The Meaning of Travel

The Meaning of Travel

In the eyes of the artsy and literary crowd, “tourism” and “travel” are far more than two words differing by a single character. If Cheer Chen’s widely beloved song among that crowd had been called The Meaning of Tourism, it probably would have had no market beyond serving as a promotional jingle for travel agencies. So I often find myself wondering: what exactly is the difference between tourism and travel, and where, precisely, does the meaning of travel reside?

At their core, both tourism and travel share the same most direct purpose: to see the world. As we grow older, the world we are able to perceive becomes broader and broader, and at the same time we become ever more aware of how small and limited our own place in it really is. And so, within the span of a finite life, we try to know more corners of the unknown world—sometimes out of an innate curiosity, and sometimes simply by chance. Before the Industrial Revolution, the life trajectory of the overwhelming majority of people rarely extended beyond a radius of 50 kilometers. Very few, like Xu Xiake, could brave hardship and travel across most of China, and even fewer, like Tripitaka, crossed national borders. And yet back then, there seemed to be no distinction between tourism and travel.

Cars, trains, and airplanes have made the world smaller and smaller, and people now explore its edges as far as their means allow. Whether one goes to a “big city” like Tieling or to an island in the South Pacific, there is, in essence, no real difference. The only thing that began to change was the rise of travel agencies. What the Industrial Revolution brought us as an achievement also became its greatest side effect: hurried sightseeing and standardized operations gradually stripped “tourism” of its original flavor, turning both people and places into commodities. And what is called a “literary” or “artsy” sensibility is, at bottom, nothing more than an expression of awakened self-awareness—a humanistic awakening in the search for the self.

There may be many purposes for travel, and perhaps most of them have to do with other people: accompanying someone, missing someone, trying to forget someone, and so on. But in the end, our journeys are only ever about finding ourselves again.