October 22
What a whirlwind ride this past month and a half has been. I think I’ve only had one or two days to myself, including this one. The other one was spent dealing with my lost wallet in Kratie, the town with fresh water dolphins and sick babies whose parents carried their IVs…I still can’t figure out why each baby had an IV, or how the tiny clinic across from my tiny hostel could be that filled with tiny little brown babies crawling around with their parents holding their IV drip bags over them, chasing them around, sitting them on the ground outside and placing the bag on motorbike handlebars while they chatted with other parents. Poverty here can strike at some pretty random times. What a strange day to have to myself, I thought, calling credit card companies, thinking about endangered dolphins, and watching sick babies.
Nonetheless, Cambodia and the craziness since has been filled; filled to the max with no time or space to breathe, only to have fun and look in the mirror and practice loving myself and others in an extraordinary way. Here I am, at a hostel after two weeks of luxury with my father, and I see there are plenty of ways to practice my newfound happiness, refine it, watch it spill all over multi-colored lines, watch it run over cups and crawl into tiny spaces, watch it spend money and smile at frustrating situations, watch it be blunt and feminine, watch it play all sorts of games and laugh through pain with friends, watch it ask questions through answers. I see that I have become more proactive in self-governance.
Cambodia…hm. After the killing fields, regulating my emotions became something I realized I could talk about at any time I saw fit, either with myself or companions. That place, those memories not only for me but for the people who actually went through it, brought me through the rainbow of black and brown, of morose and remorse and into one of connection and conversation. It opened me up. So cliché, but think about it, really think about what it means to be opened up. Almost surgically, for inspection, for introspection and outrospection and retrospection and futrospection. I saw there that my time here was limited but that my options and opportunities out of here were exponentially quite the opposite. All of those people I walked over, all of that injustice and quiet comprehension that this place faced during and after the genocide made me understand the very same thing inside of myself and helped me to begin the process of walking out of it. Loudness and voices and laughter and making sure I understand and am understood, confusion and color and brightness and stress and pressure and acknowledgement, positive and negative, all of it – it all holds the energy that I am working to finesse. If this doesn’t make sense, that’s fine. I don’t think it should because processes tend not to. They tend to write, edit, re-write, erase, and speak over things they use to whisper about. This month and a half has been all of that, encased in the realization that going places and ending new beginnings are also beginnings in and of themselves as long as I maintain what I think has grown inside of me.
That I can love what I see on the side of the road, that I can love this poverty and inequality, these smiles and those children and that group of women talking, and this conversation I have with a tuk-tuk driver, and at the same time I can love what I want to do when I come home, what I want to be in this new journey, I can love this translation however difficult it will be, no matter how much it might suck; that I can love the process of loving the search because it is all passion…this is my newest revelation. Evolving passion, (let’s be real here) because who’s to say that I won’t break down when I arrive in LAX and realize that everyone speaks English? That I don’t have to use sign language, that fried noodles with vegetables isn’t on every menu, that people won’t offer me to hold their child while they get on the over-crowded minibus? Of course I will have those break downs, especially at night, when I go outside to take my mind off…of…that…silence…that never ever exists here, not even in the most remote places. That silence that exists back home, almost like someone pressed a mute button. Of course that will break me, and of course I will go on my MacBook (yikes!) and look up cheap tickets to Laos and jobs and living arrangements and then I will stop and think about my passion and my ability to not stop this forward motion. I will think about the journey I am on, think about my own education, well, my need to get one I suppose, and think about me and my friends, and the new things I will see because I have had this realization that it isn’t the place (although this place is majestic, at least), but it is me and my ability to love myself and think I am not that bad, and it is the people I meet and the experiences we have together, no matter where we are. A little mushy, I suppose.
So. After hanging out with friends, friends from home who came to Asia, friends of their friends, friends I met in other parts of Asia, friends I met while traveling with these friends, and feverishly running around with them all around Cambodia, I saw how possible it is for me to not take myself so freaking seriously. It was great. I got to be flitty, flirty, whimsical, badass, while also never losing sight of my intelligence and wit. I let myself have fun, and while this whole trip has been fun, I have been avoiding the inevitable - the transition into “home”, and hanging out with people who came directly from there made me see that it is possible for me to maintain myself, the self that I found, treasure, love, that Asia helped me fill in while not separating completely from a culture I am not totally satisfied with (home). Meaning, I see now that I don’t have to live like a hermit once I come back to the US. I can successfully engage with civilians while not losing sight of the person I have become. Good!
Then came the ultimate challenge….my father. Challenging in the sense that families are always challenging, and because with my friends I was at least able to take a breather when I needed to (being the only girl among them, they understood if I needed to have “woman time”/BeccaTime), but with my Dad this became a tad bit more difficult. I saw that I needed to practice my happiness in the context that issues may arise when I move back in with the parentals. I saw that communication about things, namely my newfound independence, may be tense when it comes to me being back, but manageable and even cool if done well. I saw that I have been living by what Santa Barbarians might call homeless-person standards, and loving it. I saw that air conditioning actually makes me physically sick, and, while my dad was sleeping, I would turn it up to roughly the same temperature it was outside. I saw, above all, how awesome my dad is for journeying out into a crazy, rule-less place where he is a white Amazonian giant with strange facial hair and even stranger facial expressions. I saw him talk to locals and develop his English-for-people-who-don’t-speak-English skills. I saw him at first be very nervous at things not working out our way, like hotel bookings or flights, but by the end was fine when the ferry that took us and our motorbikes across the Mekong was actually slabs of wood draped haphazardly across two wooden dugout canoes. At least, he looked fine. He also looked fine when he made the ultimate decision to fly into a tropical storm, one that even I was wary about. Bussing into one is fine, because I can use local people as a fear barometer. But flying…first of all, this is a technology I had near forgotten about. Secondly, not many locals fly. Thirdly, Lao Airlines is notorious for crashing, even more than Lao boat-lines. But we went for it, and I’m glad we did. Planes are amazing! And flying into Laos was a great experience, not to mention sitting in our resort watching a tropical storm pass us by while sipping on delicious beer and occasionally checking on the elephants that were also staying at the resort. Way to go, Dad!
So, now that Dad has left, and my friends have dispersed all over Asia, I am alone again. Tomorrow I head for Bangkok if it’s not too flooded, and then on Monday I fly into Burma. After that, I will stop in South Korea for about a week and then come home. My trip is winding down, and I have plenty of mixed feelings about it. As excited as I am to begin a new adventure, I am nervous as hell that reverse culture shock is going to be far more devastating than any other reverse culture shock has been for me before. I am anxious that reconnecting with my friends and family in person will be hard and that the story of my trip will go unnoticed. I am, however, ready to hear about the twists and turns your lives have taken these past few months and hope that the time we will share will be mutually engaging. I am terrified about applying for jobs and scared that I won’t get a perfect one…there are so many things that I now want to do. I am worried about following the rules that I have so neglected to follow in Asia, simple things like crossing the street at crosswalks and letting people know where I am have gone by the wayside as I tend to now plan as things come along. I hope I can be patient with myself and people can be patient with me. I am, actually, worried about using silverware. I will need a purse or something big enough to accommodate the chopsticks I plan on carrying with me wherever I go, and will ask the wait staff at restaurants to cut my meat up for me before serving it. Wearing shoes inside may also present a problem. Taking showers inside the shower will be strange, as opposed to just using the showerhead inside the bathroom. Cooking, driving, animals that aren’t meant for eating, tipping at restaurants, having a wardrobe, bike lanes, driving inside of things rather than outside of them, parking spaces, chains of stores and markets, white people…all of this will take getting used to. What do I do if I need something right away? Drive to the store? Weird. I should be able to walk outside and find the person selling it. What will it be like to not see water buffalo everywhere? I know…I need to convince Mom and Dad to buy one and put it in the backyard. I am also neglecting the wonderful things that I should like about coming home…seeing my family and friends, freedom to talk about governments, not seeing corpses on the road, fat children (not obese, just not with bones sticking out of them), Sebastian, carpeted floors, salad, sandwiches, other food in general, the ability to walk and maintain a conversation without having to look at the ground all the time, shade, jeans. I guess this is all part of the return package.
When I think about the funny shape this trip has become, it makes me smile, utterly grateful that it didn’t turn out any other way. Back in July, I wrote in my journal, “in telling Tiana [my friend] a little more about how I got here, I realize it’s a bit of a messy story where nothing worked out and I’m still, still, still happy. Like the sky today, unexpectedly exactly how it’s supposed to be. Beautiful.”
