Coming Home

I’m back in New York, back on New York time, being transported down the Van Wyck Expressway from Kennedy Airport toward Manhattan in an airport shuttle bus whose Russian driver’s right-off-the-bat rudeness is like a slap that knocks me out of a travel dream and onto a cold sidewalk in the middle of Times Square. He’s messed with the wrong passenger; I’ve just spent 23 hours in economy class from Singapore and, to quote the Rolling Stones, I’m a little bleary, worse for the wear and tear. I’m spending my time on the bus thinking about how to put him in his place when I get off at Port Authority. At the very least, he’s not getting a tip.

There’s a lot of traffic for noontime on a Wednesday, and it looks as if it’s going to be a long ride into town. Gradually my fantasies of revenge give way to the much healthier task of thinking about where I’ve been (the driver, however, is still not getting a tip). Twenty-four hours ago, I was almost exactly on the other side of the world, farther away than I’d ever been from my home and family, in countries where, uncharacteristically, I hadn’t even managed to learn the local words for “please” and “thank you”.

My mother and I spent 11 nights in Asia: four in Singapore, seven on a Star Cruises voyage that took us to Ko Samui and Bangkok in Thailand, and to Sihanoukville, Cambodia. It had been my mother’s dream–and my own--for some time to see Southeast Asia, but her recent poor health (she had triple-bypass surgery a few years ago, and has never fully recovered) has left her with no stamina whatsoever. The heat and humidity hadn’t helped (Singapore is less than 100 miles from the Equator), and we spent a lot of time sitting on benches or steps in unfamiliar surroundings, waiting for her to get her breath back before proceeding on our way to wherever it was we were trying to go.

As I think about Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia now, on the Van Wyck Expressway at noon, with a mind misted over by jet lag, I can’t remember much of anything that seemed strange, or “foreign,”–they were simply far away from my home. Aside from odd moments here and there, I never really felt disoriented, or out of place. This is the case more often than not when I travel, and it makes me wonder if I might be going about things in the wrong way. I go somewhere–Tunisia, Antarctica, Cambodia–where the landscapes and ways of life should, at least temporarily, knock me out of my usual orbit and make me feel like a visitor from another planet. The places may be beautiful, the customs different, the languages intelligible to me either only in part or not at all, but I return home feeling that, in spite of the distances, I haven’t drifted so far away from my own orbit after all, and nothing has really happened.

But gradually, in the first few hours or days of being home, I begin to think about the details of whatever journey I’ve been on, and I’m relieved to find that the feeling of detachment that I’ve been experiencing comes not from having failed to see, to relate, to be taken over by the sense of wonder that’s always been my motivation and my joy in travel, but from thinking about the trip at first as a completed whole–a notch in my belt, an activity that I’ve enjoyed and photographed and scrawled notes about in my journal, and that is now over. Once I start to remember the little fragments that make up the whole, however–the odd conversation, light falling in a certain way in a certain place, or a strange scene glimpsed from a bus window-- I finally begin to feel as if I’ve been somewhere, and done something that has, if only in the smallest way, changed me.

As we pass, at last, through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and into Manhattan, I focus on details of our journey to Asia. It occurs to me that it’s just after midnight in Bangkok, and that some of the children in the orphanage that my mother and I visited might be clutching as they sleep the little stuffed horses that I picked up for them in Singapore. I remember Ultra Man and Spider Man, cleverly disguised as 6-year-old Thai boys whose parents, for whatever reason, are not able to care for them, eating their lunch of rice and vegetables in the orphanage just like mere mortals. And the little girl, left alone and without any stimuli whatsoever when she was a baby so that now there is nothing but a vacant darkness in her beautiful eyes, responding to nothing except, tellingly, my mother’s breasts.

I think about Muong, the soft-spoken Thai driver from the port town of Laem Chabang, who spends most days of the week making the two-and-a-half-hour-long, traffic-clogged drive (which he hates) into and back out of Bangkok, ferrying cruise ship passengers into the city so that they can shop and he can afford to send his 9-year-old son to school. His cell phone rang just as we had almost reached our ship again; it was his wife, asking him to bring some dinner home for “the baby.” He immediately made a u-turn to pick up some chicken from a vendor; he’d waited for us in the suffocating heat of Bangkok all day (and, against all odds, had found the orphanage for my mother and me), but we were going to wait so that his son could have his supper–and thus the other five passengers had a reason not to tip him. I showed him a picture of my own 7-year-old “baby” when we reached the cruise terminal. Holding the picture up to the light, he smiled and nodded approvingly.

At a Buddhist monastery in Sihanoukville, a young monk tried to arrange his robes properly so that I could take his picture, and giggled because they were giving him such trouble. (Here I also encountered a monkey who, like the most practiced of beggars, gently put his padded little hand on my leg and looked with studied innocence into my eyes, and then decided that it might be more satisfying to simply bite the leg.)

I recall how beautiful Singapore looked just before a thunderstorm from the Executive Lounge on the 27th floor of the Singapore Marriott, and that leads me to thoughts of the British family that included a little girl of about ten who was clearly undergoing treatment for cancer. The three of them showed up in the lounge every evening to have something to eat and drink; they kept mostly to themselves, playing cards and telling each other jokes, laughing softly.

On the ship, there was the South African Zulu photographer, who seemed to find it difficult to look into people’s eyes. He said that he wanted to shoot fashion, but his photographs of tribal ceremonies were the most eloquent in his tattered portfolio. There was also the white South African man who had lost his partner of thirty years and his beloved dog within the past year. He waxed nostalgic about his days as a British colonial in Rhodesia, and complained bitterly about what was happening to “his” country. When the photographer found himself short on the funds that he would need to get back to Durbin, though, he gave it to him with no reservations. It worried me when I found him one morning on deck, staring at the heaving turquoise water below.

And I think about my mother, gasping for breath in the heat of day, telling me stories about my father over cool drinks at Singapore’s Fullerton Hotel at night. I remember how, unable to climb the hill up to the monastery in Sihanoukville, she spent her time talking to two little Cambodian boys who counted in English and recited the alphabet for her while she waited for me to come back down the hill. That, she said, was enough to make her happy.
It occurs to me that this trip has been like listening to a symphony of little prayers (including my own) whispered in various tongues; it’s a music that I will play over and over in my mind for a long time. It will, no doubt, have an effect on how I conduct my life. Perhaps another reason for my lack of disorientation when I travel is that, on the ground among people simply living their lives in the world, nothing really is that foreign, and everything is an opportunity add some depth to one’s own life.

The surly Russian bus driver’s cell phone rings as we travel west on 42nd Street. From what I can tell, the person on the other end is his doctor, apparently asking him with some urgency to come in for an appointment. Politely, in a soft voice, the driver tells him that he is working too much, that he has no time, that perhaps he can try to come in next week.

He drops me off at Port Authority. I tip him. “Thank you,” he says, with a gentle little smile. I collect my bags and go home to see my family.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008