Why travel?

Every day, cable cars climb up and down the street fronting my house on Nob Hill, and the cling-clanging noises they make echo through my open window as I write, reminding me that I live in an era of unprecedented mass movement in human history. Chinese have replaced Japanese as the Asian country with largest traveling population.

But, why travel?

Why trudge abroad when we can be, as Paul Russel puts it, "stationary tourists" logging onto the Internet and surfing the world in the comfort of our bedroom? The cynics would contend that the going is not worth the fare anymore, that paradise was lost long ago.

We travel out of necessity, of course. To trade, to proselytize, to discover new homes. But, most importantly, we travel to find ourselves.

One's place in the world

The world may have been discovered long ago, but not one's place in it. One watches gorillas play in their habitat or one descends into dank and dark tunnels of other ruins to imagine one's own life lived otherwise, elsewhere.

But some of us travel for a deeper reason, the deepest perhaps. Ultimately, a traveler is a pilgrim on a quest.

The outer space explored is the metaphor for the inner life expressed. Every trip thus becomes a story, and every new passport with its pristine pages is, essentially, a novel waiting to be written. The traveler emerges a bit wiser from the experience, with a story or two to tell if and when he or she comes home.

A few years back, a homeless man in his 40s with a little monkey moved into the front step of an out-of-business shop near my office and we became friends. I always caught him with a thick book, and, unlike many other dispossessed, he displayed a remarkably sunny personality.

One day I asked him, "How long have you been homeless?" He laughed and said: "What made you think I'm homeless? No, I'm a traveler."

When I returned from a trip to Southeast Asia a few months ago, the man and his little monkey were gone. Those who knew him told me that he had decided to go to Mexico to check out some new sites and did not know when or if he would be back.

Though I shall miss him, his friendly smile, his sunny disposition and his funny pet in a vest, I'm glad that he picked up and went.

The man and his monkey reminded me strangely of a childhood hero, a monk in the famous Chinese 16th-century epic, "Journey To The West."

On a quest to find the sacred Buddhist text, he had to journey through a thousand exotic landscapes with his band of misfits, with the Monkey King as his guide.

Home for them became anywhere and everywhere, its logistics translated into a beatific vision of freedom.

They turned the cold hard ground into a soft bed and tugged the night sky into a blanket filled with stars.

Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and author of the "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His latest book is "Birds of Paradise Lost," a short story collection, published in 2013.