Finding a Purpose in Travelling
When we travel, we tend to only see a temporary slice of the products and outcomes produced by the people there: from the delicious, unfamiliar food cooked by the local to the exquisite design and architecture of buildings to the contemporary language that is spoken in the area. Having traveled to several places where I indulged in the flavors and aromas of local dishes, obsessed over the beautiful and fresh design of local coffee shops and stores, and snapped photos of the street views or city view from tall buildings, I quickly found my memories of places blurring together and my sharing of memories of these places centering around food, architecture, coffee shops, and views of neighborhoods and streets. I slowly became more confused whenever I think of travelling, the meaning of it, and the impact of travelling on me, my identity, and my sense of places and cultures.
If one were to ask me where I want to go next, I would point to places I have never been, with vague justifications based on general perceptions and stereotypes of those places: “I want to go to [country] because it is a developing country with very localized shops, varying scenery and levels of economic development among different neighborhoods and cities, vibrant ecosystem of small business and hence would be interesting to explore.” If one were to ask me where my favorite place to travel is, I would be stuck and become silent for a few minutes before picking out a random place to simply reply with, as I found my perceptions of these unknown places to be too vague to distinguish from one place from another. Then, I would soon quickly find myself feeling a tinge of sadness and confusion as I go down the path of answering the existential crisis question within my own self about why I need to travel and where the meaning of travelling lies, especially after having spent so much time and money planning and going on trips.

I have spent hours and days and months trying to figure out the meaning of travelling — travelling to new places where people speak the language I don’t speak, where people share different values and societal norms, where, if I travel, I would not be able to understand how different these norms are, and why there are such differences, beyond making some speculations through observations, which might be misleading. I spent hours going through tens and hundreds of travelling blogs I could find on Google to find stories about why people travel, looking up quotes on travelling, and reading travelling books to find out the answer to why people travel, and what meanings travelling holds for them. Most content I found was blogs consisting of beautiful photos of food, fashion, interesting spots, and landscapes in different areas or short stories of how to travel, where people travel to, and what they see rather than why they travel and what implications these experiences have on their deeper views about their identity and perspectives of the world. I looked up travelling fellowship essays, curious about what people’s back stories are behind travelling to specific destinations, but found very limited excerpts of their experiences. I am left hanging with a deeper question of the deeper motivation of why people take months and years off to travel extensively to so many places around the world without feeling tired and discouraged from the blurring views of having traveled to so many places and how travelling has shaped how they have changed over time.
I feel puzzled and curious when I heard intriguing stories of people picking out very distant and unfamiliar places to travel to for one year on a fellowship to do something that is not very popularly pursued, whether it is learning how to paint, taking photography, or meditate for a year. I can’t imagine myself going anywhere alone, in a very distant place where I would know no one, and start building my life again in a year. The chance is, if I were to pick a very distant place that is not commonly visited, I probably wouldn’t speak the same language that the people there speak. Going to a new place without knowing a language reminds me of the traumatizing experience I encountered when I first entered the US feeling dumbfounded and out of place, the moment when I studied abroad in China without learning much about the culture of the country without being able to hold extensive conversations with the people there, the guilty and missing out sentiment I struggled with when I went to a rural village in China to volunteer for an orphanage without being able to communicate directly with the kids there to understand their stories or to create any real impact. I feel scared and nervous whenever I think about the notion of living somewhere new, alone, and without the capacity to communicate with majority of people there.

Unable to find the answers to the purpose of travelling externally through reading online blogs and travelling books, I tried to reflect upon my own experiences of travelling to see what has motivated me in the past and how the experiences through travelling have shaped me and how I view the world around me.
Thinking about the places that I have traveled to and why I chose them, I realized some interesting trends:
1. I simply went to some places because there were funding and grants to travel there and to do projects at school. For these places, I would be willing to travel to places where I don’t speak the language but would be with other English speaking students in the US who would be in similar situation, whom I would spend most of my time with while “learning” about other cultures to a very limited extent through observations and speculations.
2. For the places I picked on my own and spent my own money on, all the destinations are in the US or in Vietnam or in an English-speaking country where I knew for sure I could communicate with people there and be able to navigate on my own. For these places my main motivation was rather to meet up with some friends that I have made through some other occasions who are local in the area and would show me around their favorite places in the area.
Thinking about the impact of travelling on me, I realized that most valuable source of learning and value that travelling has on me was the people I travel with. I learned from catching up with my friends, observing the way they interacted with others, discussing with them about some issues or topics of interest, and sharing our observations and reflections of places where we traveled to.
I still have no answer to the purpose of pure travelling itself, as to me, I have only used travelling as a mean to maintain and strengthen relationships with friends, to meet new people, and to learn from other people. I was passively assigned locations to travel to only because those opportunities were around me, or if I actively picked locations on my own, then I am confined to locations where people speak the language I speak and where I know that I can connect with local people there through shared language. Either way, I found some sense of comfort and confined most of my interactions to the group I traveled with.
I have never thrown myself out of my comfort zone to travel alone, to a very distant location, and start my life fresh from ground zero, to understand another dimension of meaning and purpose of travelling.
I hope that one day, I will take a leap of faith to buy a one-way plane ticket to a distant place, to start from zero, to live there for an extended amount of time, and to discover a new dimension of meaning and purpose of travelling beyond what I have experienced.
