Two-way tickets to Paradise

I have taken trips throughout my life, many of which I wished I had stayed and never come back (damn those two-way tickets with expiration dates).

Some of those trips were just few-week stops along the way of some restless summers. You may frame me as a sort of backpackers.

Except the term has been loosely coined mostly for Yale-like types to explore the Orient, in the hope that someday, one might be qualified for Ambassadorship.

I, on the other hand, just went wherever my heart led me: to Liberia (so I could experience first-hand what’s like to re-patriate as a freed American slave), to Cote D’Ivoire (so I could see the vestige of French Colonialism – very similar traffic control booths like the ones in Vietnam), to HongKong (where I, refugee-turned-relief worker, could offer minor comfort to fellow men less fortunate than I, or, to put it bluntly, in the same boat as I six years earlier), to the Philippines – where I could discern patterns of cultures, a place where people were neither/nor yet both/and (English in language, yet Asian in culture).

Trips I have taken back to Vietnam, but not in the same mindset as the native nor wavelength as Yale-like backpackers: I ain’t white.

I was neither accepted as one of the natives since many were born and grew up after the Fall of Saigon nor was I approached by District-1 vendors hoping to sell souvenirs e.g. zippos, dog tags and “Fire in the Lake” copies of copies.

But each trip offers its own uniqueness. People, places, and life-altered experience. Each trip carved away some of me, and in their places, gave me back a lot more.

I no longer am Sam. I don’t look at people through the color lenses, nor do I “hear” people solely via the language spoken.

I ate, slept in my grad school friend’s home (Ghana) and went to their open-air churches ( 5000+ in attendance) where I was asked to give a few words from, oh well, America (ironically, a land whose current President tried to “homestead” for White-only). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after his 78 Harvard speech – which raised alarm about overt materialism – suffered and endured criticism, among which ” don’t like it? go home”.

I am here because America had a conscience attack back on that last day of Vietnam. Good conscience!. The last of loyalty and lessons learned.

Trips I have taken were outpourings of and were aligned with white-men burden, conscience attack, noblesse oblige, guilt, Manifest Destiny?, the Great Commission (subdue the Earth – then the Moon). After absorbed those “American” scripts, I went out of my way to bring them to life. My D-Day. So don’t tell me to go back to where I came from, after having been totally “bleached” inside out (not to mention paid all my dues).

If I were to subscribe to stimuli-response reflex, to every taunt or tweet of this man-child, I would be flying back East many times over (or “Turning East” as the title of a Harvey Cox book). Just have to locate my return ticket.

But not this way, not by ill-timed tweets “Go back..” Heck, ain’t no Exodus away from America ever. People came here with one-way tickets, mind it be a passage across the Atlantic, or a boat ride out on the Pacific. Before embarking on those volunteer summers overseas, I made sure I raise enough money for those two-way tickets to make America all the more beautiful in the world’s eyes. All the while, I wasn’t even one of those Ivy-league backpackers with Ambassadorial aspiration to begin with. Just a reflex stimuli-response to world’s need as we all should.