease to interacting with everyone I’ve run into. I have returned to exactly where I was, but I am different, or want to be, clinging with balled fists and taut arms to who I could be, who I was in my travels — a softer self, molded by being elsewhere.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus - I’m so jazz-pilled

• POEM - “The City” by CP Cavafy - Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here,