I was at a very tender age. So tender that I could not fight with my brothers who favored Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films. Every Saturday at 9:30pm when Rambo made his presence in TVB Pearl, my joy in the NHK documentary of The Silk Road would be abruptly severed.
No mercy.
I sulked and whined about how unfair it was. How many drops of blood did Stallone have to shed before his films would ever end? There’s always another drop. Week after week.
We had one TV set. There were no set rules on who got to choose what amid eight of us. Being the youngest, I had little authority of course. Plus my choice of (to my siblings, the very boring) Silk Road won little support, if any.
I cannot explain why I loved that documentary as a six-year-old. The moment when Kitaro’s theme music wafted out of amplifiers, a magic spell was casted upon my little brain. I was never a TV fan indeed. Yet scenes of deserts, camels, grottos, people who live life so differently kept tugging at my heart.
If traveling means more than just boarding a flight to go somewhere, my traveling started at six. In front of the TV. In a documentary film. Despite being constantly interrupted.
The fascination of seeing, savoring, smelling, sensing something different from my life encoded in my genes has grown throughout years.
As a young child, I would often lie on a bench in the public park in my neighborhood daydreaming. Everytime when I saw a flight inch across the sky, I asked myself, ”Would I ever be in it?”
We six children ate like locusts and depleted the meagre household income at no time. The thought of dining at a restaurant or going anywhere even in HK as a family was unheard of, let alone traveling. The only trip I have ever had as a little child was going to my parents’ hometown, a fishing village called Little Bridge Head, by the South China Sea . It was in the days when shabby clothes worn by me (after my sisters had worn them for even more years) would be tied to a bundle and presented as a gift to the mainland relatives. Old days. There was little thought of traveling. Rather, it was a scavenger hunt — mustering all we could afford or could not afford to visit relatives whom I had never known existed.
Nothing really deterred me from traveling in my mind though. I have done endless trips through reading. My first memory of a book wasn’t any children stories, but a book about Nepal, which I picked from my siblings’ bookshelf. Afterwards I spent years traveling Japan reading Japanese writers. After Japan, it was Russia through Tolstoy’s’ works and the Sahara through a Taiwanese writer. A bit older, magical realism took me to South America, thanks to all the Latino writers.
At 17, I finally boarded my first flight. The journey is continuing.
This winter, I will visit Nepal. A good 26 or 27 years after I read the first book about Nepal. Perhaps I can ride a camel and camp in the desert in Rajasthan to fulfill the six-year-old’s dream of being on a camel. In a week, I am to visit my parents’ hometown where my mainland relatives now enjoy some prosperity that makes even our chins drop.
The globe never stays static. That’s the charm of traveling.
I am grateful for The Silk Road — a little thread that has linked my little soul to the big big world long before I knew anything about the intricacy of this planet I live in.
