Why This Trip Matters
Somewhere at the bottom of the storage space behind my bed lies a smashed mug which reads: I (HEART) NY.
It was given to me intact four years ago by an old school friend. He'd just returned from his first semester at Columbia. We were in the McDonald's near the junior college we studied at, and he randomly fished my souvenir out of a bag of other assorted mugs.
It was a nice gesture, though I was rather ambivalent about it. On one hand, anything with I (HEART) NY is a quintessential NYC souvenir. On the other hand, much as I appreciated it, it was an ironic reminder of a personal hangup.
I don't come from a very well-to-do family. Because of my academic aptitude, however, I've often found myself in the company of people who are. In my early adolesence, the inevitable social comparisons led to a good deal of confusion and angst. One of these comparisons was about travel.
Till I turned twenty, the furthest I'd ever gone from home was to Thailand for a family holiday. My last such holiday was to Genting when I was sixteen. These trips were always on wheels. When we lost our family car in a non-fatal traffic accident some years back, we effectively lost our passports. Subsequently, I've had the fortune of boarding a plane a mere four times (to two destinations and back). Both trips were all-expenses-paid: the first was for military training in Taiwan in 2000; the second was for a student conference in Korea last year.
My classmates, however, always seemed to be getting better deals. From parent-sponsored school expeditions in junior college to holidays with friends, they appeared to live three times the life I'd lived. The clincher came when many of them departed for overseas scholarships. Not only did I feel a vacuum opening in my world, I also felt incredibly alienated whenever they came back and spoke only of their experiences abroad. I always fell silent during such conversations, having nothing to share.
I had a chance of a lifetime to go to California in my first year of study at NUS, when I successfully applied for student exchange to UC Berkeley. However, financial constraints forced me to pull out at the last minute, despite being one of the strongest candidates. I viewed this as the first time that I lost something I deserved through no fault of my own, and was silently bitter about it for a long time.
On the day I received the "I LOVE NY" mug, I went to meet two other friends in town. I'm not sure how far I can actually consider them friends, though, because at that emotional stage in my life I was resentful of their upper-middle class status and popularity in our circles. I obliquely demonstrated this by petulantly throwing my bag over the barricade at which they were seated, then circling round it to join them.
When I arrived home, I realised that I had smashed my mug in the process.
I was disappointed at first, because I valued it as a gift from a friend, and as iconic gift in itself. But I quickly rationalised the broken mug as a symbolic protest against people rich enough to travel to New York on a whim; and as an uncanny reflection of the 9-11 attacks some weeks earlier. Immature as it appears to me now, that is how I felt then.
Four years have passed and much has changed. Due to experiences in the intervening period, I've made peace with many of the people I used to envy due to my insecurities. I've realised that I'm much more than my air mileage and that beating one's chest over one's deprivation is the ultimate show of bad faith. The epiphany is this: it's not that I've been unable to travel all this time; it's just that I've not wanted to, and needed someone to blame for it.
Hence, tonight's trip to New York will be especially meaningful for me. In lugging suitcases to the Big Apple, I will be jettisoning much of the baggage that has weighed me down for years. Not just the baggage of bad faith, but also the baggage of peer pressure to take a far cheaper holiday in Southeast Asia. In choosing to travel to New York, I am in fact saying: this is where I want to go; this is the kind of person I believe I am; these are the people I want to be with. As a small bonus, I will also be able to say that I've been somewhere that many people haven't been, since it's not your typical tourist destination.
Then again, I'm not your typical tourist.
It was given to me intact four years ago by an old school friend. He'd just returned from his first semester at Columbia. We were in the McDonald's near the junior college we studied at, and he randomly fished my souvenir out of a bag of other assorted mugs.
It was a nice gesture, though I was rather ambivalent about it. On one hand, anything with I (HEART) NY is a quintessential NYC souvenir. On the other hand, much as I appreciated it, it was an ironic reminder of a personal hangup.
I don't come from a very well-to-do family. Because of my academic aptitude, however, I've often found myself in the company of people who are. In my early adolesence, the inevitable social comparisons led to a good deal of confusion and angst. One of these comparisons was about travel.
Till I turned twenty, the furthest I'd ever gone from home was to Thailand for a family holiday. My last such holiday was to Genting when I was sixteen. These trips were always on wheels. When we lost our family car in a non-fatal traffic accident some years back, we effectively lost our passports. Subsequently, I've had the fortune of boarding a plane a mere four times (to two destinations and back). Both trips were all-expenses-paid: the first was for military training in Taiwan in 2000; the second was for a student conference in Korea last year.
My classmates, however, always seemed to be getting better deals. From parent-sponsored school expeditions in junior college to holidays with friends, they appeared to live three times the life I'd lived. The clincher came when many of them departed for overseas scholarships. Not only did I feel a vacuum opening in my world, I also felt incredibly alienated whenever they came back and spoke only of their experiences abroad. I always fell silent during such conversations, having nothing to share.
I had a chance of a lifetime to go to California in my first year of study at NUS, when I successfully applied for student exchange to UC Berkeley. However, financial constraints forced me to pull out at the last minute, despite being one of the strongest candidates. I viewed this as the first time that I lost something I deserved through no fault of my own, and was silently bitter about it for a long time.
On the day I received the "I LOVE NY" mug, I went to meet two other friends in town. I'm not sure how far I can actually consider them friends, though, because at that emotional stage in my life I was resentful of their upper-middle class status and popularity in our circles. I obliquely demonstrated this by petulantly throwing my bag over the barricade at which they were seated, then circling round it to join them.
When I arrived home, I realised that I had smashed my mug in the process.
I was disappointed at first, because I valued it as a gift from a friend, and as iconic gift in itself. But I quickly rationalised the broken mug as a symbolic protest against people rich enough to travel to New York on a whim; and as an uncanny reflection of the 9-11 attacks some weeks earlier. Immature as it appears to me now, that is how I felt then.
Four years have passed and much has changed. Due to experiences in the intervening period, I've made peace with many of the people I used to envy due to my insecurities. I've realised that I'm much more than my air mileage and that beating one's chest over one's deprivation is the ultimate show of bad faith. The epiphany is this: it's not that I've been unable to travel all this time; it's just that I've not wanted to, and needed someone to blame for it.
Hence, tonight's trip to New York will be especially meaningful for me. In lugging suitcases to the Big Apple, I will be jettisoning much of the baggage that has weighed me down for years. Not just the baggage of bad faith, but also the baggage of peer pressure to take a far cheaper holiday in Southeast Asia. In choosing to travel to New York, I am in fact saying: this is where I want to go; this is the kind of person I believe I am; these are the people I want to be with. As a small bonus, I will also be able to say that I've been somewhere that many people haven't been, since it's not your typical tourist destination.
Then again, I'm not your typical tourist.
posted by The Empty Signifier @ 5/15/2005 11:02:00 am
7 comments
7 Comments:
Wishing you the trip of your dreams wanker; I want a mug!
It's a dream fulfilled isn't it? Dont leave NY without having all the fun. I can commiserate with your troubles .. i mean financially but one major difference, the academic aptitude has left me.
wait a minute..... that time when you met up with me and yishbye you flung your bag over the rail..... OOIIII!!!!!!!!!
I wasn't referring to the two of you. Yish was the one who gave me the mug and these, to quote myself exactly, were "two other friends".
hi...i've been reading ur blog for awhile, and i think i'm in the same position u were in when u were 20.i resent the fact that my friends can travel wherever they wish, and i thought that no one truely understood my desire to travel.i've also been no further than thailand..not even been to australia, where everyone seems to have been.
i'm so glad ur taking this trip!!hopefully one day i will too.=)
-the non-traveller
Real happy for you and hope you'll be able to blog as you go along - in my personal experience, if I don't blog about the holiday while I'm on it, I never get round to doing so afterwards!
Though I don't quite understand the bit about New York City not being a typical tourist destination - of course it is! There's nothing wrong with going to typical tourist destinations; pretty often they're as famous as they are for good reason, and I'm looking forward to reading all about New York's good reasons here over the next few weeks. :)
Anonymous: Thanks so much for your comment; it means alot to me to know there are people out there who feel the way I do about certain things. Of course there are, but the affirmation from actually hearing from them is priceless. So thanks, and I hope you've gained something out of knowing what I feel as well.
Mich: Z's cable will be terminated on Friday, so my blogging may be rather irregular after this week. Will definitely make a conscious effort to put my thoughts on this site before my experiences lose their immediacy, though!
As for the tourist destination comment: I'm not so sure if NY's a touristy place for Singaporeans, since it's quite literally the furthest place on Earth from our sunny island, and the airfare is accordingly painful. And that's not mentioning the priciness of things, or the city's lack of mountains and golden beaches. You know how Singaporeans think when choosing between ten trips to Indochina and one to NYC...
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