June’s traveler of the month is Aaliyah Bilal, an Oberlin graduate who first felt the pull to visit China on a research fellowship. Her return a few years later and ongoing travels, along with her career as a full-time writer, deepen her identity and give profound and unexpected meaning to cherished pieces of home.

  I initially came to China on a graduate research fellowship to write about the Huizu of Yunnan. One develops a unique blend of skills living here that are not regularly exercised when one leaves. When my two years in Yunnan were over and I moved to the UK, I longed to return. I came back the second time to work as a translator.

Travel is education.

At present, I write full-time. As someone who is entirely self-taught and working in the largely un-excavated terrain of fiction centered on Black Muslims, the process is slow going. I feel very privileged to have the time and space to indulge my imagination in this way.

Living abroad has changed me in profound ways. Travel is education. The story of Franz Ferdinand didn’t mean as much to me as it did after I visited Sarajevo and stood on the spot where he was assassinated, marking the start of the first World War. Also, it is very easy to fall into a kind of regional solipsism when we are only drawing from the local, or live in a context where we are blinded to the ways that other cultures assert themselves in our lives. A few years ago I took a trip back to the town where I was raised. I was melancholy to see that the sign of our old neighborhood Chinese restaurant was still standing there, though the business had closed years before. That sign wreaked of meaning to me; it was part of the texture and terrain of my childhood, etched into my memory like sitting between mom’s knees while she tamed my hair into twists. In my own way, I knew that place. However, it was only as an adult that was I actually able to read the text– East China Sea Restaurant- and see the characters as something more than a bunch of intersecting lines. The sign had its meanings for me, and yet there were other meanings- crucial, indigenous meanings- waiting to be uncovered. Travel isn’t necessary to living a connected life, but it can certainly help cultivate the sympathies necessary to live happily in a diverse world.

I’ll be visiting Europe, Japan and the Caribbean early in the year, and plan at least one trip to the US.