When I was recently on vacation in China, all my regular Internet sites were blocked! I thought I could get around this by purchasing a VPN, but alas, I couldn’t even access the support page to troubleshoot the problems, nor could I contact my phone provider for more international data, which I didn’t think I would need until I discovered that my translation app wouldn’t work on the data speed I had.

So here we were, trying to talk to people when we didn’t understand a word of each other’s language, and trying to navigate without Google maps. It definitely helped to keep a sense of humor about all the getting lost and the miscommunication. One night, we were trying to explain (without the translator app–or a note in Chinese that we later got) to various restaurant people that we were vegetarian, only to get a lot of shaking heads and blank looks. Finally, we saw a place with an array of fresh vegetables displayed in a cooler behind the counter and thought we could explain ourselves with sign language. The server, who miraculously had her own translator app, told us to point to the vegetables we wanted and she would make them. We pointed to a lot of vegetables, because we thought she was going to throw them all in a stir fry, but we ended up with  separate dishes for each veggie, plus scallion broth, rice and tea. The delicious food just kept on coming!

Being blocked from the Internet also made me hyper aware of how much time I spend (waste) on Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It felt both odd and welcoming to be forced to go to my writing files whenever I felt the urge to use my laptop. Over the course of the trip, I spent several hours working on a spring clean-up I try to do at least every other year, where I go through all the unpublished poems in my “Active” folder and figure out which ones I want to keep sending out for another year, and which ones no longer hold interest and need to be moved to “Inactive” or “Meh.” This always leads to tons of revision as I look at old work with a fresh eye.

Though being forced to write was a good thing, I have to admit I regretted not getting the immediate gratification of people’s reactions to the cherry blossoms in Kunming, or my musings on Substack, which made me wonder–what is it about we humans in the social media age that makes us feel that everything we do needs to be immediately validated? True confessions, I am one of those people who obsessively looks for likes and feedback for anything I post on the big cyber cloud. Sometimes I worry that this has a negative impact on my writing–whether in sharing groups, I’m too quick to read something half-finished, simply for the joy of hearing people’s reactions to it. But I do like to think that reading things out loud, even  early drafts, sharpens my own ear for what’s working or not working in a piece. In fact, one of my favorite revision techniques is to read a piece out loud even if I’m the only person listening.

I didn’t write a lot in China; I rarely do on vacation. I mostly enjoyed the distraction of sightseeing, the feeling that I was amassing thoughts and experiences I could synthesize later. But when I did sit down with my writing–just me and the page, and the Great Firewall surrounding us, it felt like a lovely ink-brush wash of inner peace because I couldn’t quick-click to headlines blaring at me from news or email or social media sites. What a wonderful feeling of insouciance to have no idea what was going on in the news! T–mp could die, I remarked to my partner and I wouldn’t even know.

Now that I’ve been back home for a week, I hate to admit how enticing the old habits have become. I’m letting my distraction demons take hold more often than not, as if making up for lost time, partly because I worried that all the work I’d done to publicize my books by building up my writer presence on social media had dissipated with my two weeks of complete silence. But really, what people seem to want to see from me are not more book or writing-related posts; they want to see my pictures of China, which I’m putting out day by day on my Facebook page. I guess many of us respond to the urge to experience travel vicariously when we can’t do it directly. And perhaps, through looking at some of the astounding images, we can find our way behind the Great Firewall of China, capturing both some of the magic, as well as the shift to a more peaceful perspective that can come from letting the anxiety-producing headlines fade to a gentle blur.

When a friend of mine asked me what I was looking forward to about my upcoming China trip, I found it hard to come up with an answer. While I had done a lot of research in choosing the string of destinations in this part of China less traveled by westerners, there was nothing in particular that I needed to see. I was simply attracted to the region because it was the home of many of China’s ethnic minorities, and the gorgeous pictures of places like Black Dragon Pool, Jade Snow Mountain, and Leaping Tiger Gorge were too enticing to pass up.

Now that I’m here, I’m not disappointed. Eye candy is abundant everywhere. Despite the general hassles of travel and the rather exhausting pace of very full days, I feel nurtured by the serenity as I slowly circumambulate the reflecting pool by the three pagodas temple, where the cherry blossoms–an added bonus–shine pink, in both the water and sky! I’m awed by the white-capped spiky peaks of Jade Snow Mountain looming in and out of the fog, reminding me of an ink brush painting. I’m buoyed by seeing people dancing in the streets in the ancient cities of Dali and Lijiang, some in their colorful traditional dress, and some in jeans and sweaters, and how so many people in the crowd from parents with toddlers to gray-haired elders, join in the flow. And these old towns are a tasting paradise. In any 2-3 block radius you can sample homegrown tea, coffee, fruit juices, fruit tea, homemade plum wine, milk powder candy, sesame candy, hot pepper relishes, dried fruits of all persuasions including persimmon, mango, hawthorne bark, and–if you want it–yak jerky.

But was my desire to travel here based on a need to see any of this? I could have stayed home and walked in my own comforting woods. Or traveled only as far as New York to see spontaneous exuberant dancing among strangers in public places. Or been content with past trips to Mount Ranier or the Alps if my penchant was to see snow-covered mountains. And I could likely find many of the street treats at one of my local Asian stores.

What would be missing, however, is the serendipity.

It has been consistently the unplanned, unanticipated moments that have engorged my inner travel bug. There’s an exhilarating feeling (at least, for me) that comes with being in a new place, an invigorating sense of wonder in rounding the next corner, whether the discovery will be an exquisitely ornate pagoda roof, a man carving marble, or a store selling tacky toys and souvenirs that still look totally different from American tacky toys and souvenirs.

Keying into serendipity keeps my writing brain fresh. It reminds me when I’m frowning at the blank page or the blank screen, to lean into that wonder of discovery. The experiences I’ve had here are now part of my brain’s bank of images and memories, ready to be resurrected at just the right moment as fodder for an poetic image, a metaphor, or scene in some future work of fiction or non-fiction.

This doesn’t mean that I’m taking home an assignment to write a poem or story about China. In fact, these blog posts–along with occasional emails and texts to family and friends–will likely be the only types of “straight writing about China” I’ll do. In my own writing process nothing is more of a creativity killer than to intentionally sit down with the purpose of writing about something I’ve recently done. Instead, I’ll try to integrate these experiences into other issues that suddenly call to me, as I did in Ganesh Ascends to Heaven–a story in Immigrants about someone trying to put their life back together by traveling to India after unintentionally killing someone.

And even if I don’t remember everything I’ve seen and done, because I haven’t bothered to take a lot of notes or write much down, I’ll have to trust that when I need it, the muse (like the Black Dragon god of the Naxi people, who lives under the water here and wakes up in spring to give the people luck and prosperity) will dive down into the muck of all my travel images and resurrect just the right one.