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Travel Food Feature
Dumpling-free Hong Kong
Hong Kong is changing. On a four-day tour of the city's culinary highlights, you can avoid the dumpling, but not the theme restaurant.
By Jamie James
[02/18/00]

Daily Planet
Saltwater croc chomps Aussie youngster
The girl escapes, but the father wants retribution.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[02/18/00]

Wanderlust
Ecstasy in Borneo
Chinese exotic dancers offered me drugs and sex in Indonesian Borneo. Never underestimate a Lion's Club connection.
By Chris Taylor
[02/18/00]

Travel Advisor
Homeward bound
Our travel expert offers advice for immigrants heading home, tips for finding lodging in Guatemala and discouragement on the Madrid-Bilbao drive.
By Donald D. Groff
[02/17/00]

Daily Planet
Daredevil jumps from Pisa's Leaning Tower
Italian police are still looking for the suspect.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[02/17/00]

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By Pico Iyer

Feb. 19, 2000 | And so our dreams of distant places change as fast as images on MTV, and the immigrant arrives at the land that means freedom to him, only to find that it's already been recast by other hands. Some of the places around us look anonymous as airport lounges, some as strange as our living room suddenly flooded with foreign objects. The only home that any Global Soul can find these days is, it seems, in the midst of the alien and the indecipherable.

And so, a wanderer from birth, like more and more around me, I choose to live a long way from the place where I was born, the country in which I work, and the land to which my face and blood assign me -- on a distant island where I can't read any of the signs and will never be accepted as even a partial native. Specifically, I live in a two-room apartment in the middle of rural Japan, in a modern mock-Californian suburb, none of whose buildings are older than I am, with a longtime love whose English is as limited as my Japanese, and her two children, who have even fewer words in common with me. Once every few months, I see a foreign face in the neighborhood, and occasionally my secondhand laptop greets me with, "Good morning, Dick ... . The time is 6:03 p.m. [in Houston]," but otherwise, long weeks go by without my speaking my native tongue.

Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home By Pico Iyer Knopf 320 pages Buy Global Soul

You could say that much in the area is familiar -- my apartment building is called the Memphis (as in the city of the hero of a thousand karaoke bars), and my girlfriend worked for years at a boutique called Gere (as in Hollywood's most famous Tibetan Buddhist). The Gere store is to be found inside the Paradis department store, which houses the Kumar Indian restaurant on its fourth floor and sits just across from a Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor, a Mister Donut shop, and a McDonald's eatery. But the very seeming familiarity of these all-American props serves only to underline my growing sense of a world that's singing the same song in a hundred accents all at once. The Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor is generally rich in young girls with black silk scarves around their throats, waiting, in thick black furs and fedoras, for the lucrative (elderly) dates they've just arranged to meet on their miniature cell phones. Mothers with silent kids beside them sip demurely at blueberry flans and pear sorbets, rice taco salads and tomato gratin, while a country-and-western singer on the sound system croons about the sorrow of lost truckers. Colonel Sanders is dressed, often, in a flowing blue yukata, though the recipients of his old-fashioned Southern hospitality are largely carrot-haired boys and girls in black leather microskirts slumped, in untraditional fashion, across the spotless tables.

On rainy days, the unfailingly perky cash-register girls (with TEAM MEMBER and ALL-STAR written across their chests) race out to place umbrella stands in front of the entrance, and hand out "Gourmet Cards." The scented autoflush toilet plays a tape of running water as soon as you go in (just past the elegant sink for washing your chicken-stained hands). And every time a cashier presents me with my change, she cups my palm tenderly to receive the coins.

I go for walks, twice a day, in and around the neighborhood -- the "Southern Slope of Deer," as its name translates -- and pass through silent, tidy streets that look like stage sets in some unrecorded Star Trek episode. I pass Autozam Revues and Toyota Starlets, Debonairs and Charmants, Mazda Familias and Honda Todays (with Cat's Short Story tissues in the back). Mickey Rourke grins down at me from a bank of vending machines. The local dry cleaner hangs out a sign that promises, REFRESHING LIFE ASSISTANCE. At the intersection of The School-dori and Park-dori (as these science-fictive locales are called), dogs wait patiently for the lights to change, and everything in the whole firm-bordered area is so clear-cut that every single house is identified on maps at the number 12 bus stop.

Outside my window, toddlers cry 'Mommy" and men in white shirts and black ties scale ladders to polish the sign outside the bank. Most mornings, a truck rumbles past, playing the unbearably mournful song of a traditional sweet potato salesman.

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