Why I travel to understand where I come from
Before the ticket is booked, before the bag is packed, there is a quieter moment that happens long before the journey begins. It is the pull. Not wanderlust, but remembrance. A call that comes from stories inherited rather than lived, from questions left unanswered, from a history that arrived in fragments. This is the call of diaspora.
I travel because my roots are scattered. Because my lineage was carried across oceans, wars, and silence. I grew up with stories passed down in pieces—told in kitchens, revealed through gestures, remembered in the body more than in words. My grandparents ran through forests during wartime. They disguised themselves to survive. They carried rice on their heads, unsure when the next meal would come. These were not lessons written down. They were movements learned under pressure.
Diaspora is not just distance from a homeland. It is the space between memory and understanding. Travel is how I begin to close that space. Each place I go becomes a question: Who were we here? How did we move through the world? What did we create while enduring uncertainty? I am not searching for nostalgia. I am searching for clarity.
This is where my creative philosophy lives. I do not create to decorate or to document alone—I create to remember, to translate, to make sense of what could not be explained to me growing up. Drawing, writing, photography, and movement are my tools for listening. They slow me down enough to observe patterns, gestures, and rhythms that echo across generations. Art becomes a form of research. Movement becomes language. Creation becomes continuity.
When I travel, I am not only witnessing places—I am collecting fragments. A stance. A path through a market. The way hands work. The way people adapt to land and weather. These details find their way into my sketches, my words, my training. What I cannot find in archives, I trace through lived experience and creative study.
Pre-flight is where intention is set. It is the moment I acknowledge that travel is not an escape, but a responsibility. To move with awareness. To observe with respect. To create with purpose. Every journey feeds the work, and the work feeds my understanding of who I am and where I come from.
This is why I travel. To reconnect what was broken apart. To turn movement into meaning. To use creativity as a bridge between past and present—so the story does not end with me, but continues forward, shaped by intention rather than silence.
