When I was the tender age of seven, my parents’ television broke. They decided not to replace it. At the time I felt this was an unjust tragedy, now I know that it was, in fact, quite the opposite. Without nightly television shows to gnaw away my time, I resorted to reading. I found myself drawn into worlds far richer than any television could convey: Narnia, Middle-earth, Earthsea, Redwall, Hogwarts.
Every evening I devoured the pages of a new adventure. Tricking Gollum with Bilbo. Screwing up potions class with Harry. Ringing necromancy bells with Sabriel.
I read about these heroes and heroines and wanted to set out on adventures of my own. I started small—tramping around the woods behind my parents’ house, fighting invisible foe with maple branches. As I grew older, I found one of the best ways to feed my desire for adventure was through travel. By boarding a plane, I could experience worlds completely different from my own.
As a university student I scrounged up all of my money and went abroad at every opportunity. Hiking an old Incan trail into Machu Picchu, farming in New Zealand and staying with Buddhist monks in a South Korean temple were just a few of the adventures I stamped into my passport.
In 2007, I travelled to Cambodia with a program designed to allow students to experience (and therefore better understand) third-world poverty. I spent six weeks with a family in the slums of Phnom Penh; living their life, eating their food, learning their language, attempting to understand the hardships of living on less than three dollars a day.
There I saw a level of poverty I didn’t think possible. Children slept under tarps and scrounged through piles of trash to find a bite to eat. Many of them went shoeless in a slum carpeted with broken bottles and jagged metal edges. I also witnessed a level of love I didn’t think possible. Older children cared for their younger siblings. Neighbours were selfless with their meager resources, sharing food and water for showering. It was humanity as I’d never seen it before. People at their worst, their rawest and their best.
Just as books inspired me to go on adventures, going on adventures inspired me to write books. My experience with the children of the Boding slums stayed with me long after I returned home. It forever altered the way I examined the world and eventually inspired the storyline of one of The Walled City’s characters, Jin Ling—a cross-dressing street girl who sleeps under a tarp, steals for survival and sacrifices everything to search for her lost sister.
There are threads that tie us all together, universal similarities that transcend language and skin color and culture. No matter where you go—in this world, or inside the realms of fiction—you’ll find that all people share some of the deepest experiences: suffering and love, despair and hope. Reading books and travelling to far away places opened my eyes to this reality, and writing helped me make sense of it. It’s my hope that The Walled City will begin this cycle anew.
That somewhere, a reader will shut my book with a hunger in their heart, and start a passport stamp collection of their own.
Stepping outside of your comfort zone and seeing the world is an invaluable experience. One that distinctly shapes who you are as a person. Travel is a commodity best seized when you’re young; unencumbered by mortgages and jobs and children. Where I’m from in the US, we don’t often have the luxury of a gap year, but I know that if I had, I would’ve spent it travelling.
So this is my encouragement to you, dear reader: go out, see the world and have adventures. You won’t regret it.