A woman out in the world
What I've learnt from more than a decade exploring the world on my own.
Press play to hear an extended passage from The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli, a poet who fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua:
She was outraged, how could I just accept such an insult to my intelligence, she blasted, slathering mayonnaise on bread.
Hadn’t I noticed that my male compañeros were never questioned about the female company they kept?
Was I not aware that even those who had jobs far more sensitive than my own slept with foreign women, women journalists, whoever they felt like sleeping with?
Over the past months, I’ve had at least three half-ten letters in my drafts waiting to be completed and sent, but found myself unable to focus on any single one. This newsletter is in no way meant to be tied to any news cycle, but I felt like I had insufficient mental bandwidth to ponder the subjects I had started to dig into in those letters during such a time of upheaval and conflict: the US capitol riot, the fierce clash of perspectives on cultural appropriation and sexual harassment/assault that played out over Malaysian social media, Myanmar’s military coup and Malaysia’s subsequent tone-death deportation of 1,200 Myanmar nationals back home, the devastating blow to freedom of speech with the announcement of a “fake news” law snuck in amid Malaysia’s ostensible “state of emergency”. And most recently, the Atlanta shootings, have reignited discussion on the intertwined racism and sexism experienced by Asian women.
It feels strange and disconnected to be writing at this time without writing in confrontation of such events directly, but I feel constitutionally incapable of the hot take. Were I to say anything at all, I would want to have something deliberate and provocative—and more importantly, something new—to say. But that takes time, especially considering the completist I always feel the need to be. I always feel like I need to have read dozens of books and interviewed dozens of people to put forward a sound perspective that goes beyond the boundaries of just my own mind. I always feel like whatever I write on a subject, the piece has to be—if not realistically the last word on it—then the fullest possible manifestation of it I am capable of writing at that time. But more often than not, time passes and the urgency dissipates. The rest of the world moves on, and there come other talking points to get on top of. But I’ve realized that I can depend too much on the social media cycle to determine whether a story is still “timely” or not, and it’s a mind trap I need to get out of.
Back in mid-January, when the second wave of infections came, Malaysia went back on lockdown for a while—no more than two from the same household in a car, no dining out, essential services only, that sort of thing. (That’s been lifted now, with social lives resuming.) In some ways, you’d think one would feel more at ease looking inward during such a time, happier to tinker over one’s own obsessions in a circumscribed world. But in another way, it’s the opposite. You’re hyper-aware of everything that’s going on outside your immediate sphere because you aren’t immersed in—you aren’t living—any particular event yourself. From your social media perch, you seemingly have a view of everything that’s happening in the world, and what people are clamoring at. And if you don’t engage in that common attention economy, it can make you feel like you’re missing out, even as you feel largely incapable of contributing much that’s useful.
I don’t actually want this newsletter to be beholden to that attention economy—for one, there are people engaging with it better and more comprehensively elsewhere. I remind myself that both here and in my work, I want to listen more closely to the themes and subjects that obsess me, and not primarily be directed by the news of the day or what everyone seems to be thinking and talking about at any given moment. One just has to accept that one can’t write about everything, or one might end up writing about nothing after all. I think I would like this newsletter to be a step into unexpected or unrelated things that may or may not extend their tendrils in some more obscure way to the bigger picture. And to my completist self, I say over and over: every letter is but a snapshot of a particular time, and need be nothing more.
So, I return to a letter I was writing last December, in which I began to reflect on traveling solo for more than a decade, without feeling any longer that I need to make it an all-encompassing essay—at least, not right now, though it ended up pretty long anyway. And after what happened to Sarah Everard in London, kidnapped and murdered while walking the streets alone, this dispatch is unfortunately and tragically relevant again. Come to think of it, I guess it would always have been.
Notes on a decade+ of wandering on my own
A couple of years back, when a friend visited Kuala Lumpur on her own for the first time, she asked me for restaurant recommendations where she could dine without feeling uncomfortable, where a woman alone wouldn’t draw attention. It surprised me a little at the time within the context of Kuala Lumpur, since one tends to see one’s own city in exceptional terms, but I remembered that I had made the same consideration when traveling without company to places that were new to me, and I knew exactly what she meant. It meant a few things; in part, I think it meant the sort of place that wouldn’t be disproportionately populated by men.
I’ve traveled on my own many times over the past decade, and have learned to be comfortable inhabiting male-dominated spaces: a restaurant in Marrakech full of men watching football because it was the only cafe near my guesthouse at night, a cafe full of mining truck drivers catching breakfast off a rural highway in Peru, a busy canteen full of male campesinos in a Guatemalan highland town. By necessity, because I gravitated towards roads less traveled, I had learned fairly quickly early on not to be fazed by the furtive and frank glances of curiosity—and for the most part, I’ve been left alone, or my presence inquired into with courtesy.
The way I’ve come to deal with it is by doing my best to give off the aura that my presence anywhere is nothing out of the ordinary, no matter how much I actually stick out like a sore thumb—in some countries, being the lone Asian woman, rather than the lone white woman, will get you more stares. I’m not sure if doing that actually influences how others see me (a little, probably), but it helps make me feel more comfortable in my own body so I can liberate myself from my mental confines of what’s seemly or unseemly. If there’s a space I want to enter that I feel intimidated by, I try to walk in acting like I’ve done it a hundred times before.
It was sometime during my last year of university that a growing curiosity about the world, which had sprung from the places I studied about in my law and history courses, began percolating and morphed into a juddering restlessness that felt like conviction. Having always identified as an introvert, I had been my most social and communal during this time of my life, and enjoyed it thoroughly. At the same time, I was starting to feel that I wanted—needed—to see the world and make sense of it through my own eyes, unmediated by friends and family. Nothing feels quite so grand an adventure as the anticipation of planning a trip all by yourself, of setting out and arriving in a strange place on your own. Left to your own devices to find your feet, everything just feels so much more discoverable. Alain de Botton wrote in The Art of Travel:
It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others... Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
Perhaps if I look back on the jumbled scraps that constitute my diary during that time, I’ll find less of a neat line between that realization and what happened next, but it led me to ideating and reimagining, over and over, what traveling by myself would be like, and finally doing it. After I graduated, I went backpacking around Central America (with a telling and formative start), and those months would constitute my first real solo travels—by which I mean setting out on my own to a place where I don’t know anyone, rather than, say, extending a trip with friends to include a few days of travel on my own, which I had done before. Traveling solo also doesn’t mean spending all my time alone, since I invariably bump shoulders along the way with fellow travelers or local guides and acquaintances. But it does mean essentially making decisions and moving from place to place by myself; and in a remote place, it often means counting on the goodwill of strangers to take me from A to B, where intervention—should it be necessary—is not readily at hand.
Since that first time, I’ve continued to explore the world on my own—not for every trip I take, but it has been my default mode. Though it has its downsides (the right company can bolster you in doing things you wouldn’t do by yourself), in many ways it is also less cumbersome (the wrong company can stop you from doing things you would do on your own). You can head off and move on when you want and where you want, without having to meet someone halfway on anything, which allows for spontaneity in a way that is utterly freeing. I think of it as the purest expression of following my curiosity, simply finding my way from one thing that interests me to the next and to the next. Despite popular perception, I am by no means unique: more women are reportedly traveling solo, and apparently, a larger proportion of solo travelers are women than men (at least in the US and UK). But whenever I recount my travels, people always ask, not just because but certainly because I am a woman: “Was it safe traveling alone?
Without making everything of it, and while recognizing that male travelers too are harassed and attacked (in the US, men reportedly experience higher victimization rates than females for all types of violent crime except rape and sexual assault), women are specifically vulnerable because of their gender in a way that men aren’t as often (in the UK, government statistics estimate that 4.9 million women had been victims of sexual assault—including rape and attempted rape—in their lives compared to 989,000 men, with 98.5% of the rapists identified as men). This can leave women feeling like they have to choose between safety and freedom. As Sylvia Plath wrote in her journals:
Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
And for female journalists, there isn’t much of a choice. In an article for Nat Geo, Camille Bromley writes:
In much of the world, a woman traveling unaccompanied defies social or cultural norms; in some of the world, this act defies the law. Journalism, a profession predicated on going out into the world and following the trail of a story to its unknown end, is crippled by this gender divide.
Some years back in Peru, I boarded an overnight cargo boat by myself, followed by a ten-day journey by dugout canoe along the Amazon River with just my guides, which remains one of my most memorable journeys. From a short piece I wrote for Washington Post:
I say it now like I had made the decision just like that. But I agonised over it. I had seen enough movies to imagine the Amazon’s possible horrors, and the fact that there would be zero means of communication after the third day weighed on my mind—even as I texted my human ports-of-call and told them not to worry unless they didn’t hear from me by the eleventh day. Still, Miguel had talked about Cocha Pasto in terms eminently doable, with a safe return seemingly taken for granted. I dared myself to go ahead, but, erring on the side of caution, asked if he knew a female guide—and was surprised when he said yes. The next morning, I found out that he had simply asked the guide to bring his wife. "Two for the price of one," Miguel said cheerfully. You can imagine how it looked: like I was being chaperoned. With some hilarity, I thought, That’s not the kind of traveler I want to appear to be! And yet, as a woman traveling alone, you feel obligated to take all the precautions you can.
I’ve gone walking alone, without a guide, a number of times in the mountains and rural expanse of countries like Indonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, Spain, and Italy—alternately fearful that I would come across a stranger and hopeful that I would meet one. Happily, my fears never came to pass.
I’ve hitchhiked along remote country roads in Central America as the only tourist among locals (sometimes it was the only way to get around without hiring your own private transport)—and though the rides could be rough, it’s also given me one of my keenest memories, lit by the most mundane sort of magic. Somewhere in the highlands of Guatemala, trundling along in the back of a pickup truck: I remember unfolding myself to lie down, my head resting on my backpack, after several passengers had got off and freed up space. What a surprising moment, I think now, in which to have felt such a sure sense of peace and faith, as I looked up at the stars and enjoyed a silent camaraderie with my fellow travelers, the night breeze buffeting us gently along.
Over and over on my travels, I’ve had to put my confidence in strangers and rely on their goodwill, just to get around. The young man in Pisagua, Chile, who walked me back to my guesthouse when a coterie of dogs advanced warningly towards me. The off-duty driver who sent me back to my hotel on his tuk-tuk in Antigua, Guatemala, when I got caught halfway in the rain at night. The guesthouse uncle in Bajawa, Indonesia, who woke up before it was light in the morning to send me to the base of a volcano I wanted to hike, because it was safer than calling a taxi. And countless others. Every good deed, no matter how small, carried me a step forward in my journey.
Without hesitation, I would characterize my accumulated experience traveling alone as having been largely positive and encouraging. However, I—like most, if not all, women—have experienced sexual harassment. Thankfully for me, no disconcerting encounter has ever crossed the line into violence.
While strolling around a highland village in Guatemala during my first solo travels: a teenage boy crept up behind me and cuffed his hand up my crotch (I was wearing jeans), giggling as he ran away. He did it in full view of the public square, while adult men saw what happened and stood silently by, which I found to be more humiliating and provoking than what the boy had done. I wanted to grab the boy and shake him, but he was younger than me—a boy. I didn’t know what to do, and just left the square.
There was that time in Tbilisi, Georgia, on the steps of Vake Park. A rotund, florid-faced man gesticulated mutely to me, pointing at his phone. He looked to be in his fifties and stressed about something, and I thought he needed help. At first, I couldn’t see what was on the video because of the glare of the sun. Then he pushed it closer to my face, and I finally made out a video of a woman performing a blow job. I reeled back in anger, and I resisted the mad urge to shove him down the steps. I made myself turn away to continue walking, as calmly and deliberately as I could, up ahead to where a woman was playing with her daughter and a boy in a hoodie was reading. I never did approach them, but at that moment, they looked like strangers whose mere presence could be comforting.
And what about that time hiking Gunung Inerie in Flores, Indonesia, when my guide molested my behind under the guise of making sure I didn’t slip down the admittedly very steep slopes of cascading soil? Unbelievably now, I had tried at first to offer him the benefit of the doubt. Then, when the realization sank in, I told him, as forcefully as I could without lashing out, to stop and walk in front of me. He didn’t take me seriously the first time, and on the second, responded by bounding way ahead as if to say, Fine, let’s see how you get on by yourself now. I thought of leaving there and then, but we were already quite some way up the mountain, and in truth I felt that he wasn’t dangerous, just fishing for what he could get. I continued to trudge up behind him, and he looked back from time to time to check that I was okay. We both made a little effort to return things to more even footing through small talk, but largely remained silent.
At the top of Inerie, I took a photograph of him in case I ever needed to identify him, and we made it back down safely without further nuisance. But later, I had to endure the supreme awkwardness of meeting his family—including his many daughters. I had met his wife earlier that morning while we sat down to breakfast together before the hike, which was partly why I felt I could trust him, along with the fact that he had been recommended by another guide, who, come to think of it, had seemed a little pushy. Surrounded by these women, it felt impossible to say anything. I was a traveler; I was going to leave and probably never come back. He’s their father and husband and they live here. Part of me didn’t want to disturb the local dynamics of a place I was never going to return to.
These encounters soured my moods and left me, in the immediate aftermath, more skeptical of strangers—most of whom didn’t deserve it, but that’s the unfortunate line you tread between protecting yourself and being open to the world. I try to remember that though it’s the stories of women violated and murdered on the road that burn brightest in our minds, most women who set off on journeys by themselves do return home safely (perhaps not without some scrapes and difficulties), with some of the best memories of their lives and a new appreciation of the expansiveness of the world and the kindness of strangers—and friends and family telling them how brave they are.
And yet, and yet… If something had gone wrong, if they had been injured or attacked, others might have been inclined to blame them for not being cautious enough. Surely they should have known better? What were their motivations for traveling, and traveling alone, in the first place—and were those motivations justifiable? Surely a woman can’t just want adventure (funnier thrust here), which men are naturally presumed to want as a rite of passage? Vanessa Veselka wrote in her essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters”:
True quest is about agency, and the capacity to be driven past one’s limits in pursuit of something greater. It’s about desire that extends beyond what we may know about who we are. It’s a test of mettle, a destiny. A man with a quest, internal or external, makes the choice at every stage about whether to endure the consequences or turn back, and that choice is imbued with heroism. Women, however, are restricted to a single tragic or fatal choice. We trace all of their failures, as well as the dangers that befall them, back to this foundational moment of sin or tragedy, instead of linking these encounters and moments in a narrative of exploration that allows for an outcome which can unite these individual choices in any heroic way.
There are many articles on the internet offering up tips on how women can travel safely alone. Learn Krav Maga, always keep someone informed of your whereabouts, dress down and blend in. But we’ve heard enough stories to know that just one little thing has to go wrong, and your life can take a different turn, very quickly, even when you do everything right. This warning voice is always present in your head, but it’s easy to brush it aside when things have mostly gone well for you. It’s easy to think, That won’t happen to me. What are the odds?
As Amanda Lindhout recounts in A House in the Sky, her harrowing and stone-cold sobering memoir about being routinely tortured and gang-raped while being held hostage for ransom as a rookie foreign correspondent in Somalia:
I’d like to say that I hesitated before heading into Somalia, but I didn’t. If anything, my experiences had taught me that while terror and strife hogged the international headlines, there was always—really, truly always—something more hopeful and humane running alongside it. What you imagined about a place was always somewhat different from what you discovered once you got there: In every country, in every city, on every block, you’d find parents who loved their kids, neighbors who looked after one another, children ready to play. Surely, I thought, I’d find stories worth telling. Surely there was merit in trying to tell them. I knew that bad stuff happened. I wasn’t totally naive. I’d seen plenty of guns and misery by then. But for the most part, I’d always been off to one side, enjoying the good, the harm skipping past me as if I weren’t there at all.
That’s exactly what emboldens you for the next trip, and the next, and the next. An ex-boyfriend once said to me, as he worried about an impending trip I was making, “You trust too much in your own good luck.” But on the other hand, it feels impossible to move through the world constantly anticipating the worst-case scenario. Just as we approach other aspects of our lives, so we approach travel: we inform ourselves the best we can and take whatever calculated risks we feel we can. Right? Right? What is the alternative?
Despite the hand-wringing over all the what-ifs that can accompany the planning of more difficult journeys in more remote places, it’s hard to express adequately how much being able to navigate the world independently means to me. It feels like the very essence of freedom: just knowing that you have the capacity to land on your own two feet in a strange land. It feels especially true for me, as someone who has always had a terrible sense of direction and who can’t get around without a map. I blame it on my constant reading in the car when I was a child, disinterested in the world passing by outside. It was really only in my late teens or early twenties that I grew to want to see the world for itself, to level it with its depictions in the books I read.
I remember that as a young girl, I was described more as “book-smart” by my mother in contrast to my “street-smart” best friend, and it had felt like something of a vindication when I returned home safely from my first solo trip. I had shown myself that I could go somewhere completely unfamiliar, without a single contact in the country, and be resourceful enough to find my own way—not without some stumbling blocks and false starts, but find my way regardless. For that reason, traveling on my own remains my greatest source of security and confidence.
In attempting to toe the line between freedom and safety, there have been funny moments, and perhaps missed opportunities for getting to know people better, on their own terms. I think men know what the lone woman who crosses their path off the beaten track is likely thinking. And in turn, they’re probably thinking about how they can defuse the tension—to say, without quite saying it, Hey, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m a good guy!
I remember a particular exchange in Flores, Indonesia:
I wanted to visit Lake Wawomudha, and found a motorcyclist to take me there. Once we arrived, I told him I would meet him again in a couple of hours, and rushed off on my own into the woods. But soon, I found that the surrounding forest was sufficiently devoid of people that when I came upon a smoking cabin with no one in sight, I wondered if I should have invited him along as a walking companion. When I returned to meet him at the trailhead later, he was lying in the grass waiting, and I overheard him talking to a coffee farmer in the area. The farmer asked: “Eh, why didn’t you go with her for a walk?” The motorcyclist shrugged nonchalantly—“I don’t know, she ran off very fast before I could say anything.” I had to hide a smile, and felt a twinge of guilt.
Another exchange in Flores, shortly after the Inerie episode with the handsy guide, when I had my guard up more than usual:
I was riding a shared cab with a few local passengers from Bajawa to Ende. I had given the young driver only the street name of my destination, and he asked me, mid-journey, for the house number of my intended lodging. I hesitated to tell him exactly right then because we would be arriving a little after dark and I didn’t want to share more information than I had to any earlier than I had to. After a pause, he gave me a sideways glance and smirked knowingly, “Oh, I see. You don’t want to tell me. You’re afraid I’ll kidnap you or do something bad?” Later, I would find this funny, like we were breaking a kind of fourth wall. But at the time, it felt discomfiting, like he was taunting me slightly.
In the end, there was nothing to worry about. For the most part, people are decent, and you can count on their interest in self-preservation too. The driver was dropping off an Indonesian woman before me, but no one was answering the bell at her relative’s home. Still groggy from sleep, she told him that she would just get off—he didn’t have to wait. But this seemed to agitate him. “No, no,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’re in the house. If anything happens to you, it’s me people will come after. I don’t want no trouble.”
I leave you with…
My family’s growing bundle of mischief, who always manages to look deceivingly demure and stately in photos 🩵 She’s grown too fast!
E.
p.s. There is a companion letter to this letter.