Lyn & Krys sandwiching me, and in the background: a New Orleans traveling jazz band in Florence

It was Italy that started it all.

That was three years ago. I was traveling through the well-beaten path of Venice, Florence and Rome at the height of summer with two very dear friends I hadn’t seen for a year. I’d traveled before, of course, and I’d been away from home for years already, but it was only that June that I’d given any thought to ‘travel’ as a kind of philosophy. I’m sure it was due in part to the bountiful charms of the country, but also, I think it had to do with the undercurrents of dissatisfaction running through each of us at the time. We were 19 and 20s who had lived through very different experiences in Melbourne, Connecticut and London, with much to reconcile between head and heart. And isn’t it true that when you’re in such a predicament, you look for a palliative, for inspiration, for answers — or perhaps, a distraction from your own preoccupations? The world is so much bigger than we are, after all.

But it was only when I returned to the monotonous lull of Russell Square in London, then unfortunately hammered in by two terrorist bomb explosions (I was just a block away from where the bus had exploded) and stringent road blocks to the unnatural silence of the 7/7 aftermath, that I was able to recollect my thoughts. Buried up to my chin in 16-odd rolls of film, painted with the summer light of Venice and Florence and Rome, I tried to make out the illegible handwriting in my moleskin, to make sense of the glaring inconsistencies and contradictions of my journal entries. I spent weeks sorting out my baggage, and I mean ‘baggage’ in both its literal and figurative sense: I still hadn’t signed a place over summer for my second academic year in London so I was staying at a friend’s flat while attending a summer school course in World Politics, everything I owned packed haphazardly into various boxes and suitcases and bin-bags-cum-knapsacks bursting at their seams. The figurative? What we call ‘emotional baggage’, of course.

At the time, however, the inklings of this project gave me a sense of purpose. And when I proposed it to Krys, my aforementioned Italy companion from Melbourne and literary-partner-in-crime, she effortlessly came up with an appellation for my pet project.

Suitcase Generation, she announced, with an exaggerated, celebratory air.

Genius. In the conditions I had been living in then, I should have thought of it myself.

In this modern world, thanks to the emergence of budget globe-trotting options, more and more people are redefining what it means to travel. I know I have in many subtle ways since that summer of 2005, but I suppose travel’s most obvious attraction is the new possibilities it up to you – the different landscapes and people, the different customs… how it shows you that it’s possible to even think about leading a different life, that it’s not wholly unrealistic. One must go without familiars in order to beto influences, to change… right?

Yet, on the other hand, eyesd to other cultures sometimes make us appreciate more lovingly, our own. And that is the contradiction inherent in travel – its excitement but also its transience, the tension between our simultaneous desires to explore different places and to find a place to call ‘home’, which points to our deep-rooted need to belong but at the same time, for the thrill of not knowing what’s waiting around the riverbend.

So here you have it: my pet project of a travel literature e-zine, which actually made a too-premature debut that summer of 2005 and an equally hasty departure; and now, two years down the line, newly reincarnated as a blog-cum-e-zine still waiting to define itself on a subject very close to my heart… at the mercy of whatever time I can find on my hands, of course.

The Suitcase Generation.

Stay a while. I’m pretty sure you belong here.

Your Editor, Emily Ding
emilydlt