This is an unlikely meeting inside the parsonage of the Hungarian church where I spent my childhood. Across from me sits Kawkhu, Mushi to my left, and Pastor Mary to my right.
Unfamiliar smells fill this familiar place as notes of the homemade dinner consisting of South East Asian cuisine hang in the air.
Those who have not traveled far or for a lengthy amount of time view my travels with an awed fascination. Those younger say they hope to travel someday. Those older say, somberly, “do it while you’re young” as though they have let their own opportunity float into the abyss.
I half-smile and think of my younger-self with that desire of traveling. Young, inexperienced, and full of that dangerous combination of fervent longing and naivety. Expectations and daydreams occupied my mind so steadily that I fostered this desperate sense of needing to leave in order to feel fulfilled. I feared arriving at my death without seeing this world.
Now as someone who has traveled great distances for varying reasons, I hold the secret of travel: when done properly it serves a purpose greater than photo opportunities and exotic stories to fill conversational lulls. In truth, travel cannot be measured by the number of miles traversed or the amount of stamps on a passport. Travel can only be measured by the richness of the experience. The most valuable travel - perhaps the only valuable travel - is the travel that facilitates understanding and forces one to obtain a difference perspective.
I no longer fear missing out on this world. Rather, I see the foolishness and restriction in the belief that one must physically fly across the country or the globe in order to experience the vastness and diversity of this planet.
In so deeply fearing leaving this world unexplored, I ignored all the possible travel within in my own reach.
The circumstances I find myself in at this moment are both casual and reveltory; before I dive into this devine looking spread, I realize that travel is happening in this very moment. Travel is happening in my second most familiar place in the world - second only to my house which is precisely one left turn and 15 minutes down the road.
Kawkhu and Mushi are Internally Displaced Karens who left a refugee camp in Thailand along the Thai/Burma border in order to attend a doctorate program in the US. Mary - my pastor and their classmate - acts as our common denominator having arranged this assemblage of cultures. Their pasts seem implausible to me; the imagines they describe dawdle inside my mind blurred and foreign. Despite the fuzziness with which we view each other’s histories, this dinner connects us.
We eat Tom Yum Soup accompanied by Thai salad and loose leaf tea. Rice is to Asia as bread is to America. When Kawkhu and Mushi bring the rice to the table they bring their culture. With each spoonful, I add a bit of their history to my plate. As we pass our dishes and scoop our rice, the conversation drifts from one country to another in a seamless flow comprised of comparisons, stories, and questions.
While Mushi and Kawkhu talk about the elephants in their hometown - how wealthy people own them and how violent they become during mating season - I’m not surprised with the absurdity of owning an elephant, but rather at the nonchalant attitude with which this fact is shared.
We talk about fruit and the food they miss. They ask me where to find the best mangos, and sadly I know they’ll never find mangoes as delicious as those grown in their home country.
But there is also American food they love. Like the fresh raspberries we eat for dessert, grown and picked in their very own garden in their American backyard. Bright and sweet, the raspberries serve as a distinct contrast to our soup making them the perfect compliment to our dinner. A balance of flavors like the gathering of the two cultures.
With dinner time as our liaison, the distance between our lives feels less insurmountable.
I leave the parsonage and the sight of my surrounding shock me like leaving a movie theater and being hit with the mid-afternoon sunshine. I spend a minute reorienting myself. For 45 minutes I was sure I had crossed the planet, though I don’t know exactly where I was. For 45 minutes, I wasn’t in the US or Asia. I was just at a dinner table, adrift between countries. No physical ground supporting my feet, just floating on conversation.
While I drive home the weight of the experience rests at the forefront of my mind. I turn off the radio and soak in the magic of the last hour. I wonder, how many chances of travel I missed when ruled by the misconception that the world cannot be explored without a passport.
I arrived at the dinner table with foggy images of Kawkhu and Mushi’s lives. But as our courses progressed, as we shared our plates and drank our tea, understanding slowly replaced those feelings of overwhelmingness and inaccessibility.
Want to dismantle those intimidating and seemingly impenetrable barriers created between two starkly different cultures? First, share a meal.
