Travels in the Land of Hunger

Preface 2019

Thursday, September 12, 2019

While working on this memoir, some have asked me how and why I came up with the idea of turning my travel blog into a book instead of focusing on writing my next fiction novel. The idea came when I saw and flipped through the pages of Salam Pax: The Baghdad Blog in a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden, near the end of my backpacking journey, as detailed in this travelogue. Salam Abdulmunem's book was a published version of his Iraqi web diary that provided personal accounts of life under the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I realized that through the daily discipline of blogging about my journey, I had more than enough content for a travel memoir, but that I needed to heavily research and cite supporting sources to confirm the accuracy of my narrative. Thus, this is not a book where I transplanted my blog in raw form onto paper. Instead, it is a book I researched over several years (thirty-four pages of cited sources–see the Notes section starting on page 435), edited and modified while maintaining the format of the original blog.

In addition, as a longtime admirer of Canadian drummer Neil Peart, who wrote The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa–which I had read in the year after graduating from university and in the months before leaving for Tokyo, Japan–I liked the idea of contributing (if even in the slightest way) to the genre of travel literature; a genre that stretches back to the first century of the Common Era.

This book captures what it was like for me (at times in meticulous detail) on a day-to-day basis to travel in South Korea, along the Banana Pancake Trail (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), Hong Kong, Macau, China, and the Russian Federation. I describe the people I encounter and the ups and downs of low-budget travel while offering insights into the diverse cultures, customs, history, and socio-economic challenges these nations face in an increasingly globalized world. As a fiction writer, there were moments of inspiration during the journey that led to fictionalized accounts and stories in the book: one steampunk and the other a science fiction dystopian novella, along with interspersed stories of meeting an enchanting woman from Barcelona in Cambodia who would later become my wife with whom I have two highly creative young boys.

One running theme in the book that I spent much time reading about during the journey and researching in the post-travel writing process was the history, expansion, and exploitative and corrupting nature of the sex trafficking and sex tourism industries in Southeast Asia. It was horrifying to see and sad to discover the role U.S. foreign policy played during and after the Vietnam War in developing the industrial and international scale of these desecrating illicit markets, which continue to violate to the highest degree human rights. Today, most, if not all, developed Western nations not only exploit the natural and labor resources of poorer countries but also sustain these shadow sex industries that entrap, abuse, and oppress girls and young women. I hope this book sheds light on these dark markets so that you, the reader, know and can help fight the good fight to end them.