Back To Reality or Was Reality What I Just Left?

Something about traveling changes a person.  This is especially true when the traveling reaches beyond the boundaries of our own lands.  I think if one were to get mathematical about the whole thing the formula might read something like:

Familiarity = Comfort
Comfort = Complacency
Complacency = Ignorance

When we journey out of our comfort zone the results can be unpredictable at best.  Sometimes we reach a feeling of enlightenment, sometimes we become depressed.  Sometimes when we return to our normal state we find that what was once normal has changed.

Many of the feelings confronted depend on how far from our comfort zone we journey.  Feelings about ourselves and our lives might vary little if we went abroad to Canada yet traveling to South East Asia, Africa or China can result in an enormous re-evaluation of who we are and where we fit into the world around us.

A few days ago I returned from a trip to the Far East.  It was largely a family trip to the Philippines punctuated by a four day solo journey to China.  Most Americans probably couldn't find the Philippines on a map.  China would be a different story, the shear size of the country would increase the odds substantially that a random finger pointing at a map might land in this enormous land.

I have traveled abroad  many times in life and even spent years of my life living in different countries yet this time it has impacted me more than I can ever remember.  I think this might largely be the result of perspective.  At forty-four years of age my perspective is forever expanding and at times feels simply overwhelming.  At the great risk of diminishing anyone without the resources or desire to gain a worldly perspective I must say there is a certain comfort to be obtained from ignorant simplicity.  Some of the people I work with have never ventured beyond neighboring states.  The distant lands are just that and their vision of how they impact the world or what their place is in humanity is so small there is little concept of anything beyond the needs and desires in their own lives.  When it comes to a political vote self interest reigns because in truth, for them, there really is nothing else.

It is a terrible thing to generalize but at the risk of defaming my countrymen I must say this is a quality that, in my experience, is uniquely American.  It is a quality that makes "American Exceptionalism," the idea that America knows the one true path in the world, an enlightened form of thought while in truth, it is the height of arrogance.

Most that have traveled beyond our borders have come to know the truth that so many of our countrymen do not and frankly if they did, would be ashamed to admit.  The truth is that the vast majority of the world knows a hell of a lot more about us than we do about them.  For an America seeking to remain a global super power this is an incredibly dangerous thing.  I have had conversations with the simplest people in distant lands that will ask more detailed questions about America and contemplate more complexities about the world than I have ever found in this country.  People who with a fragment of our education are able to make an amazingly complex thought and judgment.   Why we have isolated our own minds so?   While I don't know the answer to this question, the result is enormous damage to our own moral compass as a people of this world.

Shanghai, China

During this trip abroad I traversed a spectrum from extreme poverty to future global power.  I witnessed first hand a China that is expanding and building more than we could ever imagine.  While the impact on the Chinese people can be debated for better or for worse, the simple fact is that a nation building the empire of tomorrow cannot be denied.  There are many complex realities to China that I will no doubt discuss in future blogs.  That said, one cannot deny when faced by gleaming sky scrapers, spectacular show case cities like Shanghai, building cranes as far as the eye can see and transport systems of road, rail and air more modern than anything in America that we are falling behind.

Wang Yaoyi

A dear friend of mine welcomed me to China and was not afraid to bring me behind the veil.  She introduced me to two sides of reality and I hope, in the years to come will take me much deeper into an extremely complex society.  My friend has a good job but she is not rich.  She simply survives.  She dreams, she lives and she fights to remain an individual in a society where her life is little more than a speck.  Like a ranger in an unforgiving environment, Yaoyi, was and is my guide.  She is my instructor and I feel like her student.  She teaches me language and culture.  She is translating for me the realities of a world beyond my street, my town, my nation.  She lives a very simple life that meets her needs with few luxuries.  She works extremely hard with few rewards and struggles with loneliness.  She wants to find love, to make a family to fit into some formula for life.  She wants to understand her place in the world.  Yet some how, in some way, despite all the struggles that she faces on a daily basis emotionally and monetarily, I envy her purity, her simplicity.

Grandmother and Grandson

The Philippines is a nation waging its own battle to survive.  It is growing and collapsing at the same time.  It is home to unimaginable beauty and unimaginable destitution.  My wife is the product of a middle class Filipino family yet by our standards she would be considered poor.  Her parents live an incredibly humble life in a provincial island town.  Their small house is surrounded by rice fields and a stones throw from the ocean.  While humble, there is incredible beauty in their lives.  Both her parents were once university professors.  Her father was an Electrical Engineer and her mother a Botanist. Both have visited America and at one time could have moved here but in the end decided not to.  Neither has a single regret.  Their is beauty in the simplicity of their lives.

Abanco Family

My wife's brother navigates the chaotic polluted streets of Manila every day to sell Mercedes Benz to the richest of the rich.  He lives in the house where my wife grew up.  He is as generous as you could imagine yet lives with so little.  When we were first married 22 years ago we made an application for him to get a green card to enter the states.  In three years his turn will finally come.  I told him this while we visited and his response was simply, "I don't think it is worth leaving here.  I mean the job market in America is quite bad isn't it?"

This time when I returned to America I felt a little ashamed.  I feel ashamed when I look at my house and I think of my life.  I have so much yet deep inside I wonder who is the lucky one.  Is it my wife's parents who live a stones throw from the ocean surrounded by gardens and rice fields?  Is it my brother in law who sees opportunity in places I never would?  Is it Yaoyi who while nearly thirty is in control of her own life, her own destiny?  Her mind bridges the east and the west like no other person I know.  Her life while simple, seems to me so pure.

The more I know of the world the more I wonder where my place is.  The more I know of the world the more I feel an alien in my own land.  The more I know of the world the more I treasure those that with patience and love, have taken the time to introduce me to a universe beyond my own mind.

When we returned home to America my son called out to me as I was climbing the stairs to the second story of my house.  He called out to my wife who was sitting at a computer marveling over the images captured in the places she had just been.  My son simply said, "thank you.  Thanks to you both for showing me a new world, a new place."  I could tell in his eyes that at 14 years of age, he will never be the same.  In three weeks he changed.  His eyes were more open and his mind no longer reached simply to the end of the street.  He understood more about himself and the world. He understood what it was to have everything and to have nothing.   For the rest of his life, a portion of his heart would  now be occupied by thoughts and realities of distant and faraway lands.  No longer was he simply a child of America, he was now a citizen of the World.