“The Question of Travel”
“Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” These are the thoughts that accompanied me as we embarked on an 18 hour long journey to Singapore. Our flight to Southeast Asia was the latest of several cross-continental trips that have taken us and our precious toddler, in the past four years, to Turkey, Japan, Denmark, Spain, and Malaysia. As our daughter comfortably fell asleep on my lap, I wondered, just like Elizabeth Bishop, about the quandary of traveling.
Traveling with a young child is no easy feat. In addition to the excruciating amount of planning, packing, list making, and some more planning; there is an enormous amount of parental self-doubt and guilt involved. I wonder, if it is our selfish need to travel and experience new cultures that is testing our daughter’s limits? Demanding her to go out of her comfort zone, disrupting her regular routine, and forcing her to embrace the realities of a foreign country. For instance, in Malaysia we couldn’t find fresh milk. The popular Malaysian milk brand HL had stabilizers and preservatives in the milk. Our daughter who is used to having Organic Horizon milk did not have any dairy in our week long sojourn in Malaysia, as if she could taste the additives. I know this is a very privileged first world problem, but as parents we couldn’t help ourselves from experiencing pangs of conscience for not providing our daughter with the comforts we can provide at home. But in retrospect, our excursions have taught our young daughter that she cannot always get what she wants.
What childishness is that while there’s a breath of life
In our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
Inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
Instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
My husband and I are drawn to cities which have embraced multiculturalism and diversity. Be it the academic and historic world of the 8th century Cordoba, where Jewish, Christian and Muslim people lived in religious harmony, or the modern day Singapore. Singapore presents a model of multicultural, multireligious society which is not threatened by fear and ignorance.
“In the United States, we call ourselves a ‘melting pot’ of different races, religions and creeds. In Singapore, it is rojak-different parts united in a harmonious whole.” President Obama compared Singapore's multiculturalism to rojak, a fruit and vegetable salad, which is also an ept colloquial expression to describe the country’s harmonious multiculturalism, considering Singapore’s superior gastronomic offerings. Singapore is a captivating blend of colonial history, and Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures. Nowhere is this cohesive diversity more evident than in the country’s famous hawker centres, or indoor food stalls.
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
Really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
Like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
Bishop’s poem arrives at a simple answer. We travel because it would be a pity not to. “It would have been a pity not to have seen” Singaporeans from all walks of life, eating a wide array of dishes in the country's famous hawker centres, which are like permanent food festivals. In hawker centres culinary influences from all over Asia are quite evident. One can find Malay satays, fish laksa and Hainanese chicken, along with roti canai, Thai basil omelette, pad thai and som tum. Indian biryani, dosa, tandoori chicken, Chinese noodles and pork dishes, and delectable Japanese custard breads.
- Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
Between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages
Our hotel was a walking distance from Lau Pa Sat hawker centre. Even after all these months later, I can still sense the aroma of different cuisines mixed together in the hawker centre. A British structure right in the centre of Singapore’s bustling financial district, a place where colonial history, and cultural diversity come together to play. It is here we witnessed people from different ethnicities gathering under the Victorian Clock Tower to eat from dawn to dusk; a coming together of the past and present. It would have been a pity had we not had witnessed the closing down of an entire street in the financial district, every night, so the locals can enjoy freshly grilled satays of all sorts outside of Lau Pa Sat. They have a community BBQ every night. Hawker centres and communal dining experiences like this ensure that people from different ethnicities and cultures not only work together, but also socialize together. Diversity is celebrated in Singaporean cuisine and its society.
Where else in the world, locals from all walks of life convene to enjoy cuisine from the rojak, harmonious whole, that is the Singaporean society? Here is a country that breaks its bread together, cuisines from different cultures are allowed to intermingle, just like its people. Singapore is the utopian society, which is an alternate reality, in our otherwise politically charged society, straight out of a sordid dystopian future.
‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
About just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have just stayed at home,
whereever that may be?
In her poem “The Question of Travel”, Bishop ponders if it is our childishness, dreaminess, or lack of imagination that prompts us to travel? We travel because we seek a world where people can coexist as one, regardless of their ethnicity and religion. We travel because as humans we are more similar than we are different. We travel to seek the familiar in the foreign. We travel to free ourselves from the daily rigorosity of our lives. To rediscover ourselves as individuals, as husband and wife, and most importantly as parents.
I hope our travel experiences help our daughter in forming a universal identity. I hope she grows up to be not from a city, or a country, but from this world. I hope being exposed to new environments make her more adaptable to the unexpected surprises life has in store for her. I hope being exposed to diversity allows her to have a unique perspective on life, which guides her conscience to find solutions that benefit her entire global community.
So without further adieu, I present to you a recipe that’s inspired by our time in Singapore, Coconut Kulfi. This delicious Coconut Kulfi or popsicle will surely provide a reprieve from the heatwave we have been having in North America. The kulfis are flavored with cardamom and rosewater, making them extremely flavorful.
