Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Exoticism is relative. When in Japan or China, my hair and skin color attract a lot of attention (though in fact I’ve found that the texture of my hair gets commented on more than its color). It’s usually a source of bemusement and, at worst, an annoyance. Combine exoticism with dramatic economic disparities, however, and you get a much more damaging situation.

A particularly egregious example can be seen in this BBC article about Burmese refugees in Thailand. Kayan women, whose necks come to appear stretched after years of wearing traditional gold rings around them, are not being allowed to leave the country, in spite of definite resettlement offers. The likely reason for this is their status as an attraction for (wealthy) foreign tourists.

This is also an example of why it’s important to keep well-informed as a traveler. Tourism can be a real boon to local people but, sometimes, the desire to attract travelers seeking the exotic can make the relatively powerful keep others in undesirable conditions.

Naomi Klein’s article about the currents (literal and metaphorical) that led to the death of a Polish immigrant in Vancouver International Airport reminded me of the ELL students I used to teach in New York.  Many of them had come from Poland.  A large percentage of these Polish students were around my age and had advanced degrees: some in law, others in engineering– fields in which you wouldn’t expect job-hunting to be especially difficult.  But all of them had come to the US because of the difficulties they faced in finding a job that payed a living wage.  Some were planning on staying and were working on getting their green cards so they could get an American university degree without having to pay the outlandish tuition that international students are charged (since many employers would not accept their degrees from Poland); others just wanted to improve their English abilities because they believed it would be a major advantage in the job market back home.

All of them found themselves facing immense difficulties in the US, though none of them faced anything so dire as what happened to Robert Dziekanski.  They found themselves working long hours at low-wage jobs (sometimes illegally).  One student, a woman who gave an impression of eloquence despite occasional misunderstandings of English structures and vocabulary, told a story of sleeping for weeks on a jacket on the floor in the apartment she shared with several other recent immigrants.  The situation only improved when she found a mattress on the curb and carried it up six flights of stairs.

As Naomi Klein’s article suggests, my students were relatively successful in a system created by the kind of globalization that is guided by the needs of corporations.  Isn’t it about time that we started to demand and create a globalization driven by human needs?

At least, I’m back in my apartment in a life that seems designed to highlight the polysemy of the word home. China is the second place I’ve lived where I’ve been visibly foreign, and it’s strange to call a place like that home (which gives me a hint– though only a hint– of the difficulties faced by those, such as Asian Americans, who are often thought to be foreign in the country of their birth; I myself have occasionally been told that my last name “doesn’t sound American”, but that’s mild compared to being labeled foreign on sight). Nonetheless, I often find myself missing Japan as if it were home. I make comparisons to it wherever I go. In Ireland, I immediately connected the tradition of having an annual mass for the graveyard, before which families clean up their relatives’ graves, with Obon. In New York, I complained about the subway system being more confusing than Tokyo’s, and I’m not even going to get into the differences in politeness and orderliness. So maybe Japan is my second home.

What, then, is the first? Seattle? I miss the place, the vibrant greens and grays, words like salal and geoduck, but I haven’t lived there as an adult. Yet none of the other US cities I’ve lived in have felt like home. In San Francisco, I was still having trouble with the sky being blue.

And what about places I’ve never lived?  On this trip, I made it up to Donegal where my mother’s side of the family is supposed to have come from. In Dublin museums and galleries, photographs of famous Irish Americans used the term “ancestral home”. Certainly, I don’t have the claim to the place that people who live there do, but there is a connection, even if it is one merely constructed of family stories. Stories may only matter in one’s mind, but that’s the only place where anything can be deemed to matter anyway.

The trouble is that we’ve given this one term, home, so many different meanings and then expect one place to fulfill them, as if every sign should have just one object. This is, of course, highly unlikely in our highly mobile age. Or is it? There is one place that meets all these requirements: the Earth. That may sound cliché, but it’s also the truth. I’m a child of a global age, and so are you. Corporate globalization seeks to make that meaningless, to level out the cultural differences that make living in an international society so fascinating, while increasing the economic divisions that prevent some people from fully participating in the global society. In other words, it is, in fact, an enemy of real globalization– the human sort.

More on my trip will follow when I get the USB cord I need to upload my photos. That will be either when the airline finds my suitcase and sends it my way or when I make it into Zhengzhou proper.