Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Elise Hu. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Essayist and travel writer Pico Ayer speaks so movingly about how to find home and a sense of belonging in places across the globe. It was the central idea of his 2013 archive TED Talk, which we're sharing with you today. After the talk, he sits down with me to dig a little deeper into how travel has shaped his idea of home.
He also picked a book for our summer book club series. It's a collection of essays called Letter to a Stranger, Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, edited by Colleen Kinder.
Chapter 2: What does Pico Iyer say about the meaning of home?
Okay, enjoy. Where do you come from? It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India. And they're absolutely right insofar as 100% of my blood and ancestry does come from India, except I've never lived one day of my life there.
I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects, so I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. And if where do you come from means where were you born and raised and educated, then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England. Except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education.
And all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if where do you come from means where do you pay your taxes, where do you see your doctor and your dentist, then I'm very much of the United States.
And I have been for 48 years now since I was a really small child, except for many of those years I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. And...
If where do you come from means which place goes deepest inside you, and where do you try to spend most of your time, then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan, except all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them.
And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is. Because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multicultural than I am. And they have one home associated with their parents, but another...
associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. Home for them is really a work in progress.
It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than you could say with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, where's your home, I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.
And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California. And I looked through the living room windows, and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places.
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