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* Warning: this entry rambles (a great distance).
It's a delight to look through social media and see how many people I know from school are traveling this summer. Then how do I explain the annoyance that's ready to hurl clouds into my vision when I see photos of them posing, in perfect outfits, in front of ruins, palaces, and oceans, in the midst of pristine resorts?
It's the part of me that disdains tourism, never mind that it's supposed to support local entrepreneurs, for exoticizing the consumption of a culture without regard for the past and present struggles of the people who have produced this culture.
It's the part of me that wants to believe myself somehow above this, simply because I've taken classes in cultural studies and anthropology, so that when I do go abroad this July, I won't focus more on associating myself with foreignness online than on engaging with the people who live there.
And yet probably more so, it's the part of me that's annoyed to see all these social media posts about traveling and not have anything to compete (yet). More for myself than anyone else, I'll write it in public: I have spent the past few weeks at home; I will be spending most of the next few weeks... at home. I would argue that the most glamorous thing I've done so far is to go down a slide with my baby nephew (!!). But for once, I'm finally able to rest from the endless social climbing that is being a college student, to remember who I am when I don't feel under the scrutiny of my peers.
Lastly, it's the part of me that is ashamed to admit I'll "only" be abroad for a little over a month this summer, as if a few more months could make me a different person, somehow less of a tourist and more like the people around me. I would have more chances to get to know people, to experience and to do more, but I don't think any amount of months can define a trip abroad, or erase even vestiges of tourism.
And yet, a few years ago, when my sister came back from a quarter in Madrid, she was literally (I thought) the most fashionable person in the airport. It immediately seemed to me that going abroad changed your style, made you more sophisticated.
The day she came back, I left the same airport for an eleven-day tour with my youth orchestra to Eastern Europe. It was absolutely a tourist experience, and we were certainly a sight: a large group of mostly Asian-American high schoolers coursing through the streets, yelling to one another over their phones in English (and then performing Strauss in the evenings).
I didn't expect those eleven days in Europe to change me, and they didn't. Even when I traveled back a couple summers later with the same orchestra, I came back as American as ever, other than perhaps having my eyes wide open still from all the art and landscapes I saw (like the Alps through Salzburg and the Duomo of Florence, pictured here respectively). But this summer, I've wanted to believe, will be different: not only will I be abroad for over a month, but I'll be speaking Spanish, traveling alone, studying, and doing service-learning. With all this, I'll be so much more than a tourist.
But all these combined cannot erase the fact that I'll be totally clueless as to how to get around, a stranger to everyone around me, unused to the blurred sounds of their speech, unused to speaking Spanish so fast and on the spot, and vulnerable to all sorts of scams. Or the fact that I'll want to "experience the culture" in tangible ways and buy things to bring home. Basically, that I'll be a tourist.
As much as I would love to blend in with my surroundings instead of gawking at them, I can't erase the years I've spent immersed in another culture, another language, and how these years have made me into who I am; I can't expect to blend in, no matter how much I read about Argentine society (and not least because of my race), nor to hide my estadounidense accent, nor always to address people correctly with either "Ud." or "vos." People will recognize instantly that I don't understand cultural norms and that I don't belong. But is that such a terrible thing?
I've thought of studying abroad in terms of how it will enrich my understanding of the world, but what will more definitively be enriched is my understanding of what it means not to belong; not to be able to communicate in my native language, and to have to learn all over again what it means to belong to society. It isn't for nothing that I've heard study abroad described as profoundly lonely.
In one of my classes this past spring, the notion arose that traveling alone in a foreign country allows the people around you to become part of the landscape, instead of being deeply enmeshed in your life, so that you can see yourself more clearly. I've resisted this notion, desiring more to lose myself in what I perceive as rich and rooted rather than to exploit it as a mirror or a stage. At the same time, I've cautioned myself against "gawking" and recalled that a tumultuous sociopolitical history will have shaped much of what surrounds me.
And yet I wonder, is it wrong to gawk? In different words, is it wrong to consider a culture beautiful? It's a threadbare discussion, but to risk pulling a few threads: I think that when a culture's beauty becomes something you can wear in isolation from its history, when a "beautiful" culture becomes nothing but a costume for the endless pageant of social capital (both online and around us), then it's wrong, in the sense that it reduces the product of people's experiences — and in a way, the experiences themselves — into nothing but a commodity.
But if experiences of sociopolitical turmoil have led people to produce traditions, art, technology, and languages that move you to wonder, I think that's a different perception of beauty. It may not necessarily embark on research or activism, but, rather than seeking to exploit or to consume, it at least recognizes the gulf between you and what you perceive as beautiful.
An irresistible question to proceed with is this: in a similar sense, is it wrong to consider a person beautiful? Wrong in the sense that it compresses people and their experiences. The stakes seem both greater and lesser than those of considering a culture beautiful: while the beauty of a person hasn't been commodified to the extent that tourism has commodified the beauty of a culture (though it's interesting to argue otherwise), people go around calling one another beautiful all the time.
I would answer this question the same way, by highlighting aspects in our perception of beauty: there's a part of us that seeks to consume, another to understand, another part to build, and one that is content to wonder. If the desire to consume obscures the wonder of who a person is to the extent that they are valued only for their ability to satisfy this desire, then that is wrong.
To me, this manifests in the use of the word "pretty" to express the beauty of a woman. While it's used with well-meaning, it's inadequate to bear the weight that so many of us subconsciously attribute to it.
I let loose my exasperation with "pretty" in a poem I wrote a year ago, which I figured is relevant to this ever-wandering entry and thus will be shared via screenshot:
But as many people embrace the word "beautiful" to describe their culture, it's also true that people genuinely like being called "pretty," untroubled by connotations. Beyond waging war on the word itself, or its application to people, I wrote the poem thinking about how we attempt to compress people, especially women, into their ability to satisfy certain notions of beauty, especially the notion I've come to associate with "pretty."
Since I've already extended this entry beyond the length most of my audience is willing to endure, I'm also interested in the language around beauty. For example, after a performance in April, someone described my spoken word poetry as "lovely." I thanked her, but it bothered me, because I wanted it to be thought-provoking and complex. So when someone else told me that an aspect of the same performance made him anxious, I was much happier.
But regarding the comment that my spoken word was lovely, it makes me wonder what else my poetry meant to her; but in the moment that I was passing by, what she chose to say was "lovely." Perhaps to her, "lovely" doesn't have as light-hearted a connotation as it has to me.
It also makes me think about the difference between perceiving beauty and choosing to place a word on it, like "beautiful," "pretty," or any word that has evolved into the English language to express beauty. I wonder, does our perception of a thing or person change once we place on it? Or does the word itself enlarge to encompass our perception?
And then it makes me wonder how perceptions of beauty are manifest in other languages (I don't know enough about connotations in Spanish to launch into a tangent there), and how they are different.
Yet I could write pages on all that, so instead, to wrap up this entry at long last:
Perhaps I'll lose myself in what is around me, perhaps I'll find a route through Tourism that satisfies my conscience, or perhaps my surroundings will be a mirror, and I'll find myself — in any case, I'll have something interesting to write about.