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THE MOBILE AGE, PART 2: Globalism
Here we see that within the hybrid nomad/settler experience, where elements of home and away are continually blended, there are in fact distinct variant experiences possible. Four potential combinations of cultural variance (high or low) and physical mobility (high or low). High cultural variance with high mobility. High cultural variance with low mobility. Low cultural variance with low mobility. And low cultural variance with high mobility. Four blends, in other words, of the cultural sense of being home or away and the physical reality of whether you are or not. You probably won’t have to look very far to illustrate these variants. My own life tends to deal them up in steady rotation. A travel experience – walking the barley fields of Ireland’s Wicklow hills recently, for example – delivers up a genuine sense of having journeyed far away from home, away from the culturally familiar. But these experiences are followed within days by the sense of being almost entirely at home, in this case having travelled just 30 minutes north to the city of Dublin. Returning home to the West Coast, meanwhile, my sense of home and away immediately wheel around to the inverse side of this equation. As is my normal pattern, I’m at first overwhelmed with the sense of home, capable suddenly of rhapsodic lyricism on the topic of cherry trees, salty sea breezes, the smell of fir and pine. All of which transitions within a couple of days back to my head being in far away places, planning for that future trip to Shanghai. We yo-yo back and forth from home, our feelings about where we are yo-yo-ing some half-cycle lag behind us. That’s the pattern of contemporary life, the experience of being who we are now. But the way this idea is brought home to me more frequently is in observing how in each different place, you may now encounter all four of these same experiences simultaneously. I can illustrate this with another trip I took recently, which in keeping with the notion here, took me very far away while not travelling very far away at all. I found myself out in Richmond on the Number Three Road the other day. This part of Vancouver, known as the Golden Village, is rarely recommended in the guidebooks but should be. Vancouver’s new Chinatown, outstripping by many orders of magnitude the size and commercial zeal of the old one. Although Chinatown is actually not quite the right word for it. The area is more like an Asiatown, a trading pit of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Filipino retail activity. A district of people who have carried their sense of home to this new place, which would have been very “away” to them when they arrived, and which has since been refashioned into a new “home.” All the while the air is full of new arrivals, the sky glinting aluminum as the underbellies of 777s and Airbuses streak overhead, inbound for YVR. Here, as my father would have done before me, I was soon seeking out my culinary souvenirs. Dumplings, I fixed upon mentally. And dumplings I did find. Shanghainese, Singaporean. Dim sum, duk pukki, wonton, gyoza. I brought home a Pan-Asian parliament of dumplings that were then boiled and steamed and microwaved according to the instructions on the back of each package. And then we sat down to feed, my boy and I. Happy nomads in the heart of our own household. Home at home. Away at home. Either way, tucked in at the dining-room table. Chive shrimp (Chinese) I believed to be the winner. I chopsticked one of these into a mixture of soy and rice vinegar, green onion and sesame oil, then held it across the table for my son to eat. “Well?” I said. “Tell me. What do you think of that?” But he didn’t answer. He was back to eating his own dumplings. He was eating Shanghainese pork dumplings as if he had been born to do so. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
