My Next Adventure Abroad

Living with Needle Butt is both and blessing and a curse.

It’s mid-morning, late-March and the early spring sun is wavering behind scattered clouds, shifting the light in my living room between shade and sunlight. My hands are shaking. I just typed in my credit card details and, after hovering my mouse arrow over the large bright blue ‘BOOK’ for a few moments, clicked.

$700 CAD poorer, I have a confirmation email for my one-way flight in mid-July from YVR to AMS.

It’s time to go.

My Last Adventure Abroad

5 years ago this month, with $60 in the bank and a nearly $20,000 of student loan debt, I decided that in half a year, I would put everything I owned in storage and hop on a one-way flight to Taiwan.

I was 21 then and had graduated from the University of British Columbia the year before. Despite my elation to finally be done school with lifetime bragging rights about earning a bachelor’s degree at age 20, I nevertheless found myself in the real world at the height of the economic recession.

And that it was a crappy place to be. Everywhere I turned were dead ends and closed doors.

I couldn’t do it anymore; I didn’t spend so many sleepless nights getting that degree to be working 2 dead-end jobs. For years I had dreamt of packing up and setting up shop elsewhere in the world indefinitely.

That time had come.

There’s a word in German that seems to describe this feeling accurately.

All my life, I have dreamt of something greater somewhere out there in the vast universe.

As a child, I imagined that I was part of worlds from my favorite TV shows or storybooks. I’d write myself into them. I’d draw myself into them.

As a teen, I started creating my own worlds: vast, expansive, and intricate lands complete with their own cultures, religions, maps, and stories. I wrote novels set in these distant worlds.

Then, as an adult for the first time with no educational or other obligations, I was ready to go live this otherworldly dream.

After I made that firm decision, I worked hard over a summer to save up money and in September I was gone.

Cue a whirlwind example of “way leading onto way.”

One chance meeting would lead to a chance opportunity. One misplaced step and I would stumble down a rabbit hole.

I was quickly swept up in a storm of events, lights, missed encounters, regrets, and a multitude of diverse people from all over the world that I never would have gotten to meet if I had simply chosen to stay home and tough out the recession.

I got a job as an English teacher and a model in Taipei. Within 3 months I was booked to fly into Kuala Lumpur to represent Taiwan at the Miss Tourism International 2010/2011 pageant. Within 5 months I appeared in a ‘Faces to Watch’ feature spread in ELLE Taiwan.

I then ended up on a city-hop of Asia late winter, Hong Kong in the spring, a month in Macau, shuttling between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, back in Vancouver briefly for the summer, then on a 5-city tour of China with a group of 40 models, fashion designers, and performing artists.

I returned to Vancouver in October 2011 with a plane full of travelers singing “we’re coming home, we’re coming home, tell the world that we’re coming home.”

The day after I landed back in North America, I immediately was on another plane to LA.

When I finally got home, my wanderlust was sufficiently sated.

All I wanted was a regular job and to never have to see an airport again.

 

Life Back Home

Being happy with regular life lasted at most a year.

But at that point I was in no position to up and leave again. I had finally gotten the job I had wanted for years, if I did indeed want an office job: I worked in a swanky glass office in the Central Business District of Vancouver. I was paid a good salary, had vacation days, benefits, etc.

And I had fallen in love.

It was the kind of love that starts out the way your married friends tell you their relationship with their now-spouse starts: within a matter of weeks or months, you wake up one day and realize that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Being the non-committal type that I am, I ran as fast as I could in the other direction but I couldn’t get away.

So I settled down.

I experienced the happiest days of my life right in my hometown and despite the distinctive urge rising day-by-day to hop on a plane and jet (this was two years from that final touchdown in Vancouver), I instead signed a lease on an apartment and moved in with the guy.

But I wasn’t ready for almost-married life and neither was he. Sure we took trips to the far corners of North America but for me, it wasn’t far enough. I was still too close to the comfort that comes with being in a culture one is familiar with. There’s nowhere to get lost; everyone speaks your language. The landscapes still look like home. Comfort became a debilitating stagnation of both of our dreams.

So our paths diverged on a late winter morning.

We moved apart to find our own way and hope that our ways which lead on to ways will one day lead us back to each other.

 

My Next Solo Journey

Seeing that my life back home has once again become an unbearable cage, I, on this day, booked only a one-way flight to Amsterdam to chase whatever other lights, music, and callings wait for me beyond the borders of my homeland.

I don’t know where this trip will take me nor do I particularly care; I just need to go.

The plan so far is:

• Amsterdam – July 13
• Barcelona – July 19
• Brussels – July 22
• Tomorrowland Festival – July 24
• Paris – July 27
• Berlin – July 29
• Prague – August 2
• Budapest – August 9
• Sziget Festival – August 10
• Croatia – August 18
• Venice – August 25
• Ibiza – August 28
• Krynica-Zdrój – November 18 to December 4, representing Taiwan at Miss Supranational 2015

And some tentative plans:

• Bangalore and Goa with the Indian Trance Family for Christmas and New Years
• Southeast Asia in the new year for a Full Moon Party, another visit to Bali, a hunt for DJ opportunities
• Toad trip to California to look for a warmer climate to call home

 

Last Thoughts About the Long Road Ahead

Sometimes I get jealous of the kind of people who are able to live the idyllic life: they meet their future spouses in high school, get married when the time is right, buy a house, grow roots into their hometown, have children, and laugh with their extended families during annual reunions.

There’s a term in Chinese for it: 幸福 (pronounced ‘xing fu’). It means ‘to have good fortune and many blessings of happiness.’

This term is used to refer to love or family (is that interchangeable?). It is used to describe that people who are looking for happiness are ‘seeking 幸福’ or those who have found it have ‘found 幸福’.

I’m looking for 幸福 as well, but the lot of life that I’ve been dealt seems adamant that I take a roundabout way of finding it.

I don’t know how to create roots. All my life, I’ve been a rolling stone, never settling, never stopping, feeling a rising tide of panic every time I have to fill out of a form that asks for an address.

Even if I find a situation where I think I can experience 幸福, something else just past the horizon seems to want to pull me away and I have no choice but to either chase it or become sullen with the roots that I’ve created.

It goes like this: sometimes I ride the late night train from downtown Vancouver out to its surrounding suburbs and sit drowsily in the seat watching the bright glass high-rises slowly disappear into darkness with vague silhouettes of trees and single-family homes.

I’m heading home but I don’t want to.

I inevitably think of the multiple trips I took between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, from the endless noise of Central, through the outskirts of the mega-city, watching streetlights diminish with every mile until only highway lights remain, flashing at regular intervals as the bus speeds by. I’m heading from one home to another, but neither is really home. I don’t want to leave one, don’t want to go to the other, and don’t want to make the trip but I have no choice.

Back in Vancouver on the train, I’m gripped with a sense of nostalgia and sadness, yearning for roots but never able to stretch them far into the ground before some situation, self-induced or otherwise, yanks me up again.

Yet despite all of that, I did create some roots in Vancouver.

I have friends, family, and, perhaps, enough roots to make a home and family of my own one day.

But for now, it’s time to go.