The Traveler: Part I. Danger in Claims of Discovery

The Traveler:  Discovery and Exploitation

Do we have an obligation as a traveler?

To understand and be understood.

In the 21st century, traveling to developing and third world countries has become a popular taste for middle class consumption. The average Americans are developing a desire for escape and picturesque in some of the poorest countries in the world. Travel is projected as the prototypical transcendence of culture, freedom, and exchange. One could say that traveling has helped shape much of the trans-cultural knowledge that infused the US symbolic multiculturalism.The traveler becomes the discoverer and adventurer. Yet, as an enthusiast American traveler myself, I am critical of the privilege and obligation that I carry as someone who traverse different worlds. I question my own dilemma:  How do I share my experiences, express my own concerns, leisures, and freedom without participating in the capitalist project of exploitation and hegemony?

I don’t have the answer to this question, but I happened to read “In Putting the World in Order: John Lloyd Stephens's Narration of America” by Miguel Cabana who eloquently addresses the concerns that I have. As a social critic with an imagined community of intellectual rebels, I have organized, inserted, and revised a couple of his points for you confused travelers out there.

• The historical implications of traveling to the “unknown: The quest for lost civilization dates back to the conquistador's thirst for gold and decades of colonialism. Western nations were seen as protagonists to save the remains of civilizations, which are about to disappear or self destruct. Traveling to the the NEW WORLD were attempts to reconstruct a lost civilization, and ultimately appropriates that loss in order to inaugurate a higher civilization that is Anglo-America. The explorers then becomes the legitimate heirs of the newly claimed continents.
• Since then, interest in alterity- the Other- the native, the primitive continues to thrive through fetishization and commodification of indigenous cultures.It reveals a cruel dual motive: traveling as a pursuit of health and pleasure and contributor of perpetual oppression. We the travelers become a part of this contradictory American quest that asserted the project of modernization by re-appropriating the value of premodern societies. 
•  Traveling can be seen as means of locating oneself in the world, a means of understanding the value of one's native soil compared to. Yet there is vandalism and the pride that goes along with it.Through visiting sites of antiquity, one can find out who they are and their nation can discover what it will be. Places and monuments become signs which expresses an absence and need for ownership.

Despite all this, the traveler carries the selfless endeavor of acquiring knowledge for the civilized world. The American traveler is projected as a "cultural hero." The travel writer has the responsibility to his audience back home. He has to live for his "imagined" community of American readers. But we should be aware of the ramifications caused by our own support and praise for such claims of discovery and culture exchanges. Here are ways in which traveling can be exploitative:

• Actively participates in the development of communication and transportation at the service of capital and brings commercial expansion for nations like the US and Europe.
• Cultural genocide of neo-colonialist move which makes the region's current inhabitants seem backward and ultimately "primitive"... makes them foreigners in their own country.
• Capitalist appropriation and imperialist destruction of ancient art through projects of "preservation"  
• Bourgeois quest and arrival: spaces where they can exercise their lust for adventure, where they can obtain the knowledge that enables them to exercise their power.

  
  

  I’m not saying travel is bad nor am I suggesting don’t travel. It's not traveling , it's how we travel and who we are and who we represent. Traveling is important, and so is discovery and cultural exchanges. Yet, there is a certain level of awareness, humility, and respect that we ought to have. So go along travelers, and remember, seek to understand before you are being understood.
  
  Part 2: How to handle the obligations that you feel as a traveler returning home, coming sometimes in the unknown future.

Many references from “In Putting the World in Order: John Lloyd Stephens's Narration of America” by Miguel Cabana

Nature from and Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature,

There I feel that Nothing can befal me in life,- no disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -all means egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye ball. I am nothing. I see all. ... I am the lover of the uncontained and immortal beautiful. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.... The waving of the boroughs in the storm is new to me and old. It's effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right...

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature but in man or in a harmony of both...

___________

Atlanta, GA.

I sit in on child's swing, rocking back gently as I type away words of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I breathe in the summer air, the wind gently caressing my bangs and cheeks. All is calm and peaceful, and once again with a book in my hand, I feel at easy to rekindle my love for nature and books, the essential nutrients of infancy and humanhood.

I exhale deep air and shudder of my experiences in DC, four months of becoming a caged animal, soaking in artificial sunlight and materialistic venues. My entire body and mind was raging, and I knew that I am not complete without nature, because all beasts belong in the wilderness and I am no exception. 

My mother, a daughter's perspective

From the womb, the first world I entered into was my mother's, a world filled with Vietnamese stories, songs, and poetry. I held her hands tightly everywhere we go and I slept next to her every night, mouth agape under her tender breasts. She is a powerful woman, apt with words and language and she can easily sharpen them into tools for healing or weapons for battle.

Yet, mother is not perfect and neither is our relationship 

Growing up, I took those things for granted, and many times, I wished my mother was not so into... herself. I looked to my grandmother, who meticulous took care of six daughters and their children as well children from my grandfather's mistress. My grandmother was also a fierce woman, who cooked to feed and grinded every day, from sunrise to sunset. I used to watched her pounding  the rice with rhythm and force. She was tall and has a strong figure, hips wide and a slender back slightly curved from years of plucking rice. Whenever I was with her, I felt as if am the only person that matters.

Thus, when my grandmother passed away and I became agitated by the fact that mother was not like my grandmother. My mother could not cook or clean, or take care of infantile. Moving to the US was a difficult transition, and everything I knew slowly disappeared. including my mother.

The strong and commanding woman that I once fear become a blue collar worker at the food factory. She longer can speak eloquently and no loner spends time reading fairy tales to me at night. My mother become one of the many nameless immigrants.

It was this summer, doing research on the Vietnam War in Vietnam that I quickly unraveled the fascinating history of my mother. Bits and pieces of her came to life as stories got passed around the dinner table. My mother was famous in the village for the audacity to speak against the ways of communism, One of uncles told me that she was put in jail for writing a book about how communism can be effectively implemented. My grandfather came to jail , frantic and worried. However,  it turns out the policemen have brought out their guitars so she can sing.  Her intelligence, wit, and charm were unchallenged.
I also learned darker deeper secrets that my mother was hiding from me.
Part II to be continued

Introduction to this blog

This summer, there are two things that I devote myself to: my mother and writing. Luckily for me, in many ways, they're inseparable. My mother is the first bad-ass feminist that I know (blog coming soon). And yet there’s so much more about her that I don’t know. Now that my semester in DC is over, I am crawling back to my mother’s care. For at least half of my summer, I want to grow under her love, nurture, and poetic deliverance.  At the same time, I want to take care of my mother more than ever: She who has given me so much, the moment that she decided I shall be born when everyone else protested to when she surrendered her Vietnamese passport in exchange for the future of her two daughters. There is a Vietnamese proverb: KHÔNG CÓ GÌ BẰNG CƠM VỚI CÁ, KHÔNG CÓ GÌ BẰNG MÁ VỚI CON, which means “there is nothing compared to rice and fish, just like there is nothing compared to the mother and her child..” Likewise, my mother and I are complementary of each other, and together, we continue to feed each other spiritually and physically.

Secondly, I seek to build myself a fortress by blogging. Writing has always a powerful tool for healing for me. It enables me to process, reflect, and transform my thoughts, often chaotic and noisy, into coherent and powerful written experiences. From third grade (when I first came to the US) to high school, I've had about 20 diaries and since college, more than 8 blog sites. I admit, the numbers raise a point about my inconsistent and sporadic nature with writing. However, it also means that I’m a writing addict and relapses are frequent.
This site is a space for me to voice in and record my thoughts as a 22-year old woman living the summer before she graduates from college. Many blogs will be in English, but there will be ones in Spanish.I will cover just about anything that occupies my mind and disturbs my sleep.

As an amateur writer, although I feel insignificant to make claims of impact, I hope that by occupying the border-free online world, my words can reach others who need to hear a voice that resonates with their perception and experience. Yet my blog is not meant to liberate or heal anyone but me. I don't have that right, credential, or responsibility. My blog is a point of reference for cultural, political, and intellectual reconsideration. I hope to trigger a smile, a nod, a uh-oh, even flared nostrils and furrowed brows because disagreement is okay and even good.
Once again, I write purely because it liberates me. It empowers me. Una representación tanto como una prescripción, la escritura me tranquiliza. When I am writing, I breathe in stillness and deep. I close my eyes and feel myself floating on my back in the ocean, face and body absorbing rays of sunlight.
If you're reading this, you too are body floating in the ocean, I hope you will find ways navigate the storm.