A Portrait of the Alarmist as a Young Man
I have so far spent the better part of a year trying to build this website. That should reveal just how seriously I’ve been “trying.” But today, faced with the hangover-like ennui that follows a long, hard week of work, I’ve committed myself to hunkering down and putting in some effort again. That has mostly meant sifting through old photos on my hard drive in search of a better image to use on my landing page (and, perhaps, a better head shot for my bio, although I’m not holding my breath). So far, I’ve worked my way through five years of photos, from the most recent, taken in May, to the oldest, a collection of grainy going all the way back to 2011. I’m not ashamed to say: this little chore has taken my emotions on something of a rollercoaster ride.
In every folder I’ve opened, I’ve traveled backwards through a lot of moments I’d rather forget and memories I wish were more current.
A year ago, my better half and I went on our first tour of East Asia. For us, this journey eastward was a surprisingly significant step – Southeast Asia is like training wheels for traveler, a safe and easy way to enter a much larger and more complex world. It’s rich with opportunities. Beautiful, almost dream-like landscapes abound: the jagged karst that jumps out of very bright blue waters, the saffron robes and crumbling pagodas, the sunsets that burn themselves into your memory. It’s easy to become attached to such exotic beauty (exotic for those who are not born into it, of course), and the lax rules allow nearly every stupid scheme you can cook up to become reality. But the layer of mystique that had hooked us long ago had worn away into a sort of verdigris over the years. We just hadn’t accepted that truth yet.
When we went to Hong Kong – itself notorious for turning travelers into lifers – I think, in our complacency, we expected to experience a culture and climate not all that unfamiliar. But it wasn’t that at all. Hong Kong had a vibrancy we’d never experienced in Asia. It was wet, humid, and lonely. The flickering red signs seemed sharper against the gray sky, the noise was less strident against the tranquility of the public spaces, and the main island was full of characters that were brand-new to us. The neon, the salt smell of the harbor, the hardline focus so evident in the eyes of the expats in Central, the slick sartorial choices of men and women dressed to the nines in Yves Saint-Laurent and Gucci, the steam rising from bamboo baskets, in front of which sat parked Lamborghinis and Teslas – Hong Kong blew me away.
The stony and strange little country still holds special meaning to me: it was there where I decided I no longer wanted to kowtow and conspire for my monthly salary.
We had traveled there to run a marathon, the first I’d signed up for in Asia and only the second I’d run since my debut back in 2010. It was a muggy morning that didn’t get any better as dawn broke. I’d worked my ass off to get into good shape, but the humidity that day knocked me flat. By the 28km mark, I was off pace and my vision was getting blurry. Next thing I know, I’m kneeling on the asphalt in cold, driving rain and bawling. Volunteer staff ushered me to a meat wagon (i.e., a bus) that carted me to the finish line. I remember looking at the elite Kenyan runners, who had also dropped out and were now wrapped in wool blankets, chatting with one another and knocking back the sport drinks and Snickers bars the staff had given us, and thinking, Those guys look unconditionally happy. Man, I want that.
I decided then that I was going to quit my job, the first full-time position I’d had in media, and also the first job that gave me the liberty to call myself a professional editor.
After that trip, we settled on a spur-of-the-moment flight to South Korea, where we ran a marathon, walked plenty of metric miles, ate and drank a lot, and ultimately discovered another land rich with distinction from the din and languor of life in Thailand.
A month later, I’d left my job at Bangkok 101 and we were boarding a plane to Shanghai. Looking back on it, I can see now how that job had become a microcosm of my life in Thailand. It was a good place to start, but not a good place to linger. I had hit a glass ceiling in less than two years, and the excitement I once had for the work had been forcibly dispelled by the cold shock of long office hours and brutal office politics, not to mention the troubling indifference that, like an insidious disease, all staff were felled by at one point or another.
Shanghai to Beijing, Beijing to Badaling (which, yikes; in hindsight, we should have chosen a different part of the Wall to visit), and from there back to Shanghai for a day before flying to Japan. China was everything we’d feared and loathed and wanted to see and then some. Among the highlights: the French Concession, copious xiao long bao and pulled noodles, great craft beer in Beijing, the hutong, the dancing in public parks. The lowlights: the hordes, the people spitting (and pooping!) on sidewalks, the fights that break out over nitpicky things.
I was in a weird place. I’d grown my hair long and had no clue what I was going to do when I got back to Bangkok. Even now, I’m still not sure, to be honest. (At least my hair doesn’t look so appalling.) A friend recently told me to expect a life crisis every ten years. Somehow, I’ve accelerated through those stages and enjoyed one roughly every five years of my adult life. I can’t tell if that’s a byproduct of my restlessness or simply a result of not finding a job I truly love yet. In any case, images from that time show a portrait of a man in full-on crisis.
We fell in love the moment we landed in Osaka. The crisp spring weather lent the city a rejuvenating air. And there was something about its country simplicity – Osaka isn’t much of a tourist destination – that made it such a welcome place to land after spending so much time in Southeast Asia and then amplifying its most challenging characteristics over two weeks of independent travel in China. Kyoto was perhaps even better. It was remarkably charming despite the crowds of women decked out in geisha gear and countless other travelers who followed the same guidebook-recommended day walks as us. Tokyo was a beast, and we knew it from the start. Even now, I want to go back there. It feels like unfinished business.
This last year has been pivotal. Those trips into a vaster Asia have opened my eyes, and I now unshakably know that the future lies far beyond the sticky embrace of the country I currently live in. I still haven’t exactly narrowed down what it is I want to make of my life with the skills I’ve sharpened, but the pictures I’m seeing are a poignant and sometimes painful reminder that I can be happy within this unknown realm.
What an afternoon.