The Unlikely Link Between Travel and Fiction
Last week I was with a friend, lying next to him in a tent. He was smothered by his perceived failure, crushed by the caste system, falling short in performing his sacred duty, unable to protect his nephew from the ultimate indignity, sweltering in the rural Indian heat. In danger of attack from mosquitos, goondas, and blood infections alike, he sobbed and collapsed into his threadbare cot, defeated.
And then I sighed and closed my book. I was back in Houston lying next to my wife. It was 2:40 am and I wanted to keep reading but couldn’t keep my eyes open. The next day when I woke up I finished the novel: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It was my attempt to review this novel that nudged me along to see the thread between travel and fiction. I knew I had to relay the experience of reading about the episode in that tent, but I didn’t know how I could possibly share how big it was for me.
If you want to regularly enrich your life in profound, unpredictable ways, there is nothing better you can do for yourself than read fiction and travel. I made this connection when I was trying to reconcile how I could love novels so much but nonetheless struggle to review them.
What is the capacity of a moment? And how many moments fit into a life? What’s ironic is that we intuitively understand that life can only fit a finite number of moments, but any given moment may yield an experience that, to us, feels infinite: limitless in the pleasure, horror, or insight we gain as we revisit it endlessly over the course of our lives. As I considered how I might share the experience of reading A Fine Balance, I reviewed some of the more expansive moments that reading fiction and traveling have provided me.
Eleven years ago I was living in South China and I would smoke cigarettes on the roof of my apartment in Shenzhen late into the night, staring across the water to the twinkly lights of Hong Kong, wondering what people were doing in those buildings, thinking of something I saw on a weird blog called the dictionary of obscure sorrows where someone posted made up words for made up feelings: “sonder n. : the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed.”
I had a lust for life. I felt like I was really doing something in China, but I also felt profoundly lost. I would say things to my friends like, “this is our time!” But I would also get dejected, and chain smoke cigarettes in my sparsely furnished apartment, eating instant noodles and watching music videos on my phone because I had nothing else to do. I started to devour pirated paperback books sold on the sidewalk. Frequenting these book stalls put me in proximity to a cafe which introduced me to a social scene through which I landed my first job.
I started as a one-on-one English tutor and got promoted to an SAT tutor. I was promoted to work with the uber-privileged children of wealthy businesspeople and government officials, academic wunderkinds who had been forced to “bei danci,” a Chinese phrase that means to memorize words but translates more accurately to internalize vocabulary to the tune of hundreds of words per week. It was the definition of mindless, rote memorization, as boring for the students to learn as it was for us to teach, but the measure of success for teachers and educators alike was the number of words a student could memorize. In a stunning coup, we the teachers convinced the parents and administrators of the advanced class sections to let us have the students read and discuss novels in groups and memorize some of the vocabulary words in context. Watching the students come alive throughout the novel discussions was among the most rewarding professional experiences I’ve ever had.
I still remember one female student who stayed after class three-quarters of the way through our reading of The Great Gatsby. She was silly and fond of anime and K-Pop but didn’t speak up on class material often. That day she broke down sobbing at her desk, “Why does Gatsby love Daisy so much? Why doesn’t she love him back? Why doesn’t he find somebody else?” After five minutes I realized I was out of my depth and had to edge back to the door and call over another teacher. This was not a singular incident. Over the two years we read novels together, our fairly pedestrian in-class conversations would be punctuated regularly with intense revelations where students would share the tectonic effects these novels were having on their internal worlds.
Despite how rewarding teaching was, my life outside the classroom was increasingly a mix of listlessness and personal disasters. So after three years, I returned home to Houston, Texas to go back to graduate school. My first job after graduating was supposed to be a temporary gig writing grants and doing odds-and-ends support for a professor from the program I graduated from. We were on a small, independent team at a large state university. Working alone with a fifty-minute commute, I didn’t often get to know other people at the school.
There was one guy who always gave very enthusiastic “hi!”s in the hallways. One night over shawarma and hummus down the street from our house, my girlfriend and I saw the enthusiastic greeter walking down the street. He was too far away to say hello so I decided to visit him in his office next week since I didn’t realize anyone else lived that far from campus. I was stunned at the number of fiction books in his office. As we started to talk, I realized that this guy reads. Not like, picking up Atomic Habits and referencing a book he loved in high school–this guy was a world traveler, laying out a whole new topography of literature for me as he talked about Indonesian crime novels and Russian love stories and Chinese satires.
He invited me to join a book club that specializes in books over 300 pages and meets once a quarter. In the almost two years since I joined, I have got to read a bunch of books but it’s been a struggle because I’ve been so busy. I end up listening to a bunch on audiobooks or getting summaries of the last third or quarter of the book before the discussion. For the most recent book, I couldn’t actually make the meeting, and that might have been the best thing that could have happened to me because I decided to read it on my own, and it made me remember.
The book was A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (the one I was reading at 2:40 am at the beginning of this essay). It made me remember that I love reading long novels. It made me remember that there is a singular quality to good fiction that makes it stand out as different from–and in my opinion better than–any other kind of writing (or entertainment for that matter). It made me feel like I was someone else, somewhere else, living another life, just as real as the one that I have during the day.
When I was seventeen years old, I went to Panama for six weeks as part of a program called Amigos de las Americas. I did it because my older cousin did it and it seemed cool. It was like a junior Peace Corps. Once a month I went to this nice building in a shady area of town with a bunch of other teenagers where we were trained on how to conduct “community-based initiatives” in foreign countries. We would be sent to Latin America to live in host families and leverage our free time and a small amount of resources to find out what kind of project the community needed then raise the resources for it, organize it, and execute it.
“Culture shock” isn’t quite a big enough word to describe what arriving in Panama was like at seventeen years old. I was a good kid but also a pretty spoiled troublemaker. It took a few days to adjust, but then it was suddenly like I had a new life. I was living in a one hundred and fifty square foot concrete and corrugated tin hut with another nineteen-year-old volunteer from Seattle, my host parents Maria-Luisa and Fernando, and their daughter Carolina.
The town we were in was very secluded, about forty-five minutes down a muddy, mountainous, pothole-filled road that even a souped-up Toyota purpose-built for that kind of road took a few hours going very slowly to get to. It took a couple of hours to get to everyone in the community walking from one end to the other. Everywhere we went we had a squad of young boys who followed us, talking to us and helping us out. They rode bikes and wore flip flops and jean shorts with a machete tucked in their back belt loops and no shirt.
We ate rice and beans every day, most days with cilantro our host mom plucked from a plant next to the house. Our host Dad was very quiet, affable, and dependable. He had a soft laugh but was very proper and hard-working and the oldest of the men in the cluster of homes we were in. One of our host uncles next door was young, loud, and very brash. He was very funny and loved to drink homemade fermented corn liquor called chicha fuerte (I think), and do something called Saloma, which was basically their own special kind of yodeling.
The next house over had Marcial (pronounced Mar-see-all) and his family. He was short and strong and had kind eyes. Everyone was poor, but Marcial was so smart and so capable that even now twenty years later remembering him provokes a complex range of feelings in me. I am glad that the people there had him, and I remember him fondly. But it also makes me kind of angry and resentful at the way the world is structured, and the way benefits accrue to the people they do because Marcial with money and opportunity could have done so much for so many people.
This is just a glancing introduction to the place I lived and three of the people there. So many characters are left out. So much plot and texture remains. After eight weeks, we went to a big hotel in the capital, Panama City. The people who were in charge–who I thought were so worldly and mature then but looking back I think the oldest person was thirty years old, and most of the supervisors were between nineteen and twenty-four called us into a big room several times over a few days for training sessions.
There was one training session that burned into my memory more than all the others. The trainers started by saying that this is a training some military veterans receive when they are discharged. The gist of it was this: “when you get home, nobody is going to understand what you’ve been through. Some people will want to listen to your story, but people will ask you what it was like, or what you did, and nobody will be able to grok the totality of what you’ve been through. Nobody will grasp that you just had a whole different life for this period of time you were here. You may struggle to communicate what it was like, and you may even grieve that you are not here anymore. Even well-meaning people who love you the most may have trouble understanding and lose patience with you referring back to what it was like or grieving not being there.”
And they were right. And that feeling–that feeling of, “I had a whole other life there that I am grieving, and you might not understand.” As dramatic as this sounds, that is the only analog that I have found that compares the feeling of finishing a long novel.
When you read a long novel, you are building the world in your mind. You are there. You are changed by it. Although logically you understand that the book is already written, you are creating it in your mind as you read it, you are encountering it–it is as real to you as a world that you are moving into and becoming a part of.
What’s ironic about my time in Panama is that Panama is not the only world that I left behind. Before I traveled there, my Dad slipped 7 or 8 books into my suitcase he thought I might like. Among them was a novel called Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. I still remember sitting in the hammock on the edge of the concrete box I lived in, looking off the gently sloping mountain of the Panamanian countryside, the lush Caribbean jungle for miles, but mentally being with Peter Lake in the fictionalized Bayonne Marsh south of early 20th century New York City. A week later, when I finished it, it was my favorite book.
Both Panama and the Bayonne Marsh are worlds I go back to in my mind sometimes, worlds that I inhabited that changed me. Marcial and Peter Lake are both people I refer back to. Certainly, my relationship with Panama is stronger, but it’s a matter of degree, not of difference.
I remembered this when reading A Fine Balance. I was short of breath as I raced to finish the book because I was so anxious and excited. I wanted to wake up my wife and tell her about Beggarmaster, a character who was so complex and complicated that I couldn’t decide what to think of him. He took people who had nowhere to go in life and grossly disfigured them, but then gave them jobs on the street to beg, but then he took care of them and ruthlessly enforced their safety, beating anyone who threatened them, enriching himself in the process. Such a weird, patriarchal, generous, cartoonishly evil man who nonetheless did right by people in his own weird way and lived by a rigorous internal code.
Then when terrible misfortune befell all of the characters in the book over and over, I felt compelled to tell people in my real life. I wanted to grieve and explain to people why I was distracted at work. These people who had become my friends, for whom I had developed compassion and begun rooting–bad things were happening to them. This is why I was moving a little slower. When people asked what was going on in my life, it somehow felt more real to tell them that Om and Ishvar might actually have finally found a place to live than that I was answering emails and grading papers this week for the three hundredth week in a row.
And that’s the trouble with reviewing fiction. Diving in and reading a good work of fiction is like traveling somewhere else: you’re living another life in miniature. It comes complete with new people, places, action, drama, hopes, fears, and dreams. Giving yourself over to it can be pleasant and educational but will also change you in ways that you cannot expect. The most enriching, perspective-changing events in my life have all been singular one-off experiences. But as for things I can do regularly to cultivate texture in my worldview in ways I didn’t know was possible, nothing even comes close to reading fiction and traveling.
Castles in the Sky on Substack is about using introspection and idiosyncrasy to break through intellectual loneliness and existential boredom. Each week there is a new essay, story, or book review that blends storytelling and eclectic ideas to give you a new way to look at something. If someone forwarded you this, find the full blog here.
Bulletin Board
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Sorry for the delay in December!
Please be on the lookout, the schedule might be a bit irregular coming up in the next month or so to make up for lost time.
Crowd Work
Which novel felt the most like you had a whole other life?
Crowd Work: Which novel felt the most like you had a whole other life?
In this essay, I talk about A Fine Balance and Winter's Tale, but the novel I go back to the most in my daydreams is actually probably a children's book called Twenty-One Balloons that I read at the end of middle school and it really capture my imagination. It was about a guy who was supposed to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon and found a secrete island where these people had secretly been living with this huge diamond mine in this secret society. It was funny and whimsical and fantastical and ridiculous. Other than that, I feel like when I finished 100 Years of Solitude I had to sit in silence for like an hour just to let it wash over me. It felt like I had to say goodbye to a friend.
Shantaram is perhaps one of the most immersive recent novels I have read. This amazing description of your main character gives me a good sense of the complexity and magnetism of your recent read. "Such a weird, patriarchal, generous, cartoonishly evil man who nonetheless did right by people in his own weird way and lived by a rigorous internal code." And the stories about the kids in China stumbling into the grip of written narratives, and especially your win of getting permission to engage them in conversation about novels, is all incredible to hear. A complete testimony to the influence of both travel and story.