noise and sound

The freedom of time is so constantly fleeting, and the financial freedom to travel is just the first hurdle. Some people don’t value foreign experience very highly either, choosing not to spend their time and energy in places that don’t deliver clear goals. This 8 month holiday/gap year of sorts had targets spread around me at various distances. The travel I did after my winter showed me new targets I wish I’d been aiming for while I was living in Uyak Bay.

my flight from kodiak to anchorage

Goals I held at Fishcamp were foremost the process of gaining acceptance to graduate school, followed by smaller goals of reading more intellectual history, reflecting on the ideas that inspire me, primarily the power of agency in moments that span time, and maintaining relationships with friends. Following these goals were much smaller ones, cold plunging each morning, trying to play hacky sack with my juggling balls , watching Gilmore girls again (perhaps my least impressive “goal”). 

We may have some personal limit of productivity… I’m not sure, but if we do, I hope mine was not met in isolation because that bar was quite low. On some days I watched birds build their nests in less time than it took me to make a single piece in my ceramics studio.

Traveling abroad brought new targets to attention that I wish I’d been aiming at in isolation… primarily my inability to communicate cross-culturally. I’ve known that I have a great weakness in this area for a long time. Growing up, my parents would tell me that some of their greatest regrets were their inability to speak another language fluently or play an instrument. As an adult, I now understand how they felt. The communication gap didn’t feel large upon my arrival in Cambodia with my friend Gareth. Tiger, a driver that Gareth knew from his previous trip to Siem Reap, spoke very good English. He was our guide for the next three days. Tiger was knowledgeable and generally kind to us, though he definitely liked Gareth more than me. Gareth is really cool, so it makes good sense to like him more. Gareth also happened to be the one who paid him. Even on our first ride with him from the airport to the terrible room I booked, he began ignoring my questions. I think he just didn’t know the answers to them, but he kept ignoring some of my questions the following days. It was cast in more hilarity every time Gareth got an immediate answer to his questions. 

Siem Reap was incredible. Easily one of my favorite places on the whole trip. With Tiger as our guide, I didn’t have much reason to communicate with most other people. I used Google Translate when I needed to, and memorized how to say thank you, which I think is the bare minimum. Even just saying hello and thank you in Khmer brought them joy. I can only imagine how grateful and seen these people would have been if a tourist spoke fluent Khmer to them. They were some of the kindest and most hospitable people I’ve ever met. The script of Khmer is beautiful and artistically inspiring. Some of the carvings I’ve done on paper and pots take inspiration from other languages. I’m excited to realize work derived from the complex flowing script of Khmer. I wish their music was as beautiful to me as the script was. Our only exposure to Cambodian hits was from the songs Tiger played us while driving with him. There was one song that I liked quite a bit! Tiger played it at least 8 times while we drove with him. He sang along with a passion I have never seen matched, except maybe in Japanese karaoke bars. He didn’t need a drink to reach an acoustic flow state. Gareth and I were treated to a joyous performance. It’s possible that the mortal risk of driving on the roads in Cambodia inspired him to live well while on the road.

hours before the crotch seam on my shorts ripped

Much of the music he played us though was extremely repetitive. I struggled to enjoy it. A few songs featured Cambodian rappers rapping in English. Wow. It was amusing to hear them rhyming such simple words at first but he played this genre for far too long. He asked me to play a couple songs. I played him a couple of Kendrick Lamar songs, I think “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Hiii Power”. It felt right to share Kendrick as a representative of American rap culture. The setting in which his lyrics were played was so removed from the United States. We listened and passed monks on tractors. We listened while kicking up dust for farmers in rice fields. 

I think we made it to Vietnam before Gareth ruined all the easy listening music in social settings. He made some comment about how all the music played at restaurants was some terrible cover of an American pop song. Somehow, until that point I hadn’t noticed it. After Gareth brought it to my attention, it was inescapable. Weeks later I inflicted this knowledge on Jerron, who was similarly disheartened by cheap knockoffs of already annoying songs. Vietnamese was a cool language to be immersed in. Because we were traveling to such a variety of places in Vietnam, we experienced more locations with less English infrastructure. It’s beautiful to hear other languages spoken. I think I could fall asleep to it. Noise machines usually annoy me, but drifting off to sounds which hold a meaning you can’t discern feels the same as shutting your eyes in the open air under the stars, unanswered questions steadily persisting while you drift out of reality and back again.  

Bread in alley. Notice the variety of shapes and lack of birds… perhaps poisoned?

Everyone is nicer than us I think. I liked Vietnam so much. The people there were as kind as the ones we met in Cambodia. The further north we traveled, the kinder our interactions. This was the opposite of what I anticipated, as southern Vietnam was allied with the United States during the war. I assumed they would have more English infrastructure and be more interested in English speakers, but this wasn’t our personal experience, maybe because we poisoned their people and land with chemicals and completely abandoned our southern Vietnamese allies after the war, and we embargoed their economy so their entire country’s growth was extremely delayed after the war. Maybe. Despite the atrocities our country committed against theirs, we were only met with kindness from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi. 

Japan was where I most acutely felt my lack of a foreign language. I loved Japan. My favorite country overall was probably Vietnam, but Japan was incredible. The culture evolved through such isolation that many people there don’t see much benefit from interacting with foreigners. I was told this by a group of Japanese university students who studied English. They said their goal was to show their future students the growth that comes from cross-cultural interactions. Amazing. There was little space to interact with Japanese people, few social spaces. The culture is personally isolationist too. No one speaks in public to each other outside of bars. During my solo travel in Japan, I would save all of my social energy for the evening, where it would finally be appropriate for me to attempt conversation. There was one exception, and it ended up being a highlight of Japan. 

Ho Chi Minh on foot

Some of you may have seen my Instagram story in which I fell asleep on the high-speed rail (Shinkansen) and overshot my destination, a famous pottery village called Mashiko, by over 200 miles. Well, that did happen. It was a huge bummer as this was the only pottery town I was planning to visit! The city I ended up in, bleary-eyed at 9:00 pm, was Nagano. I had that gunk in both corners of my left eye. That’s how I know it’s a good nap. I walked through heavy rain to a hostel and checked in. Then I enjoyed walking in the rain on foot, exploring the city. I love rain. At around 10, I discovered a tiny ceramics studio. Everything else around town had been closed for hours, but I still approached the shop because the display case held a rare sight. Replicas of ancient Jōmon period vases were sitting there. These traditional vessels are so old, and the reason I became Interested in pottery. They are more than old… the period began 14,000 years ago during the last ice age! 14,000 years ago is almost 9,000 years earlier than the Egyptian empire formed. They are the oldest pots in the world. The period stretched until 300 BC. They also happened to have originated in the Nagano province, where I had stumbled upon this little shop. I peeked into the shop and found 3 ceramicists inside slowly making small clay raccoon-dogs. I tentatively rapped on the glass window. The three women inside were quite startled, but once I explained I was a ceramicist through Google Translate, they warmly welcomed me. The Jōmon vases drew my attention again indoors. Their melted surfaces were lit with fluorescent lighting inside the small studio. I told them of my love for the vases, and they accepted me further. They were incredibly nice and we talked through translate as they worked. Two of the women were around my age and were apprentices of the woman who owned the shop. I believe she was in her early 70s. She had been working in clay for 50 years. I bothered them with questions while they worked. It was very pleasant. They worked slowly, moving deliberately with their sculpting. I wanted to ask them 100 ceramics questions that I knew wouldn’t translate with the language barrier. A bit over an hour passed. We all sat on floor cushions. They finished their work and we said goodbye. They were kind. I don’t think I’ll ever be there again. 

Potter Sensei and her apprentices

Thailand was a very different experience from all the other countries I visited. I didn’t get a great sense of Thailand as I was only in Hua Hin and Bangkok. In both those cities, it seemed everyone spoke some English. The tourism industry was built out, designed to accommodate thousands in Bangkok. Famous streets competed for tourists through the volume of their American pop music. Every bar was plenty loud; the sound waves vibrated the asphalt beneath our feet. Hua Hin was built for a different type of tourist. White Europeans whose skin was transitioning from bronze to leather snuck along streets in arm with Thai women 40 years younger than them. The clasped arms were no indication of affection, but a crutch of support as they moved through restaurants socializing with other thai/european couples. 

I wish now that during my time at FishCamp I had tried to learn another language, even if it was just 10 minutes a day on Duolingo. Until traveling to Japan, I couldn't have anticipated how much of a barrier I felt between myself and Japanese people. Much of that was cultural, but I’ve heard that if foreigners speak even some Japanese, then locals are especially hospitable towards them. I looked into learning Japanese while I was in Japan. I found that Japanese is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. Very sad. I have given up on learning Japanese. I don’t think I'm very intelligent when it comes to language acquisition. I wasn't great at Spanish class in highschool, and I struggled in my single semester of German in college. I want to revisit Spanish though and attempt to become conversational. Spanish is such a beautiful sounding language and so useful within and without the United States. 

what more can I add…

The second goal I wish I'd had out at Fishcamp was to begin learning DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. Eventually I’ll try to learn an instrument. I've always wanted to be proficient at playing drums, but I've been enjoying some electronic music lately, especially Breakcore. The goal for me is definitely to make music foremost, so im going to begin with a DAW and supplement with an instrument that supports the music i want to make rather than just learning an instrument. That makes sense in my mind… 

Much of the value of travel exists in the reflection of it. These are my reflections on communication in other countries in spoken language and in the universal language which bonds all humans, music. 

Until next time, 

Micah Fields