Some notes on travel

Posted: 2025-03-30

Tags: personal

The following was occasioned by an incredulous tweet responding to someone's boyfriend ordering orange chicken in Italy.

I went to Italy with my father & sister at 18 or so and we had Chinese for dinner maybe two nights in a row in Milan, at the same restaurant ¹. I seem to remember having fried noodles at least one of the nights. We might’ve ordered the exact same dishes both nights. I thought it might have been important to him to be eating Chinese food somehow even though it wasn’t how we cook at home. If he was homesick, I don’t know what for. Maybe just the language. My mother sometimes chirps him for misused characters. With pinyin keyboard input it’s hard to find occasions to write hanzi. The knowledge slips away, or it withers unused. Last year when my father visited his (our?) hometown he informed a total of maybe 3 or 4 people that he was back; he was determined to avoid drinking with schoolmates or eating banquet foods laden with seed oils, sodium, and MSG. I’d like to go back to Florence one day. There was a room of French academic paintings in the Uffizi, and the quality of the light diffusing over their Virgin Marys and infant Jesuses stunned me.

In Osaka around 2 years ago I dragged my mom to an Indian restaurant because I was craving carbs but also because, although I wouldn’t admit it outright, I got a perverse glee out of the idea of eating Indian food in Japan. ² It was good but not better than what you can find in Surrey, BC. She seemed to enjoy it nonetheless; as far as I can tell my parents don’t eat Indian food very often, although I suppose the guys in the yard at work will sometimes order it for a team lunch. Later during the trip we found ourselves at Ōmi-Takashima station on the JR Kosei line trying to see Shirahige Shrine, where there is a torii gate standing on the surface of Lake Biwa. It’s a lesser-known alternative to the more famous Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima prefecture but it’s also about a 15 minute drive away from the station. I hadn’t thought that far ahead; luckily a traveling couple offered to split a cab with us. They were an Indian man and a Korean woman; the Indian was the one who’d asked the station staff (in Japanese) about the taxi situation. He had recently moved to Osaka and informed us that most “Indian” restaurants in the city were in fact run by Nepalis. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that they were bad restaurants per se, but they weren’t in the right category to be considered good or bad by the standards of Indian food ³. The couple had met travelling in Asia, I don’t remember where exactly. My mother wondered how they communicated if she couldn’t speak English. I was quite certain that they’d in fact spoken to each other in English in the cab with us and at the train station as well. The Korean was just quiet, and her enunciation was unclear. She was pretty enough that I wondered if the lack of solo travel in my life was actually a deprivation whose significance I hadn’t understood up until that point.

The torii on the water wasn’t very photogenic. The paint was dull and the red looked washed out against the summer light refracting off the blue lake and sky. My friends who’d been to Hiroshima had gotten much better pictures of Itsukushima. The road runs almost flush against the lakeshore and there were small rickety-looking motorboats passing in and out of frame the whole time. Shirahige Shrine itself has a staircase leading up into some wooded area. It was very hot and we didn’t feel like exploring the hills of Takashima. I gave up on trying to take a picture without any motorboats in it. I thought about trying to take a photo where a motorboat might be centered in the frame, or perhaps one where the torii would be occluded by an interesting JDM car passing it by. No interesting cars passed. I wondered if it would even be possible to call a cab to get out of there. Punting on the decision, we had lunch at the surprisingly well-reviewed Shirahige Restaurant nearby ⁴. The sunshine was unrelenting. My mother, who studied Japanese as an undergraduate, struck up a conversation with a pensioner couple while waiting for a table. We decided to share a table to simplify the queueing situation. Apparently the restaurant had a bit of buzz online despite mostly catering to truckers. Inside was Shōwa nostalgia. I think I had miso ramen and some oden. They ordered chicken karaage and insisted I try a piece. I explained I was embarrassed to do so, and when my mother translated that to “恥ずかしい”, I thought: “but I knew that.” They took the remaining chicken home for dinner. The couple was nice enough to drive us back down the lakeshore to the Biwako Terrace, a tourist attraction the Korean girl showed us in the taxi. The carpet in the back of the car read Mercedes-AMG. I hadn’t recognized it as a Benz until I saw the logo; so much for my car photography plans. They had a son who’d studied in the US and now lived and worked in the Bay Area, I think. At first, the wife had mistaken us for siblings.

We were killing time: the shuttle driver from the hotel we’d booked had taken our bags at Ogoto-onsen Station in the morning and told us to try and check in later, insisting there was nothing to do in town. It’s hard to describe what exactly the Biwako Terrace is, because you take a ropeway up and then there’s just some instagrammable structures that have been built on top of the summit. You get a very beautiful view of the lake and the surrounding mountains. The juxtaposition with the blue-tiled water features and canvas chairs feels a bit incongrous. I took a piss and while washing my hands I noticed a window in the men’s room looking out onto an expanse of startling green. Thinking back on it now, I wonder what the point of the construction was, is. There’s an area with wooden benches and wooden dummies with cowboy hats sitting on them. You imagine it’s a good place to take a picture with children. There’s a chairlift to a second summit that I recall being unused or inoperative. Something for next time. But there’s nothing wrong with democratizing beauty ⁵, and besides, what’s the good in hardening your heart against the kitsch of a heart-shaped observation deck? I first realized on a trip to Prague as a teenager that I’m afraid of heights. I didn’t have any trouble going up the Petřín Lookout Tower, but on the way down my knees went weak and I had to hug the railing to let others descend ahead of me. On the way down the ropeway the cabin jerked once, sharply, as it passed a cable tower. Everybody laughed. I thought it was funny too, but also wished that it hadn’t happened. At the base there are regular buses that will safely deposit you back onto the JR Kosei line.

The last meal I had in Lisbon with my mother was Korean barbecue, at a restaurant I suspect was Chinese owned and operated in Parque das Nações, the Expo neighbourhood. My dad had suggested it, having walked past it a few times strolling along the Tagus. Because of flight bookings our trips had been slightly out of sync at their beginnings and ends. We ordered a set of Iberian pork, and the price was reasonable. A waiter, younger than me, suggested in Chinese that I use the scissors after noticing me struggle with a slice of pork. I felt a bit embarrassed that somebody younger than me had to dispense kindly advice and in my mother tongue to boot ⁶. I wanted to say, “you can tell me in English,” even though I almost exclusively communicate with my parents in Chinese, especially abroad. I observed him speaking in Chinese and Portuguese with the other waitstaff, who seemed to be an eclectic mix of nationalities. There were older East Asians, a South Asian guy who served us in English, and a white girl who was kind of alternative, like the girls I see in the lines to rock shows in Toronto. I guess I envied what I perceived to be his sense of ease in social situations. Even though he probably had a very similar familial immigration history, I also envied his sense of rootedness, or what I perceived to be his sense of rootedness ⁷. Since I was a teenager, I’ve always felt like I have been waiting for the next stage of life, when I’ll leave everything and everyone behind to move somewhere else and begin my real life. Four or five moves later, that real life still hasn’t begun. In all those places I had a handful of superficial friendships which I haven’t tended very carefully. I recently discovered a project by Xiao Zhong of Pairs from 2023 or 2024 that’s been mostly scrubbed from the internet. One track is about regret and seeing Bon Iver live: “still trying to get on at Golden Plains well you’re almost 38, mate / build a moat around yourself / never lower the gate / for the arrows that will be clucked and slung your way won’t be worth all the pain and no one is gonna stand out for you in the pouring rain”. Never mind the mixed metaphor.

In Suzhou too I sometimes got the sense that I come across as younger than I actually am. I’ve been told I’m different in Chinese than in English, which makes sense. Maybe it would be stranger if that wasn’t the case. One night having dinner at the noodle restaurant in the Pan Pacific by myself, I came right out and told the waitress that I couldn’t read the menu once I scanned the QR code. This was partially a lie. I didn’t really need her help to point at a bowl of noodles in 红汤 and a pan-fried pork chop. It was the rainy season and it started coming down in sheets while I ate. There weren’t any extra umbrellas for me to borrow for the eighty metres back to the main building. The waitress suggested to me, sympathetically, that I would be better off waiting for the rain to stop. This struck me as something she probably wouldn’t have felt the need to tell a normal adult of my age. Strangely I never feel comfortable killing time on my phone in public, although the infernal device has no trouble disposing with hours and hours of my weekend mornings. The patter of rain was interminable. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands and it was awkward lingering at a cleared table, so after an indeterminate period of time I slipped out without saying goodbye and sprinted back to my wing of the hotel. It was dark and I stomped through a two inch-deep puddle, soaking my socks.

The Suzhou Pan Pacific is an alright hotel, but it’s aging. When I went in 2023, rooms could be had for around 100 CAD/night, including the breakfast buffet for two, although it’s dominated by senior tour groups and pushy aunties. We had taken a taxi from the W Hotel ⁸ by Suzhou Centre in the CBD to the Pan Pacific and the driver said he’d much prefer to stay in a hotel with character like the Pan Pacific, although he admitted he preferred to travel differently than most. He said the first place he visited in a new destination was always the same. When I guessed, correctly, that the place was the local library he responded “漂亮!” as if I’d made a brilliant return over the ping pong table. He left his pinky nail untrimmed and spoke excellent 苏州话 even though he was originally from Northern China. The sink in our room was partly clogged. There’s no way to keep the summer humidity out of the rooms, it seems, and wet clothes dry slowly if you try hanging them up. But the hotel does have character, and the structures have a sober rightness about them. The hotel was designed by I. M. Pei and backs out onto the 盘门三景 park, so you can avoid the hassle of navigating the ticketing system. I remember walking around on the walls of Panmen as a kid with my paternal grandparents; somehow it’s only as an adult that I realized that I have never actually been to the Great Wall, which lies something like 1000 kilometres to the north.

Looking back at these cities and places I’ve written about, the excuse that my family has always prioritized travel over other forms of leisure and consumption doesn’t hold water, and I must confess to being a bourgeois even though it’s hard to shake my childhood impression of material deprivation. I suppose that’s partly because my adult life has appeared to me as an unending series of failures and certainly I haven’t made much money so far. I’ve never done anything to deserve any of the good that’s come my way, and I’ve certainly done plenty to deserve the bad. From the outside, there’ve been what look like accomplishments but from my perspective these are the results of scrabbling together the results of failure into something presentable, so that things that would be achievements in other people’s lives ring hollow in mine. I mean that I fail only to discover I don’t have the courage to fail. I’ve had the same years of youth as anybody else does, it’s just that mine are somehow ersatz. Others have found animal warmth in others but I’ve been talking to taxidermy specimens. It makes sense that I can come across as having had an arrested development. I don’t mean to be self-pitying. There are many happy parasites.