I attended the talk with Travel Writer Pico Iyer.
I was eager to understand how Iyer positions himself as an English-language writer/ American/global citizen- who encounters "the strange", less than familiar.

Iyer unsettled categories of home/away by admitting his hybrid background and upbringing (India, US, UK, Japan) - and how trips to the LA airport or Jackson Heights- enables entry into diverse worlds/communities.

But LA airport is not just a curious multicultural place. Its a location of business travelers and hippies with backpacks who travel out of choice, while refugees and people on restricted visas and asylees and people who worked for their first trip home in decades- often dont speak the same language.

Given the history of colonialism/orientalism endemic to travel writing, I was hoping the conversation would go beyond "we are all human, all vulnerable, all have something to learn" rhetoric.
Sure Iyer has brown skin, it is not just white men traveling, just a little mor honesty pleas

I have always wanted to get away…first to escape the radical provincialism of my hometown of Berkeley, California by shipping off to ruggedly urbane Bryn Mawr College; then to leave behind the suburban rhythms of the Mainline weekend for the pulse of Manhattan on a Friday afternoon; soon enough to seek relief from New York City’s crushing demands by moving to big-sky Los Angeles, a deceptively taxing company town; and eventually to Asia when Hollywood’s mis en scene grew predictable.

Hitting a personal bottom on the far side of the world ten years ago -- as far from my birthplace as I could get without leaving the planet -- was transformative. The experience proved to me that geography is not my villain, it’s my way home.

Anastasia M. Ashman, writing from Istanbul, Turkey
Coeditor, Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey

You know you are home when your provenance is no more in conflict with your destination. When the past and the future convene in the present having come full circle.
You go away, only to come back... to yourself.
But do we really come back or do we just keep going forward, until the circle is full? We may be back at the starting point completely changed, but we are only seemingly different. We have more layers dug into us, more depth carved into our being, making us better able to contain the pain, the angst, the understanding and most of all the love needed to show us the way back...Home.

Home is the end result of the process of elimination. I jettisoned emotional poverty, lack of communication, violence, solitude and monochromatic design theories, and I created a home out of the singularity that remained. There is nothing simple in that singularity, but it resonates with who I am, which is the definition of home.