By making a circular journey, once I stepped away from home, I had already stepped toward it, and I never really stopped looking there.
America was my reference point to explore three continents, 12 countries and even more cultures. Now the world is my lasting reference for home.
Returning to San Francisco was like being caught in a time-space tornado. I was blinded by the well-lit streets, and upset when I couldn’t bargain for groceries. Formerly cherished possessions were now props on an abandoned stage. Friends were busy with the webs of society, kin and business, whose wisps I had all but escaped. Once tethered to this world like a baby to an umbilical cord, I had become its detached observer.
What comforted me was talking with the city’s immigrants, who knew where I was coming from better than I did. I spent an hour with the Jordanian who owns my corner store, reliving common streets, sights and sounds and lamenting the condition of the Middle East. I blabbed to a Bulgarian lady on the bus, who told me about a good nightclub in the East Bay to hear Macedonian music. My Chinese dry cleaner was delighted I could say hello in her native tongue. She understood the spiritual riches earned over such a journey, though all money was spent. We agreed that Americans are selfish simply because we don’t know how the other half lives.
Back in the land of the profane, I worried about lapsing into the oblivion of American life. I admit to being a travel chameleon, my moral practices often dictated by the fluctuating landscape. I think of it as practice for the 21st century, when reacting to change will not suffice; survival will mean evolving with your environment.
But my global vision did not fade. While I always felt disdain for America, (and still do, after witnessing the results of our global actions), now I also feel gratitude. Watching a little boy loading his pail up with sand on Baker Beach, it strikes me how rarely I saw children simply enjoying childhood. Most places, kids were working in the fields, selling bus tickets or roaming the streets. When I see businesswomen bustling off to work in the Financial District, I think of how invisible women were along my journey, and how few of them could ever receive the education and social support to pursue anything other than marriage. Most guys I know will never appreciate their freedom from duties that many of the world’s men inherit at birth. And had I not been born in a wealthy, powerful country where getting money and visas is easy, I know I never could have taken this trip.
On the train ride out of Romania, I sat in a compartment with a group of unemployed men, one of whom had just been fined $200 for riding black (without a ticket). If he didn’t pay the fine, he would go to jail. While I spent the nine-hour ride reading Romanian literature, they cooked up a getaway scheme. Here we were in the same time and place, and yet not at all, me on a world excursion and him without the cash for a third-class ticket home.
Experiences like this made me rethink travel. The word means something so different to those who can only journey in the mind. I pranced around like Tinkerbell, going places others dream of seeing — in their own country.
Beyond fleeing the economics of their homelands, the travel fantasies people shared with me were as variedas their personalities. My Kurdish sweetheart, Remzi, was fixated on Arizona, thinking it must look like his own landscape; one Sinai minibus driver longed to see Armenia and Disneyland; a Romanian intellectual just wanted to visit a pen pal in Barcelona and see its cathedrals. Inevitably, everyone has a relative in one of America’s tiny towns or gritty cities, paradises glimpsed through loving letters.
The journey revealed as much about the world as how the world sees us. Everybody knows about the Clinton affairs, and most are perplexed that we are crucifying our leader rather than showing him unconditional respect. A Hungarian train conductor who spoke no English made his point by drawing a swastika on Ken Starr’s photo.
And what do other nations associate with our hip, smug city? Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.” (Only a Bangkokian calling himself Shay Apache, dressed in yellow shades, an orange worksuit and heavy turquoise jewelry, came up with SF as the city that’s “half gay.”)
If the trip clipped my feelings of self-importance, it broadened my sense of uniqueness. Thousands of beings crossed my crooked path, each as different as the next. This is the beauty of travel, of life. I did nothing that hasn’t done before, and yet in the Earth’s 4.5 billion years, there has never been the same journey, and never will be.