Essay: "Keeping it Real"

It seems to me that people, especially our generation, are very preoccupied with "authenticity."  You best see this when people go on vacation.  You'll take a trip to Rome or Paris and you'll be looking around for for a restaurant to go to, and you'll think to yourself: "I don't want to go to some tourist joint, I want to go get real Italian/French food.  I want to eat where the locals eat.  I want to get something authentic."

Which begs the question: if you are a tourist, isn't going to a tourist restaurant the authentic thing to do?  Isn't going to a local restaurant sort of a poseur move?

It doesn't just apply to travel either.  We look for authentic music, that comes from the heart, instead of that feels "manufactured" or "fake."  Of course all music is a performance, and hence, indie rock fans are in some ways bigger suckers than the fans of Lady Gaga.  I am reminded of the video where Jon Stewart met Tom Waits.  Jon Stewart said:  I'm just absolutely delighted to see you. I was struck, when I met backstage, by your wife, your family, how unbeaten by life you are. I used to listen to your music and think: "Boy, I'd love to lie in the street nearly dead with that guy!"  Waits replied: It's an act.

North Americans are not exactly alone in this desire for authenticity, but it's not universal either.  The Chinese, for instance, don't seem to be as troubled by it.  My dad worked as a government scientist and he went through this phase where he was always hosting dignitaries from Taiwan. I don't know why; I think there was some talk of building a semicondutor plant or something.  Anyway, these visitors would always want Chinese food when they went out for dinner.  Dad would always take them to the Mandarin Ogilvie, a restaurant I can personally recommend, if you're in the area.

One time he took a Japanese visitor to a fancy French Canadian restaurant in Gatineau.  By chance, a young chef from Japan was training in the kitchen and there was a fancy Japanese dish on the menu.  You can guess what the visitor ordered; apparently he was ecstatic. It was his favourite food, so he ate it.  He was apparently disinterested in trying the local cousine (or, alternatively, pretending to himself that he was something he was not).

None of this is to say Asians never like to eat local food when they go on a trip, any more than I am trying to say American tourists never eat McDonalds on their vacations (and as a side note, if you've never eaten Western fast food on a trip to Asia, all that means is you didn't stay there very long).  Nor am I suggesting that you shouldn't try to "get off the beaten path" or to see things from the local perspective when you go on a trip.  If you're going to bother paying the money and burning the fossil fuels to get to some foreign land, there isn't much sense it just doing the things you'd do at home.

But at the same time, as William Shatner so ably pointed out, I do think we should remember that there is no authentic way to be anything other than to be yourself.  This was the one overwhelming lesson I learned from all my travel; that wherever I went, I was always a stranger to them.  Wherever I went, I was still me.

My authentic life is what I live every day.  Whether you like it or not, when you go to Starbucks, work at your job, and, you know, living your actual life, you're being authentic right there. 

Things can be "good" or "bad", or "boring" or "fun", or "tasty" or "bland", but there's very little you can do that isn't real.  I think we should remember that this moment, the one we're having right now, is as "authentic" as anything else. That our real lives are something someone else would take a trip to see and that our food is so strange to them they might not eat it.  That before our eyes is an assortment of miracles.

What troubles me about those in search of "authenticity", whatever that means, is that the people most earnestly concerned with finding it already have it, without knowing it, and are searching for it in places that it can never be.  That seems like a sure recipe for disappointment to me.