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| from a cafe in Kuala Lumpur |
In 6 months in SE Asia, I was determined to write
every single day.
No exceptions. I didn’t realize how ambitious my
goal was until I began the trip. Finding time to write was not the biggest
challenge. There was plenty of time on buses, trains, waiting for flights, and
at the end of a long day on the bed of my hotel room. After all, I didn’t work.
I wasn’t studying. Time was all I had.
But it was so incredibly difficult to write.
Why?
Because I didn’t know what to say. I would sit in
front of my laptop and completely blank. It wasn’t a matter of writing for the
public, it was about writing for myself. I always hoped to have something
thoughtful and profound, but many days
nothing would inspire me.
Still, I know it would be a great waste if I didn’t
keep a consistent diary abroad, so I decided to change my tactic. Instead of
sitting down to write a “diary” entry, I began intervening myself.
“Describe
where you are,” was the first prompt. I as not in the same place every day. Even when
I was, the place was always different with new people, new music, new
conversations, and new sunlight. It was never the same place as the day before.
At first this seemed tedious. After all, I can just
takes pictures of the place and have a visual record that will last longer than
memory. But the camera cannot hear, cannot smell, cannot feel. My descriptions
are more valuable than my photos because my own experiences inform them.
In Vietnam I wrote that the winter sky was the “Hanoi sky was a sunless grey, the color of a pearl, the color of the
inside of an oyster shell.”
In Malaysia
I wrote that Penang’s sudden rain showers “sounded like a burst of applause
from an eager audience.” I wrote that the low cloud of Kuching “seemed to drop
on the city like a theater curtain.”
After descriptions, the next prompt I would give
myself was this: “Tell me how you feel.”
I wrote in my diary, “forgetting starts when the feeling stops.”
Thinking about, and then writing out my feelings at
that precise moment was a way of bringing myself into the present. First I
built awareness of my surroundings in the descriptions, then I built awareness
of myself. The feelings did not need to be profound, sometimes – oftentimes –
they were just rants of any present frustrations.
“I am always too hot, too
tired, or too busy to connect with my feelings.
Distraction. Stimulation.
Disorientation,” I wrote from Bali, on the fifth day or travel
“I don’t
think I am a failed traveler just because I'm getting melancholy on this trip.
Just like I wasn’t a failed ex-pat when I got melancholy in Japan. Perhaps my
only real mistake is that I didn’t expect this,” I wrote from a café in
Bangkok.
This
approaches work, and with the exception of only a few days, I was able to write
every something every single day in
Asia. Now that I’ve covered the qualitative analysis of my writing pattern in
Asia, I would also like to look at some metrics. Here are some curious
statistics I’ve uncovered:
Total number of words: 103,173
Average entry: 819 words
Longest entry:
11/27 Chiang Mai, Thailand at 2,406 words
That day I wrote 3 times, beginning just after
midnight at 12:03am, then again from a café at 1:10pm, and from another café
9:07pm. It was a big long philosophical rant about my life.
11/2 Yangon, Myanmar 2,255 words
The second runner up was in Yangon, where I
dictated my descriptions from the train into my iphone. The train was far too
shaky for me to write, so I spoke my diary entry into my phone and transcribed
them into my diary while on a boat in another part of Myanmar.
Shortest entry:
10/23 Hua Hin, Thailand at 65 words
I had a small breakdown in Hua Hin, where
I felt the most depressed and miserable I had since the trip started – and I
wasn’t even a month into it!
The entry in its entirety:
“On a short vacation, I can reflect on
what I experienced once I go home. But here, moving from place to place, I am
tired. I can’t reflect on the last place
because I am trying to absorb the current place.
As my mom
would say,
‘Put the
roast in the oven, lite a cigarette and stare at the sink.’
That’s how
I feel now. “
I wrote the most in border crossings from Thailand
to Laos – specifically Chiang Rai (1518) and Houay Xai (1211). In both cases, I
was only in each place for one day waiting for the next mode of transportation
to take me to my next place.
A close runner up was again Yangon, Myanmar where I wrote an average of 1,052
words per day. That city inspired me so much, I never had a shortage of things
to say about it.
I wrote the least in Jahor Bahru, another border
crossing taking me from Singapore into Malaysia. I wrote precisely 0 words in
Jahor Bahu and I remember detesting it and being eager to get out.
As close runner up was the city of Mandalay in
Myanmar, where I wrote only 221 words per day because I got sick and felt depressed.
Honestly, when I analyzed these statistics they surprised
me. I had thought expected Chaing Mai to be the place I wrote the most per day
since I returned there for a month at the end of my trip for the express
purpose of writing. I was also surprised by the average length of my entries.
Apparently I did have a lot to say about my surrounding and my feelings. In
memory, my diary was just a long ramble of useless thoughts and observations,
but when I went to re-read it, two years after travel, I was struck by its poignancy
and specificity. Most of the entries read like a narrative, shifting between
external and internal observations.
This diary has been pure gold to me. It my favorite
and most valuable souvenir. It’s depth and breadth far outweigh anything captured
by my photographs or other archiving techniques.
