The picture above, taken in 2007, shows a typical home several miles outside Hoi An, a town near the coast of central Vietnam. The words below also come from Vietnam, though they were written three years earlier—and also several hundred miles away—during my first visit to the country. At the time I was on the edge of the semi-remote town of Dien Bien Phu, where I had fallen in love with a rickety old bridge near the intersection of two dirt roads. For a second day in a row I had come to sit and watch the bridge—and the stream of life that crossed it on bicycles, on motorbike, and on foot—from the table of a humble café. I was two and a half months into a fourteen-month overland journey from Beijing to Istanbul:
I was beginning to see how much “home” would be a theme in the journey still ahead of me. I had come to Asia with the theory that one should invest more time in building bridges than walls, and that’s what I planned to write about. But with each passing month—that is, with more time spent in watching ordinary life and realizing how extraordinary this thing we call ordinary really is—I began to think a lot about home as well. The idea of it as primarily a physical structure or as a place within national borders began to thoroughly dissolve. In its place was emerging the idea of home as a gift—something too large to be constrained by borders, too spiritual to be only physical, and too untamed for one to claim to own as he might a piece of property. Home was this bridge at Dien Bien Phu, the moon that shone above it at night, the dust kicked up by motorbikes while I drank Coca Cola. None of this was ownable; it was all something that had to be received, just as one holds outstretched hands to receive a gift on Christmas.
For the articulate thoughts of another traveler on home (she goes by the name "Sol"), click HERE.
