GAYLE FORMAN
This travel narrative is full all the things I love most about travel narratives: The search for one's self among strangers in foreign places, amusing stories of never ending difficulties from point A to B to Z, and well presented research of historical or important facts about such places, albeit in an entertaining or practical form. Forman of course managed to please all these desires of mine and raised the bar. The places she travelled to were obscure or uncommon to say the least but most importantly she skipped the tourist attractions and hunted down the heart of the locals- or rather, the hearts of the weirdest of the locals! As an outcast in her early years, Forman sought out the stories of outcasts around the world and found echos of repeated themes. Even in the furthest corners of the world, globalization was bringing everyone, everywhere on the same page--for better or worse it seemed. These quotes I picked out do not even come close to summing up Forman's conclusions from her year abroad but spoke to me as I was traveling with her.
"Cambodia, indeed the world, is full of children as bright as diamonds whose sheen is dulled by the poverty and drudgery of daily life (104)."
"The antidote to cultural discombobulation is never retreat; it is immersion (116)."
"If I had learned anything this year ti was that contradictions are complementary, that a truth and its opposite exist in harmony. It's how the shrinking world was destroying cultures just as it was creating new ones (320)."
"Life, it turns out, is as big as you're willing to make it (323)."
This passage I found interesting and I am back and forth on whether I agree or disagree with her myself though her argument does raise some important facts I felt should be shared.
"I have to admit that I am a fence-sitter when it comes to this larger issue. I have read Noreena Hertz's The Silent Takeover, the bible of the antiglobalists, and I agree with her thesis that multinational corporations have come to exert too much power over governments, and even possibly that 'the pendulum of capitalism might have swung just a bit too far; that our love affair with free markets may have obscured some harsher truths; that too many are losing out.' I have met with disenfranchised anarcho/enviro activists who share a profound belief that big business will pillage the earth and its peoples if there is a profit to be made. I have seen firsthand how our Western culture is becoming terminally consumerist as people attempt to buy their way into happiness only to dig themselves deeper into debt- the average American family carries nearly $9,000 worth of credit-card debt--and spiritual emptiness. I don't want that ethos exported. I don't want to see countries wind up like Thailand, where I had the impression that the nation had been swallowed by the West and regurgitated to the specifications of package tourists, an endless strip of monoculture: hotels, Internet cafes, clothing stores. I have also seen evidence of globalization's missteps-countries plunged into poverty while trying to conform to IMF and World Bank austerity measures. ....At the same time the disparity between rich and poor in Latin America (and almost everywhere else) has grown larger than ever before. Not exactly ringing endorsements for globalization.
"Yet I do believe that globalization is like democracy; the best system in theory, even if it's exceedingly tricky to put into good practice." --(124-5)
