Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Read Online Free PDF

simple I could drive by myself. I headed off according to his directions and was getting along rather well until I heard a siren behind me and saw a policeman signaling me to pull over. He came up to my window and announced, “You were speeding.” I apologized and mentioned that I’d seen no posted speed limit. White South Africans had a reputation for being condescending to black policemen, but I was respectful and apologetic. The policeman said, “Wait here. I’m getting my supervisor.”
    Ten minutes later, another police car pulled up and the supervisor got out and approached my window. “You were speeding,” he said. I apologized again. “You’re not from here, are you?” he said. “I’ll get my commander.”
    After another ten minutes, a third police vehicle drove up. “You were speeding,” the commander said.
    I apologized for the third time.
    “Why were you speeding?”
    “I didn’t know there was a speed limit; it doesn’t seem to be posted; and I am a white foreigner in a gigantic white Mercedes driving by myself in Soweto, which is inherently nerve-racking.”
    At that, the commander burst out laughing. “Don’t worry about it, man. We’ll escort you out.”
    I left in a motorcade, with two police cars in front of me and one behind.
    Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits. Travel distills you to a decontextualized essence. You never see yourself more clearly than when immersed in an entirely foreign place. In part, that is because people make different assumptions about you: often, expectations relate to your nationality rather than to the nuances of your manner of speech, the cut of your clothing, or the indicators of your politics. Equally, travel disguises you; one can feel oddly camouflaged and anonymous wrapped in the sketchy preconceptions of others. I enjoy being lonely so long as I am lonely by choice; I can enjoy some place far away and difficult so long as I am missed back home. I dislike social constraints, and traveling has helped me to be free of them.
    At the same time, as I learned in the Soviet Union, I was also intensely unsettled by such social anonymity. This anxiety reflects both the difficulty of reading people in other cultures and my illegibility to them. If I cannot figure them out, they probably can’t figure me out, either. When you must learn the unfamiliar rules of a new place, you become suddenly callow again. Travel makes you modest; what is prestigious at home can seem irrelevant or ludicrous abroad. You cannot rely on the veracity of your opinions in a country where standards are different. You often cannot understand why something is funny there; you sometimes cannot understand why something is somber. You question your own standards of humor, solemnity, even morality. Familiar landscapes cushion you from self-knowledge because the border between who you are and where you are is porous. But in a strange place, you become more fully evident: who you truly are is what persists at home and abroad.
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    Cultural dissonance often provides linguistic hilarity. At a hotel in the Norwegian fjordland, I found a menu that announced, “Breakfast is available daily from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. Lunch is available daily from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m. Dinner is available daily from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. Midnight snacks are available until 10:00 p.m.” One has to admire that thrifty spirit. I was very taken with the room service menu in French West Africa that offered for appetizers either “Rolled crepes with smoked salmon and egg of lump” or “Small bags of eggplant tomato-mozzarella”; for main course, the “Gratin of Molds, breadcrumbs with parmesan” or the “Roasted Captain, Olive Oil Sauce” or the vegetarian option, “Indian Jumps of Lentils.” For something sweet to end the meal, the only thing to be considered was the “Dessert Opera on custard.” In Xi’an, we were introduced to a pianist who explained over lunch