Eulogy for A Passport
Why I am never taking travel for granted again
I recently received an email from the immigration department, reminding me to renew my passport as it approaches the final six months of its usable life. It has been five years since I received this reincarnation of it. It has seen better days — the shiny gold inscriptions have long faded from the once-vivid red cover, dog-eared corners and staples litter the pages, interspersed with the odd duty-free receipt and visa sticker. The earliest stamps have begun to wane, leaving mere shadows whose depths reflect the marks left by countless border officers who thumbed through the once pristine pages.
Every time I pull it out of its dark leather case at an immigration queue, I do so with a hint of pride. I have the privilege of owning the world’s (now second) most powerful passport, after all. As beaten up as it is, it has consistently imbued me with the power to book flights and hotels to virtually anywhere with reckless abandon, and breeze through immigration checkpoints without any dreaded conversations. More significant is what it took away from me instead — the need to visit consulate offices to get visas, as too many of my friends and colleagues have to do before embarking on their travels.
I am by no means a seasoned traveler. I would term myself as well-traveled in a typical middle-class sense, enjoying the usual mainstream holiday destinations at the usual kind of frequency. However, as often with immigrant families living across countries, school vacations and holidays were almost exclusively reserved for visiting family members back in the hometown (Shanghai, in my case). Therefore, vacationing in a new place was a treat, and I was lucky enough to experience that more consistently towards the end of my teenage years.
It just so happened that in this iteration, my passport took on the role of being my trusty companion during one of the most geographically-mobile periods in my life. After graduating from the onerous mobility restrictions of life under (and arguably before) military service, I moved to London for university, enjoyed the privileges of traveling to Europe’s great cities, flew home regularly, visited New York for one of the best months of my life training for my first job, and started working in Hong Kong.
With greater financial independence and a long-distance relationship that carried over from my London years and spanning to Singapore and then Guangzhou, I found myself reaching for my trusty red booklet almost every month. Over time, the passport became a chronicle — every page a life chapter, every stamp a treasured memory. Collectively, they formed an evolving collage, etched by shades of ink from around the world — the stately black of the UK and EU, the striking red of China, the cool blue of Taiwan, the pale purple of Thailand, and most perennially, the plain grey sticker of Japan, which later morphed into a beautiful image of Mt Fuji and a cherry blossom, reminding me every time I opened my passport to decide when I will next revisit my favorite destination.
Passports should not even have to retire before being reborn. COVID-19 has added insult to injury by making my passport’s final golden months dull. Mobility restrictions mean that many of us have not been able to travel internationally this year, and I am not optimistic about the prospects of doing so in the near future, given the resiliency of the virus and the unevenness in the response across jurisdictions. Countries are tentatively working to open borders to select territories through “green lanes” and “travel bubbles.” Still, these remain baby steps, as governments that have seen success remain wary of being careless and allowing a resurgence through imported cases. Business travel and essential trade, rightfully so, retain priority over leisure travelers, and will likely remain until a vaccine is reliably proven and made widely available. IATA projects that international travel is unlikely to recover to pre-COVID levels until 2024.
This time, my passport will die an ignoble death — dusty, faded, and painfully unused.
Sometime in the late evening, when we have settled down for the day, my girlfriend and I will go through some variation of the conversation below, usually sparked by some Time Out Tokyo article on Facebook or an Instagram picture on either of our feeds. Who starts the conversation doesn’t matter. We are pretty even in that regard.
“I wish we were in Japan.”
“Same. You know, we say that literally every day.”
“Yeah, because we actually do want to be there every day.”
“True that.”
I am confronting the uncomfortable realization of how reliant we are on travel to supposedly regulate our mental well-being. Being the urbane, millennial, middle-class, white-collar corporate cogs we are, we take international mobility for granted. A week-long jaunt to Tokyo or a hop over to Taipei for the well-timed public holiday is made easy and relatively affordable by Hong Kong’s abundance of competitive air connections. Three or four quick vacations a year provide temporary respites from the suffocating grind (and humidity) of Hong Kong. We have become addicted to this drug, always planning the next trip, still itching for that next high.
In chasing the millennial dream of experiences over possessions, we have commodified travel into periodic doses of gratification that can be blasted into our veins to tame the incessant unrest in our fickle minds; to pacify the bodies itching to escape the overly air-conditioned boxes amidst this sweltering jungle, ever seeking to bathe in a crisp autumn breeze, to waft through the sweet scent of cherry blossoms in the air.
According to this legendary Medium article, travel is no cure for the mind. Indeed, it has become an unhealthy obsession. In our defense, the situation has been made worse by being confined to what is effectively the stifling limits of a dense, crowded city. While Hong Kong and Singapore have done a commendable job in containing the spread of the virus, with daily life having some semblance of normalcy, its citizens are limited by geography in their travel options. One can only go so far in one direction before running headfirst into countless 14-day quarantines and entry restrictions. Cue the opportunistic staycation offers, which have been surprisingly popular. Being the insufferable travel snob that I am, who secretly loves cheesy quotes like “we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us,” I’ll pass.
Even more mysterious are the ones who are willing to shell out actual money (in a recession, no less) to re-live the second-worst part of a vacation, the flight (the worst being the end, obviously), which explains the popularity of the frankly wasteful “flights to nowhere.” Perhaps people were just griping about their terrible flight and airport experiences to be one of the cool, well-traveled kids. Or maybe they just needed a whiff to soothe their withdrawal symptoms for the time being. Since climate change has been set back just a sliver by the massive industrial shutdowns caused by the pandemic, just a teeny bit of emissions from one flight wouldn’t hurt, right?
On being stuck in a city, we are deeply envious of those who live in a place with actual land beyond the metropolitan limits. We see pictures of pastoral landscapes and tranquil beaches popping up on certain corners of social media, shared by some lucky friends. Driving 40 minutes out to the beach in Sai Kung for the 3rd time is not quite like flying out to Okinawa for a dive into its turquoise waters (funded by subsidies from the government!). A quick blast up to the Peak doesn’t quite hit like an idyllic weekend at the Lake District.
I am not a good enough writer yet to put this into words, but it is difficult to truly replicate the electric ecstasy of stepping out of an airport in a fundamentally different place; where the people are unfamiliar, where they speak in a foreign tongue, write another script, and eat unique foods which hit your taste buds unlike any other. Even the air is different. It is a full-bodied, deeply immersive, multi-sensory experience to be taken out of the familiar, and every few months, that almost primal craving creeps upon us, paralyzing our ability to accept anything else.
You might be seeing some pattern here about the travel destination(s) I tend to talk about — more on that next time.
Being the closet shut-ins that we are, my girlfriend and I are actually enjoying the hours spent at home, unlike many of our more active friends. We’ve got the internet, after all. This pandemic has also been relatively friendly to my wallet. By far, the lion’s share of my discretionary spending budget goes to travel. With none of that happening this year, that means there is more money to throw around for the next best high — the stock market (also, more on that next time), and to save up for the inevitably overcompensated vacations that will happen the moment we can feasibly do so. Think of it like a volcano where pressure has built up over the years instead of being released periodically, making a dangerous explosive eruption all the more likely further down the line. Revenge travel is real, and I expect it will happen on a massive scale after millions have been held back for the past year. The travel drug is irrepressible, and there is no effective rehab. The withdrawal symptoms have been painful, so arduous that I am never taking travel for granted again. Or so I say.
The last stamp my passport received was in January 2020, when I visited Shanghai to spend Lunar New Year with my family. I was going to fly to Mumbai next to attend a dear friend’s wedding in February, but by then, the recently inked red Chinese stamp on one of my passport pages became a fiery brand which represented fear and panic, disqualifying me from entry into most places which had the will to act early against the spread of the virus from China. Both my girlfriend and I were disappointed that I could not attend the wedding with her, but we looked forward to making up for it with one of our regularly scheduled trips to Japan in April during a break between her jobs when COVID-19 was sure to have “blown over” or “faded out.” The rest is history.
I will be receiving my new passport in a few weeks, where the pristine gold writing on the cover will sparkle in earnest, and the pages will be crisp and inviting like a fresh canvas. I pray they will not have to stay that way for long.
