I didn’t know it yet—not when I quit my job and left the country again—what exactly it was that I was looking for. All I knew was that whatever it was, it was not to be found in the gray Puget Sound mist. In the absence of a better explanation, I told my friends, sipping the thick, velvet foam of our lattes under an overcast sky lined with cranes, that the skyrocketing cost of living was bullying me out of our waterlogged city. Perhaps, some of them said, it was because of the anxiety that shivered in the wake of our presidential inauguration. Either way, in the spring of that year, I gave up my apartment, packed my belongings into my car, and left it all with a friend.
After three flights, two chicken buses, and a strange bout of illness, I arrived in El Nido, a small backpacker nest at the far edge of the Philippines. Why are you here? In the hostel, two fresh-faced Canadian graduates shouted at me as a tropical rainstorm whacked the metal-sheet roof and Maroon Five cackled on the radio, both loud and faint. I quit my job, I replied, yelling, as if that answered their question. It’d been easier to find an answer, I suppose, when I was younger. I was postponing real life, delaying adulthood; I wanted to find myself, whatever that meant—and, back then, nobody asked. But, all of a sudden, a month away from turning thirty, those excuses sounded far-fetched. Back home, my friend was days away from walking her white, shimmering dress down the aisle in the historic, red-bricked heart of Ballard. My colleagues were gearing up for a tie-and-gown fundraiser I was supposed to run. People my age were getting married and buying houses; and I, without thinking too much about it, found myself strapped to a backpack, strolling toward the harbor. As my phone sounded for the last time with news about two maniacs’ threats of nuclear war, I walked onto a Filipino bangka with twenty-two sunburned strangers.
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That Ramadan, my Austrian friend and I were the only foreigners on the Maldivian isle. We sat together on a windy beach beneath a cloud-covered sky, staring at water the color of campfire ashes. She said: her father had traveled to Sri Lanka in the midst of their thirty-year civil war.
I could almost imagine him, a light-skinned boy with bright sandy hair and sapphire eyes, a beanstalk with a cumbersome backpack, traversing the island I’d just come from. He was riding the bone-cracking bus from the capital city of Colombo along the southern coast, toward beaches the world did not yet know were pristine, when it yanked to a stop. My friend’s father bounced in his seat. A Tamil boy in a wife-beater stepped aboard, a rifle slung across his bare, slim shoulder, and shot the Singhalese driver in the head.
My friend’s father spent the night on the dirt floor of a woman’s hut.
-
“There is no cell phone service and no Wifi,” our Filipino captain announced, his big toe, naked, wiggling on the wooden deck. “If you ask for the password, we reserve the right to toss you overboard.”
We were supposed to laugh, so I did, yet it did nothing to alleviate my nerves about spending five days at sea with people I didn’t know. But the bangka was out of the harbor by then, its outriggers skating the turquoise waters of the Palawan archipelago, our backpacks piled somewhere in the hold. As the half-built blocks of guesthouses and future resorts vanished behind the wake, we began to sail between rocky coves and limestone cliffs in a corner of the known earth, in that great swell of the Pacific Ocean.
Out here, life was much simpler, slow and unencumbered; like jazz, our days were unpredictable and improvised. I kayaked in a lagoon with a German surgeon working in Switzerland with a blond mop of surfer hair, swam ashore with a London banker, laughing about sea urchin spikes inches from our torso. We ambled barefoot on coral isles, and slept in bamboo huts under white domes of mosquito nets, cackling in unison to the motor and grind of our captain’s snores. At night, a British woman who lived in the red rocks of western Australia belched karaoke with the fishermen and their wives, singing “Macarena” as she tumbled in the sand. We lay down side-by-side in the soft belly of the earth as silver stars cut a medley of paths across the night-sky—like the Polynesians, I imagined, who long, long ago, set out in their canoes across these endless oceans. The moon fell like a white blaze, a cold fire, on the sea.
One afternoon, we snorkeled a Japanese shipwreck off of the shore and washed ourselves off with buckets of cold water. At sunset, we dug our heels into the sliver of sanded beach, bottles of Corona all around, glowing like amber jewels in the golden light, vivid and full of possibilities. The sky was radiant, lit with flames across the horizon.
“It looks like the world is on fire,” a German diver remarked.
A Canadian man replied, sarcastic, “Maybe a nuclear war did break out, and we have no idea.”
We laughed the sort of subdued laughter of the falling sun, a collective grief, a helpless disillusionment about the state of our world.
-
Not long ago, the last of the British ships sailed away, groaning under the weight of purloined treasures—tusks of elephant herds, cages of leopards, encrusted thrones of Kandyan kings, and the weapons of Chola warriors. At the heart of the tear-shaped island, there was a cemetery where the colonizers of Ceylon were laid to rest. A young, slender groundskeeper with a teeth-filled smile was sweeping a tombstone with a straw broom, clearing it of dirt and fallen leafs. This woman, he told me, gesturing to a grave, was shot by the British army after her husband had died of cholera—to keep the Empire’s secrets. This one, he said, his voice crushed, was a big, fat British administrator who had been bird-watching when he ran from a wild elephant and died of dehydration. This guardian of the dead, this child of occupied land, filled his narrow chest with purpose and pride: These people died so far from home, in an alien place, and it is up to me to clean their tombs and remember their stories.
In a church just south of us, in Galle Fort—a stronghold built by the Portuguese, fortified by the Dutch, and reinforced by the British—I was sitting in the centuries-old pews when a British man with a daypack and a camera hanging from his neck stopped short of a tombstone laid into the floor. He kneeled down, grabbed the arm of a custodian passing by, and sobbed. This, he said, was my grandfather. He had died before I was born, a whole world away.
Why are you here? The fresh-faced Canadians at the hostel had asked. We were all, I suspect, chasing something we couldn’t quite articulate, answers to questions we didn’t yet know how to ask.
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I consider myself a child of two worlds, of Taiwan and the United States, and I met the travelers in the dark, in an open-air safari jeep in Sri Lanka, less than a decade after the end of the war. Slowly, the ancient jungle was waking up, the sky started to glow with an indigo dawn. A woman’s shape was coming into form, eating a banana in the front seat. Her partner was chewing a hotel-packed sandwich. A middle-aged Angola-born Portuguese-Canadian asked them: Where are you from? The two of them looked at each other, mouth-open, mid-bite—exhausted, I think, from months of explanations. In a nasal French accent, they responded, almost together: New Caledonia. No, the woman clarified, not New California. New Caledonia is an island off of the shore of Australia. They’d left home, she said, to travel homeward; they were French, children of colonizers, but they’d never been to France. She bit into her banana again, silent.
My German-raised-in-South-Africa friend would refute me later when we trekked in the red-dirt path through the mountains of Colombia: We are not children of two worlds. We have one foot in each world, belonging to neither. A whole generation raised in the wake of fallen empires, in the carved up pieces of colonialism, the fragments of post-world war border drawing, and the butchered attempts at nation-building.
Together, we were hoping to see a snow-speckled leopard hurtling through the forest.
-
I let my body drift on the surface of the water. It bobbed with the swells of the ocean, rhythmic, as if I was lying on the chest of the planet as it breathed. When I submerged my head again, the world I knew was gone. In its place was the trilling chorus of a zillion fish teeth crushing all at once into corals in a vibrantly colored pageantry.
Up on the deck, I dried myself off with a towel and slipped in beside a British woman I was getting to know. She was lying on her sarong, reading a book about the wars in the Middle East. “Light reading in paradise,” I teased. My stranger-friend handed me her bottle of Corona for a swig, and started to tell me about her boyfriend who had served in Afghanistan during the American invasion. I told her about my Kuwaiti student who had been stuck outside of the United States when the Muslim ban was signed. She sighed over the bitter debates of the Brexit referendum that tore her island-nation apart. My grandmother, she said, had fled from Poland during the Nazi regime. In that same war, I replied, on the other side of the world in Taiwan, my father’s father had narrowly escaped being drafted into the Japanese Imperial force when Hiroshima and Nagasaki screamed beneath mushroom clouds.
“We are all immigrants,” she said. Her voice sounded like the shatter of long ago promises. “We all came from somewhere else.”
The sail above us caught wind and the bangka began to race.
Maybe, I think, we were trying to outrun our broken world.
-
Do you know what it is like? A quasi-famous Israeli commentator asked us in the cobblestone town of Trinidad, Cuba. On the night steps of La Casa de Musica, in those intimate hours beyond midnight, we could hear the faintest notes of a Black woman vocalist wafting from the corner bar where we’d met, her wails a deep longing for a better tomorrow. The Israeli had black, windswept hair, skin the color of whiskey from months of backpacking in the Americas, and he possessed an energetic, youthful charm. He was recounting the stories of three friends in the army who had died rushing to the aid of Palestinian women and children. It is always, he lamented, more complicated than it seems.
Below us, a Mestizo woman in a bright red dress twirled with a Black man in a tuxedo. Mojito glasses, long left behind, ran with the tears of melting ice, of something that once was. Do you know what it feels like—the Israeli continued, his voice strained like stitches at the seams—to live constantly in the fear that one day you might have no home to return to?
In Casco Viejo, the refurbished old town of Spanish-era Panama City, I spent a candle-lit Christmas evening with a Kurdish Iranian woman who’d watched on the news, as an architect in Germany, as protests raged across the rolling plateaus of her ancient land; on that isthmus between the Caribbean and the Pacific, in the lush, narrow land of virgin forests, I too met a Venezuelan-Panamanian woman who’d escaped the regime in Caracas and hadn’t seen her parents in nearly nine years. In Cyprus, south of its contested border, we were served in a restaurant by a young, soft-spoken refugee from Ukraine, and I sat along the lapping shores of a Guatemalan lake with a man who’d been deported from his wife and children in Palo Alto. For a while, he and I sat in silence, skipping stones, watching ripples furrow across the glassy water. Why are we like this? What have we done to all the people in our beautiful world?
On that cobblestone plaza in La Casa de Musica, the Cuban man in a tuxedo lifted his eyes, shimmering on this Caribbean island of honeyed cigar smoke and shattered families. He settled his gaze on us, up in the steps—Israeli and American and Taiwanese—and asked: “Care to dance the night away?”
The woman in a red dress twirled and twirled.
What else, I wondered, was there to do?
-
High in the Andean mountains, as we trekked toward Machu Picchu, our Quechan guide told us that Incan zodiacs took their shapes in the blackness between the stars, that their mythical creatures swam like shadow-spirits through the celestial, crystalline river of the Milky Way. What the Incans saw, he said, was not the glimmering light, but the beauty in the darkness.
Beneath that same veil of night-sky, centuries and continents away, we were gliding in my Polish friend’s sailboat across the howling waves of the Caribbean Sea. A German woman was recounting her childhood, one block east of the Berlin Wall: her elementary school friend, she said, had betrayed them, reported her father to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Distant lights flickered on the horizon like ghostly fireflies. Who—she asked, bewildered—would do that to another person?
We sat, for a while, listening to the hum of far-away stars burning through the universe. My Polish friend, her barefoot on the spoke of the wheel, took a long drag on her cigarette. Just a few days earlier, a resident of the Grenadines had told us that white merchants used to bring their cargoes of human slaves to the Saint-Dominique port and auction them off, like cattle, to settlers all over these islands. He, too, told us of a fort on St. Vincent island where cannons were pointed inwards; the colonizers were much more afraid of the Carib Indians than an attack from the outside. There’s something, the German woman had said, so poetically paradoxical about that.
Long, long ago—my Polish friend said at last, the glow of her cigarette stenciled her nose and cheek in a soft flame against the dark, sea-salt night—her father, under the Iron Curtain, had begun to build this boat in secret, dreaming of one day sailing it across a peaceful, beautiful planet. In the darkness we couldn’t see, he pounded and drilled the hull into being, that silhouette coming into form, the shape of his faith, a glimpse of the world as we hoped it could be.
-
Somewhere on that same beautiful planet, decades and oceans away, our Filipino bangka drifted into a bay bobbing with translucent bells of jellyfish, a sea sprayed with glitter, like galaxies on the water. In our final evening, I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers who had become family, drinking from endless bottles of jungle juice. Palm leafs chimed, like music notes, above us; candles flickered like foxtrot in the dark. All night, we spoke in a low staccato of half a dozen languages and laughed a whole, delirious lot of laughter. When the captain ushered us to the water to watch bioluminescence sparkle like silver confetti, my British stranger-friend grabbed my arm and pulled me back, joking that we didn’t want to die of jellyfish, not just yet, not in the middle of nowhere.
Together, we watched our boat dog hop in the shallow cove, chasing crabs, his paws plucking the frosted water like a guitar, photons lighting up, crystals in the night. Tomorrow, we’d go our separate ways again—we’d learn, in time, that Palestinian prisoners in Israel staged a hunger strike, that Germany banned burkas for members of the civil service, and that, in the land of the free, desperate, migrant children were ripped from their crying parents’ arms.
Why are you here? The Canadians had asked in that pelting tropical storm.
The wind started to pick up; it wailed in a wild, crooning voice. It felt like a tidal wave was gathering, climbing higher and higher. Somewhere in that darkness we couldn’t see, out on a beach none of us would ever find again, the granddaughter of a Polish refugee and a woman born in the mountains of Taiwan stood passing a jungle juice back-and-forth, back-and-forth, talking the warmest talk in that fast and sweet singsong of her British cadence.
