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 Travel Writing Journal
ECK Writers and Arts Conference / Chinatown, Montreal
June 14-17, 2000
The Spiritual Traveler
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I
attended a workshop on travel writing at the recent ECK Writers and
Arts Conference in Montreal. The facilitator, Margo
Hendricks, emphasized the use of descriptive and imaginative techniques
in travel writing, and offered a number of exercises designed to give
the workshop participants a more creative perspective on their
work. For the first exercise, she had a number of perfumes
and fragrances arrayed on a nearby table. She encouraged
each participant to come up and pick a fragrance. After
that, we were to write down, via free association, our impressions of
the scent.
I
intentionally picked the rather overpowering odor of gardenia because
it appealed to me somewhat less than the others. I took the
little vial with me to sniff as I wrote the following:
death
romantic attachment
a girl in a short skirt sitting in an open-air café
cultivating one’s garden to the point of obsession
an overflowing bathroom cabinet
bubble bath—the water oily and filmy
draining a tub of
bubble-bath—the foam refusing to be flushed away
Next, the facilitator read three brief sketches of
situations. We were asked to pick one, write a more complete
description, then zoom in and add more detail. I chose the
first sketch, which was of a child in a playground:
It
was a mild summer day. I stopped by a small playground in a
park and watched a boy descending a railing monkey-like with his hands
high over his head. Another boy in shorts and sandals was
going down a slide.
As he landed on the ground his knee bent and ground into the
dirt. He hobbled slightly as he got up, dusting off the
knee. The red scrape showed through. I went up to
him and asked if he was OK. He stopped, nodded his head
sorrowfully, and allowed me to inspect the wound. I could
see tiny streaks of blood beginning to well up under the film of dirt
that overlay his pale skin. Something made me shiver.
For a brief moment, I felt like a parent.
“You better get that washed off when you get home,” I admonished
him. He nodded again, then wandered off.
A third exercise focused on
the use of selective detail. Once again, we were given three
scenarios, and asked to describe what we saw. One involved
looking at the contents of a very rich person’s
refrigerator. I liked the idea of describing the contents of
a refrigerator, but much preferred describing the contents of one
stocked by a poor person, child, crack addict, or a bulemic film
star. So I wrote the following:
I see a refrigerator with only a heel of bread inside
Only a Tootsie Roll and a gum wrapper
Only a moldy pear
Only a day-old, half-eaten platter of Baked Alaska
The final exercise was simply
to write about any object that came into our minds. I tried
to think of an object I really cared about, something that I would
truly miss if I lost it. I thought of an old Seiko watch
that had belonged to my father, which I wore religiously. I
couldn’t think of an object dearer to me. So I wrote:
As
long as I wear this watch, I am a continuation of my
father. When it is finally lost—and I know I will lose it
some day—that tangible connection will be gone. There is
nothing else that I can wear close to my skin, day in and day out,
which will serve as such a potent reminder of him. What will
I do then?
I enjoyed the exercises, but
something was nagging at me. “What does imaginative writing
have to do with travel writing?” I asked the facilitator.
“We always use the
imaginative eye when we write,” she replied. “It’s not just
a matter of literally recording what happens.”
“True,” I thought to
myself. “But I don’t invent situations in my travel
journal. I record what happens to me.” I did have
another thought, however. A travel journal records events as
they occur. An imaginative piece of writing also records
events as they occur, except that they occur in the
imagination. In each case, something
occurs. Something is experienced.
This posed a challenge to
me. “What is the meaning of that experience?” I asked
myself. I felt that in order to write these events as
stories, as something that would interest a reader, this question had
to be answered at least to some extent. Otherwise, how would
I know what I was writing about? In my imagination, I had
thought of a boy scratching a scab on his leg. Later, in my
memory, I had come up with a similar image—a persimmon seed whose flesh
I had scraped off with my fingernail.
“What is the meaning of these images, then?” I wondered.
The word vulnerability came
to mind, and I wrote down a short list of some of the images that had
come to me in the workshop:
A girl in a short skirt sitting in an open-air café
Draining a tub of bubble bath—the foam refusing to be flushed away
A boy descending a railing monkey-like with his hands high over his head
A refrigerator with only a heel of bread inside
An old Seiko watch that had belonged to my father, which I wore religiously
Encouraged by this exercise,
I decided to test it outside the workshop. I was staying at
a hotel in Montreal that was just on the edge of Chinatown, so I
decided to explore the area. Whenever I have found myself in
any Chinatown district, whether in San Francisco, Los Angeles,
New York, Windsor, Toronto,
or Montreal, I have always been immediately attracted to the herb
shops. The bewildering array of pills and tonics in garishly
colored boxes, their labels printed in an indecipherable script, give
off the smell of mystery. And they are perhaps even more
impressive to someone like myself who is aware that there is a very
ancient science of healing behind all these
remedies.
I stopped in at the first
herb shop I saw, the boxes of remedies pressed tightly against the
glass, entered, and asked the owner if I could take a picture.
”No. No picture,”
the young woman at the counter said vehemently.
I was
surprised. “Are you sure?” I asked again, hoping she would
change her mind.
“No picture.”
“Why not?”
“Owner not
here. Company policy,” she replied crisply, brushing the air
with her hands as if cleaning out a dirty cabinet.
“Are there other herb stores around?” I asked plaintively.
“I don’ know. You look around. Go see.”
I turned away, disappointed,
walked down the street, and spotted another herb shop. I
went inside, and asked the same question.
“No. No picture,” the old man behind the counter replied.
“OK. Thank you,” I responded obediently.
I spotted a third store on
the next corner. It was smaller than the previous
two. Another old man sitting behind the counter was talked
to two female customers in Chinese. He spotted the camera in
my hand before I even had a chance to say anything.
“No, no,” he barked, rising
out of his seat and flapping his arms like an enraged seagull.
 Dispirited
with my luck at the herb stores, I wandered around until I was
attracted by the sight of two young men sitting just inside a
restaurant, eating from gigantic bowls of steaming soup. I
went in and asked to sit at another table by the window, next to the
young men, so that when the waiter was about to bring the menu, I
simply pointed to the two.
“La même chose,” I said,
using the opportunity to exercise my miniscule French vocabulary.
“Boef ou poulet?”
“Poulet.”
A group of four
German-speaking tourists sat down at a table to my right. I
noted each member of the group: a small, nut-brown woman with a heavily
lined face, a huge man with a bronze complexion, round unlined face,
and pony tail, a young boy with the same bronze complexion and a single
braid that went all the way down his back, and a young man with a pale
face—the only one of the party who looked remotely German.
 The
woman was as elated at the sight of the soup as I had
been. She rose up from her seat, went over to the young men
sitting at the window next to me, and inquired in English where she
could find it on the menu. I wanted to tell her how I had
managed to order and use the opportunity to show off my knowledge of
German—which was considerably better than my French was—but it was too
late. The young men were already showing her the item on the
menu.
 The
waiter brought a bowl of soup, a stainless steel pot of tea, and some
bean sprouts with basil as a garnish. I decided to take a
picture of the arrangement. The huge man with the bronze
complexion misunderstood my gestures and asked if I wanted him to take
my picture.
“Nein, danke. I
mache eine Aufnaume von die Suppe,” I replied. “I’m taking a
picture of the soup.”
“Ah!” He turned to
the other members of his group, and I heard him say, “Hübsches
Deutsch,” a compliment to my German. He exchanged no more
words with me, however, and I listened somewhat wistfully as occasional
familiar German words wafted over to me from their table.
When I was finished, I asked
for the check. The waiter was a very friendly young Chinese
kid who wore a large gold ring in each ear. He was quite
taken with my digital camera, and asked me how much it had
cost. I had frankly forgotten. I took advantage
of his friendliness to ask him about the people in the herb shops.
 “What do they have against people taking pictures?” I wanted to know.
“They’re afraid,” he replied.
“Afraid of what? Are they superstitious?”
“No. They’re afraid that they might be accused of doing something illegal.”
“Like what? Are they smuggling, selling things on the black market?”
“No. They just
don’t want trouble. Anything that they don’t know about
could be trouble. That’s their attitude. That’s
the way the people here are.” His tone betrayed his
restlessness and irritation with his native culture.
“Well, what trouble could a picture cause?”
“Maybe their shop isn’t
clean. The people here are very concerned about things being
clean. So they don’t want any pictures.”
 The explanation satisfied me, and I thanked him as I paid the check.
Back on the street, I watched
a couple of Chinese children feeding pigeons in a little square, passed
a red-bearded beggar with one arm sitting abjectly in the middle of the
pedestrian traffic, and stared fascinated at displays of utterly
unfamiliar fruit in front of the grocery stores. An
elongated, rose-colored fruit, tiny leaves at the top faintly green at
the edges, caught my attention.
“What is it called?” I asked one of the workers in the grocery.
 He answered with an unpronounceable name, and when I asked him if he could spell it, he shrugged his shoulders.
“What is it like?” I persisted.
“Like kiwi.”
“Kiwi fruit?”
He nodded. “Except it’s white inside.”
I imagined cutting open the
fruit and finding the contents to be just like a kiwi, except pure
white—a fruit of the imagination.
I returned to my hotel room,
to the lonely task of writing up my impressions of the
day. The sky had grown dark, and it started to
pour. I went over the images from the afternoon in my mind:
The window of an herb shop, boxes of remedies tightly pressed against the glass
A bowl of soup and a stainless steel pot of tea
Children feeding pigeons in the park
 A beggar with one arm sitting abjectly in the middle of the pedestrian traffic
An elongated, rose-colored fruit, tiny leaves at the top faintly green at the edges
Later that evening, my
roommate, Stan, came in. I explained to him what I had been
doing. “The idea,” I told him, “is that there is really no
difference between everyday experiences and imaginative
experiences. They’re essentially equivalent.”
“I understand what you’re
saying,” he said. “But you have to realize that most people
don’t share that point of view.”
“But you do, don’t you?”
“Not really,” he
replied. “I don’t tend to have much in the way of what you
would call ‘inner’ experiences.”
I was surprised to hear this
from Stan. “You’re having the experiences,” I told
him. You just don’t notice them because you don’t place as
much value and attention on them.”
“That may be, but I’m really not convinced that they’re real.”
This remark surprised me even
more. “Close your eyes,” I said, “and imagine that you’re
holding an orange in your hand. Imagine the way the orange
feels, the way it smells. Now peel the
orange. Break it into sections. Smell it
again. Put the pieces in your mouth. Taste
it. Now open your eyes. Go back over that
experience in your mind. It’s in your memory just as if you
had felt, smelled, and tasted a real orange, isn’t it?”
The next day, I bumped into
Margo Hendricks again, and explained to her what I had been
doing. She chuckled when I mentioned the conversation I had
with Stan. I told her that, as far as I was concerned, the
exercise with the orange was no different than the ones that she had
presented in the workshop. “The experience of watching the
little boy pick that scab on his leg in my imagination was just as
vivid to me right now as my memory of seeing that beggar in the street
the other day,” I said.
She nodded in agreement, her dark eyes shining.
“But I still don’t know what this has to do with travel writing,” I said.
 “Well,
you’re not doing ordinary travel writing,” she replied in her Georgia
accent. “You’re writing about self-discovery through
travel. That’s the difference.”
I wondered what I had possibly discovered about myself on this trip.
Before I left Montreal, I
revisited Chinatown with a young woman I had met at the
conference. I took her back to the shop with the strange
fruit like an elongated artichoke. She bought one, and we
cut it open the little nearby square. It was just as I the
grocery store worker had said. A white interior filled with
little black seeds. We tasted it. It had a bland
taste, neither as sweet nor as sour as a kiwi. I found it
slightly nauseating, and could not eat much of it. It was
certainly not the kind of fruit that I could bear to think of eating as
a regular part of my diet. My companion, not one to waste
food, wolfed it down. I mentally compared our approaches to
eating the fruit. It made me think of the way in which I had
written this travel journal—very carefully selecting and ordering the
experiences to my aesthetic satisfaction. |
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Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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