On the cusp of homelessness, there’s no turning back.
We make several trips to the local travel gear outfitter and try on backpacks half the size of our bodies, weighing them down with beanbags to simulate a full load. Reed, age six, wavers like a drunk through the aisles, knocking down compasses and water bottles. I worry about his ability to carry all he needs for the year, with his low muscle tone and his penchant for surrendering to exhaustion when things get physically challenging. The only pack that fits our four-year-old is school-sized, with just enough room for his clothes, a toothbrush, and a notebook. Maybe a stuffed animal, if we squeeze.
All three kids are determined to bring their prized blankets, emotional lovies since their infancy, which leads to a simple lesson in economy: our bags, like life, have finite capacity. If something comes in, something else must stay behind.
Some items we insist on, several of them surprising: battery-operated electric toothbrushes, expensive quick-drying underwear, an annual VPN account that will let us watch Netflix from anywhere. The kids’ clothing is fairly easy, and we stick to lightweight shorts and T-shirts, a few pairs of underwear and socks, and a thin jacket with the thought that we can buy anything we need as we go (after all, every culture has clothing). I have a hard time narrowing down what I will want to wear for the next nine months, and scour the Internet for capsule wardrobe inspiration; I don’t want to be an Ugly American with ubiquitous running shoes and flip-flops. I want to blend in with my surroundings, which will be hard to do, since blending in on the Sydney beaches looks different from blending in at the marktplatz in Munich.
We will go to my in-laws for a week to say good-bye, then make a stop in Texas to see my parents before leaving the country. This will be our trial run, and I pack both short-and long-sleeved tees, three pants, shorts, a skirt, two cardigans, a jacket, and a fleece pullover. Everyone has two pairs of shoes except for me—I add another pair to my pack, in case I need to dress up sometime between September and June. We all have swimsuits, and the boys’ double as an extra pair of shorts.
Our work is lightweight and portable, and we need little more than laptops, cameras, and a journal. I toss in a pen and wonder how long it’ll be until I lose it. Kyle adds his watercolors and sketchpad. I debate bringing my yoga mat, but it’s superfluous. It gets tossed into the storage unit with the lamps, bicycles, Christmas wrapping paper, the soccer ball, the winter coats. We pack three tubes of toothpaste because they’re on sale.
Schoolwork is a bit trickier. Much of the kids’ education will revolve around what we do and see, most of it planned on the fly, and I don’t want hefty textbooks to detract from firsthand learning. The hand-hewn stones on the Great Wall of China will teach us more about the ancient dynasties than any map in a book. We decide on electronic readers for our two literate children and a simple learning-to-read workbook for the preschooler, mostly to appease him when he wants to do school like his older siblings. Everyone will have a notebook and pen to record travel thoughts, which doubles as both handwriting and grammar practice and a first-edition souvenir. We load the tablet with history audiobooks and apps for math curriculum and toss in a set of Uno cards for entertainment and for practicing number facts. One set of colored pencils, crayons, and markers for the five of us.
We head to my in-laws’ house, and within a week I jettison half the stuff out of my pack.
The French writer Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” It’s easy to assume that Earth is very, very big and we are therefore very, very small, but it isn’t so obvious from the vantage point of our living room as it is from teeming market stalls in Turkish suburbs or stuffed buses in India.
In fourth grade, I made a model of the solar system and noticed the size of Earth compared to the sun. I think of Australia, how its gross domestic product is smaller than New York State, yet how tiny one must surely feel in the miles of open outback.
Our individual bodies take up minute measurements of space, which is a good thing because there are more than seven billion of us. But it’s easy to feel bigger than I am, important within my own thoughts and somehow significant in the grand scheme of things. My life matters, of course, and so do the lives of my other four family members. So, too, do the seven billion other lives currently inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide twenty thousand times a day. We all matter. And yet we are so much more microscopic than our daily tasks lead us to believe. Tiny.
What a tiny place I occupy in the world.
I want to see a thousand tiny places, smell their flowers, and taste the sauces made by their people. I want to feel the difference between the textures of grit in Sri Lanka and Morocco. I want to meet the woman who bakes the best bread in the smallest town in New Zealand. I want to find the best vantage point to see Bosnia from Croatia. What do the Grand Marnier crêpes taste like in Rouen? In Paris? There are untold numbers of tiny places and extraordinary people who occupy them. We will perhaps see a hundred of both.
We roll up our clothes in backpacks, test laundry soap embedded on dissolvable paper, get haircuts for the boys, then feel silly checking in backpacks meant for African jaunts on a plane to my parents’ home in Texas. We eat barbecue and Tex-Mex, we take the Eucharist at church, we say good-bye to the kids’ grandparents, and we head back to the airport.
On a steaming hot evening in early September, we board a west-bound plane, where, in twenty-nine hours, we will next touch earth in China. As we rumble down the runway, as the nose angles upward, as we lift into the air, I already miss the lamplight glow next to our couch. I crave sitting there among my books.
PART II
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.
—Mark Twain
2
CHINA