Keep Wandering/Wondering

[Note: This is an address that I delivered at the graduation ceremony for East Asian studies majors at The University of Pittsburgh on April 27, 2019.]

Dear new graduates, parents, families,

Dear colleagues,

It is an honor and a joy to find myself back on the University of Pittsburgh campus, almost 19 years after I first landed here from my home country of Romania, and exactly 17 years after my own graduation from the Inter-Disciplinary Master of Arts in Asian Studies. It is with mixed feelings that I walked on campus yesterday and recognized some of the old buildings I spent so many hours in, either deep in study or focused on a lecture. Posvar Hall, the Cathedral of Learning, Hillman Library, all there, a bit older, a bit different. Though I don’t know if it is because the buildings themselves have somehow changed, or in the last 20 years, I perhaps have. I was a diligent student, so I do not know where the fun buildings were, the bars, the hangout places… And no, I couldn’t find that noodle joint down on Forbes Avenue, I believe, where I had the largest bowl of ramen I had ever seen in my life the very evening I arrived on campus. I couldn’t finish it. I took half of it back to my dorm room and ate it at 2:45 in the morning when I woke up, jetlagged and confused.

Address at the East Asian studies majors graduation ceremony at The University of Pittsburgh

The buildings are there, but so many of the people are no longer here. I arrived in Pittsburgh carrying two suitcases—one of them almost entirely full of books for a Romanian professor here on campus—and, following cliché, a hundred dollars in my pocket, borrowed by my parents from an acquaintance who owned a clothing store in my hometown. The acquaintance had also given me five polo shirts as a gift, a sort of a donation for my new life in America. With so little to my name, I would have never been able to make ends meet without the financial support of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation Fellowship and, more importantly, without the extraordinary people I encountered here, at Pitt, and who took me under their wings. I remember arriving at the airport and being met with open arms by Dianne Dakis, then the administrative coordinator of the IDMA program. Dianne became my constant support, my pillar, my family for the first year on campus. She drove me around to get a mattress, she invited me to her house for a gathering of university colleagues, she introduced me to people and to American life. Without those initial days under Dianne’s guidance, it would have been immeasurably more difficult to adjust to being away from my home, country, family, and even language. And then, there were so many others: Tom Rimer, my wonderful thesis advisor and advocate who shocked and honored me with his willingness to learn from me, and everyone else, despite his reputation as a monument of Japanese studies, and who gave me my first research job; Keiko McDonald whose unbelievably contagious laughter must still be lingering in the corners of the EALL offices; Dick Smethurst, whose deep understanding of history made me think through major issues, David Mills, and his patient explanations of classical Japanese, Paula Locante, who first told me about the Italians and the Eastern Europeans of Pittsburgh; Hiroshi Nara, who seemed so scary when he addressed me in Japanese, Susan Andrade, Fred Clothey—a student of the famous fellow Romanian, Mircea Eliade—Irina Livezeanu, and others, fellow students, faculty members, and staff. I often think of them, I wonder how they are, I wish I could talk with them. The buildings are still there, filled with the ghosts of these memories. Those people have vanished, some into shadows, some away from this place, and some simply into different people transformed by the sheer passing of time, much as we all do. I almost hesitated to go to the Center for Asian Studies offices yesterday. Without the people I once knew, will it feel as foreign as it did the first day I arrived on campus?

*****

Humans are explorers. Wanderers. Curiosity is a hallmark of our species, a playfulness that manifests in solving problems, creating games, discovery, innovation, wonder, and stories to explain it all. Our wanders began, so we surmise from the archaeological record, as an intellectual endeavor, in search of new things, new solutions, new territories, and all these quests animated by the desire to decipher, analyze, and for better or worse, to own them. Along the way, we discovered the power of intersections between what we were bringing with and what we were finding in the new places, and it is at those intersections that our efforts have been most fruitful…

*****

There is a picture of me at age 10 on my first trip abroad. It’s a black-and-white photograph, the only kind available in my country at that time, and it shows a boy with a strange buzz haircut, half turned toward the camera, with a huge smile spread across his face. The boy is holding onto a horizontal bar in front of a train window. You can’t see much outside, but it’s clear that the train is moving. I was going to Bulgaria. Going to a different country was no small feat in 1980s Romania. Traveling abroad was largely forbidden, and ordinary citizens were not allowed to have passports. The borders were closed. For that trip, we had been granted special permission, and we had all been registered on a group passport. And this was only because we were going across the Danube River to the neighboring Bulgaria, an ally country, part of the defunct Warsaw military pact of Soviet-influence countries, and that was not considered dangerous by the authoritarian regime of Romania.

I loved traveling, even as it was limited for me during my childhood. And because my parents did not have a car, I traveled mostly by train. I let myself be fascinated by the landscape running in front of my eyes and spent hours staring out the window. There was no better, more entertaining spectacle than that. Going away, descending into different train stations, visiting family in Transylvania, going to the beach by the Black Sea, or to mountain resorts in the Carpathians, where the crisp air filled my lungs the moment I disembarked from the train, it was all an adventure. But going abroad, that was a completely different story. Leaving the country, largely an abstraction, of course, when one is only 10 and doesn’t quite understand borders and otherness, was fascinating and a little scary. I had grown up surrounded by different languages, with Hungarian spoken on my father’s side, and Russian on my mother’s. But those were my family and their three languages, not foreign places. The only foreignness I knew was the tiny store—called “Shop”, in English—in the lobby of the largest hotel in my town, where you could only buy merchandise with foreign currency. Of course, my family had none, and if they did, they would have been arrested. Through the store windows, you could see shiny boxes of candy, and exotic bottles of colored drinks, but only foreigners and their foreign money could buy things there.

After that trip to Bulgaria, I did not get the opportunity to travel much. Certainly not outside the country. In the latter half of the 1980s, the nationalist socialist dictatorship and personality cult of the dictator had thrown the entire country into despair. Our food was rationed, or altogether unavailable, and people were queuing at whatever store they thought might have any kind of food items. Electricity and heat were drastically rationed as well, leading to interminable winter nights in dark and cold apartments. Those were long years, and they certainly made my childhood feel like an endless traumatic experience. I still remember my parents desperately looking for food, resorting to the black market to buy meat, and milk, and butter. I still shudder when I see people in uniform, as it evokes memories of people close to me being arrested unexpectedly like they did my uncle when he and I travelled to a border town for a concert and were suspected of trying to defect. After all, we were part of an ethnic minority in Romania, and of the educated class, which made us doubly dangerous. Despite my travels, I am still anxious every time I cross an international border that someone may stop, arrest, and persecute me without any apparent reason.

These circumstances continued until people could no longer bear the oppression, the fear, the deprivation, the humiliation. They took their destinies in their own hands, filled the streets and faced the tanks, the uniforms, and their own terror. More than 3,000 died trying to bring freedom back to Romania. I learned the hard way that December of 1989, seeing people fall in the streets shot down by machine guns in the hands of their own police and military forces, that it is within our power to change our world, or at the very least, it is within our power to give everything to try, and that we should never take anything for granted.

It was the sacrifice of those people whose names are now listed solemnly on a granite monument in downtown Bucharest that made it possible for me to be here today. They made it possible for me to travel abroad again, 10 years later, and this time across continents and oceans rather than a river, this time to Japan as a recipient of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholarship. It was when I returned from Japan that I made a pledge to myself to never allow anything and anyone to stop me from wandering the world and being part of our global multilog. I had to participate, across continents, I had to represent not just myself, but also those who no longer could and who had willingly given their lives for me to be able to do so. From my part, I held true to that pledge. For twenty years I have been traveling the world to learn, to live with different people in different countries, to understand them and become their ambassador. I travel to teach, and I travel to represent. I travel to make people to talk to one another. And I travel to empower young people to travel themselves, as I see that as the only chance we have as a species to understand our own common humanity. That is why I am an international educator.

*****

Our world today, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, however, is changing. We are not sure that we know entirely where it is heading. We are drawing parallels with the last century and its crises, and the parallels are worrisome. After more than two decades of relatively free worldwide movement, as limited for many by political and socio-economic obstacles as it was, fear once again has engulfed people everywhere. Fear of others, of unintelligible languages, of religious and spiritual practices other than ours, fear of the unknown, and of people who are not us. The closer and more accessible the world became, the more fear enveloped everyone. We live in a time that we describe as VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We live in a world where moribund nation states—an invention of our modern times built to protect the interests of the few at the expense of the many—fight for their survival by promoting demagoguery, political dynasties and nepotism, religious tyranny and unscrupulous capitalist moguls. From Asia to the Americas, from Europe to Africa and Oceania, nationalism, bigotry, and intolerance have yet again peaked their hideous heads from the dustbins of history, animated by people’s sadness, isolation and terror for their future. In their fear, they grab guns or trucks and mow down those who scare them the most: those who are not like them. And, paradoxically, the only way to push through this moment is to believe in those same people’s ultimate desire to be on the side of good, and in their ability to change the world around them for the better.

And while this may seem like a challenge, it is in fact an opportunity: you must be at the helm of the direction you would like to see this uncertain world head. And you, the new university graduates in this room, have already taken the first steps to contribute to that change: you studied foreign languages, your traveled to countries far from your own, you broke the barriers of your own comfort zone and stretched your limits. You have taken the steps to understand our shared humanity, regardless of where we live, what the color of our skin is, what languages we speak, what we believe about the creation and the end of the world, and who we partner and create families with. With the languages you learned, you entered the space of the culture, the history, and the traditions those languages carry. You are on your way to becoming yourselves ambassadors for a better world. One in which there is no room for hatred for those who are not like you, where there is no room for bigotry, for divisive political leaders who bank on our fears and who, instead of helping us foster shared dreams, take advantage of and encourage our nightmares, as British documentarist Adam Curtis so well showed it in his 2004 BBC production “The Power of Nightmares.”

You are now the explorers, the wanderers of this time. It is on your shoulders and it is within your power to carry into the world the message that no matter where they are and who they are, humans share more than they differ, and whatever makes us seem different is really the approach to solving same old problems we all share, and have shared throughout our short tenure on this beautiful planet.

Senri dōfū (A thousand miles, same wind), written by Master William Reed

And this is exactly the interpretation I have given to one of my favorite Japanese proverbs, “senri dōfū” (a thousand miles, same wind). Have the courage to stay interested in and engaged with the world, do not worry about wandering too much. Only by wandering you keep alive your sense of wonder and your openness to discover the places where you best intersect with these moments and spaces in unexpected ways that lead to epiphanies and solutions and joy. The moment you stop marveling at the world around you, the moment you are afraid of wandering, you give up on your sense of wonder. Get out there. Make mistakes. Speak your foreign languages out loud, as broken as they might be. Celebrate your accent; it belies your beautiful heritage. Remember that skin color is just a genetic adaptation to light. Embrace those who celebrate different customs, beliefs, and habits. Marvel at their quotidian, learn their routine. Their humanity is in those details, their solutions to your problems can be found in the tiniest of habits. It is in your wonder and wanders where you will find the world and your own ability to grasp the rudder in the tumultuous sea our world is now. Ride the waves, set your course, for J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote at another time of great terror and upheaval, reminded us, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

Thank you!