There is something strange about travel where after having visited a new place for less than 48 hours, you feel that you know it profoundly, abound in insights on its citizens and customs, though this is rarely true, and ultimately, the most that can be gleaned is a certain perspective upon your own homeland, that place you left so recently, unless you are the rare poet Federico Garcia Lorca visiting New York City for the first time.
And so it seemed, traveling with my wife to speak on my book Wild Geese Sorrow to the students and faculty of the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, when we 
landed close to midnight after a 20 hour journey from San Francisco, then were driven by a waiting taxi through city streets to our hotel. Our driver complained that his youngest more studious while the eldest spurned his sacrifice of long work hours to save money for college tuition, and I thought of our own daughter who declined to travel in favor of her high school course load.
That first morning when we walked through the streets and alleyways of the Hamra district where AUB is located, there seemed something familiar about the city with its waterfront perch by the Mediterranean, its 
mixture of old and new architecture, partially a result of rebuilding necessary after 15 years of civil war and a few more with its neighbor Israel. It reminded me of Hong Kong, another ex-colonial city, also full of high rise condominiums, constant construction, the gap between rich and poor, and smells of a sweet and rich cuisine.
Before debarking, friends had gently asked if I had thought about safety, and I replied that I had researched the U.S. State Department’s online travel page for Lebanon, which basically warned American travelers that if you should encounter any difficulties, you were on your own, and that the full faith and credit of the United Sates was somewhere else, let’s say Paris, and not the Middle East. It was our government’s disclaimer, caveat emptor, “as is” without warranty.
That afternoon I had my first reading, and our host, Rima Rantisi, a younger, creative writing teacher at AUB who had graduated a few years later from the same MFA program I had attended, made me feel welcome. Her colleagues, Rana Issa and Zeina Halabi, 
taught translation and Arabic poetry respectively, with a deeply-held passion for their work. After the successful event, they treated us to an incredible Lebanese meal at abd el wahab Restaurant, including fish roe, pita bread, steamed cold artichoke, peppers plate, dolmas, baba ghanoush, hummus, raw meat kibbeh, mixed grill, watercress salad, among other dishes.
But even more incredibly, that night we had dined with their Norwegian writer friends also visiting in Beirut and spent an amazing several hours talking about literature, the impossibility of writing, the value of our respective projects, and the sorry plight of university adjuncts around the world. This is what I imagined Hemingway’s moveable feast to be like, with the same postwar edginess and hope except missing any romanticized literary pretension.
The next day I met with Rima’s poetry creative writing class and did some exercises on formal poems using the classical Tang-style Angel Island wall poems as examples. The students showed intense interest in the words of Chinese immigrants one hundred years ago, and I learned that the Lebanese are very familiar with the themes of migration and dislocation. I discovered too that classical 
Arabic verse is very similar to classical Chinese poetry, ancient literary forms which use rhyme and juxtaposition to create delight, beauty and meaning.
Furthermore these talented AUB students were at minimum, bilingual, or more; one young man easily read Lorca’s gypsy ballad “Romance Sonámbulo” with its memorable: Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas, in its original Spanish! To be a Chinese American translator-poet in Beirut introducing ethnic immigrant protest poetry to budding young Lebanese writers was an international exchange I could never have imagined. After my talk, a young woman shared that she was writing Lebanese hip hop lyrics, experimenting with a global, African American-influenced street music!
After my work with AUB was done, we had a chance to do a walking tour of the city and by car the countryside. The next day we visited the 7,000 year-old U.N. World Heritage Site of Byblos 
(Jbeil in Arabic), climbed its Citadel built by 12th century Crusaders, positioned upon a promontory jutting into the sea, a location also used by the Romans before them and the Phoenicians even earlier, as civilizations geopolitically locate its fortresses literally upon the foundations of the prior one. By the storm-tossed Mediterranean of early March, the sheer historical age of this Biblical era coastline inspired awe and was silencing.
I began to see the United States to where my Chinese immigrant ancestors came as a young country, an infant compared to this ancient part of the world, yet the Lebanese youth are no different than their American adolescent counterparts having inherited the weight, sorrows and hopes of their parents’ generation and having to carry it in some new way that they can call their own.
On our last day in Beirut, Rima treated us to a wonderful traditional Lebanese breakfast at the famous Abu Hassan bakery and deli, with different types of hummus, raw vegetables and mounds of Lebanese flat bread. Again we chatted about being ethnic and mixed race writers, both in America and internationally, how the choices made in our lives to follow the writer’s path has led to this improbable meal talking teaching and our love of words. Rima is incredible, a working wife and mother, and an American by birth now living in the land of her ancestors.
Afterwards she invited us to her condominium home to meet her husband and darling two year old boy Leo. Amidst the toys and over tea and oranges, we chatted as parents 
and working people, about soccer, the price of real estate, and the changing neighborhood. In travel, there can be nothing better than sharing time with local residents. What I understood was that this is the same work we all do, honoring those who have given us love and care by doing the everyday, the parenting, organizing of a world, to find our own way, a life.
What perhaps I will most remember from this brief visit is the absolute happiness of the shopkeepers and citizens when we told them we were Americans, not French or British 
visitors with connections to a colonialist past. They enthusiastically welcomed us, know us in a certain way, because for all the 4.5 million Lebanese living in their homeland, there are almost 12.5 million Lebanese live outside the borders (try Dearborn, MI), part of a diaspora formed by generations having left for a better life just like the Angel Island poets did.
I speculate that they welcomed us, not as tourists from a country which built the military hardware used so violently against their towns and villages, but as fellow citizens of a migrant world, where there are no borders but one, between those who have hope of a better life and sacrifice to claim it, and those who would hamper and deny it to others. As a resident of the hopeful realm, in visiting Beirut, I was traveling on ground that felt like home.
I did not know Ed Lee when he grew up in a housing project in Seattle, the fourth child in a Chinese immigrant family. Nor did I know him as a scholarship student at Bowdoin College in Maine. In fact, I first met Ed when we were classmates at Boalt Hall School of Law, when I dropped by an apartment house in Berkeley to pick up some materials from his roommates, also Asian American law students who I knew from my 1st year. The first thing I noticed upon our introduction was his broad, good-natured smile, as if he were simply amazed to meet you, as a remarkable son or daughter of the universe.
In the life of any writer comes a time where one reflects back to those first moments of putting thoughts and feelings onto paper and having them read by another word-loving human being, but it’s always a bit murky as to when that instance occurred. In a larger sense, did it originate in the clash of cultures between one’s intimate family and the extended world about us? Possibly. Or in speaking multiple languages as a child and trying to decipher meaning across tongues? For a great number. Or in the common knowledge of death or impermanence? Yes, probably for most. Or in that simple desire to entertain, to make a loved one laugh (for fear of crying) perhaps? More often, the better.