At the time, I did not know that the journey would follow me home.
Travel often changes us quietly. It enters through the senses—through unfamiliar classrooms, new textures of fabric, shared meals, and conversations that stretch across cultures. That journey expanded my understanding of science, education, and global interconnectedness, but more importantly, it reshaped how I saw my own roots. Standing in China, learning about silk, I began to see my homeland differently—its Eri traditions, its quiet intelligence, its unspoken philosophies.
Yet, it took me six long years to transform that lived experience into a finished book.
Those years taught me something essential about authorship: experience does not become literature immediately. It needs time. It needs silence. It needs a certain inner ripening. Only when memory matures into meaning does an author emerge.
That is when I finally allowed myself to say the word—author.
A travelogue, as many of us know, is a rare literary space. It does not belong to one discipline alone. It allows history, science, geography, philosophy, food, health, economics, humor, poetry, and lived experience to coexist without hierarchy. In a travelogue, the external journey mirrors an inner one. Roads become questions. Landscapes become teachers.
In my work, I have tried to connect the heritage of Eri silk with world culture—linking local wisdom with global narratives. Silk, after all, has always been more than a fabric. It is memory spun into thread. It is labor, ecology, trade, patience, and philosophy woven together. Through silk, I found a language to speak about continuity—how local knowledge converses with the world without losing its soul.
This, perhaps, is what authorship truly is.
An author is not merely someone who writes, but someone who listens long enough for life to speak back. Someone who allows experience to pass through time, reflection, doubt, and courage before becoming words. Someone who understands that writing is not an act of speed, but of sincerity.
My journey to China gave me experiences.
The years that followed gave me authorship.
And in that long interval between travel and text, I learned this quiet truth:
Stories are not written when they happen.
They are written when we are finally ready to understand them.