The Backpack Archipelago

Sean Michael McWilliams. Say the name to yourself a few times, you just might want to remember it. I ran into this apparent traveler demigod on the steamy-morning sidewalks of Kowloon, Hong Kong, just outside of the melting-pot backpacker hovel known as Chungking Mansions.

I offered Sean my fascinated ear for more than an hour, during which he rambled out the sort of tale that could only be told by persons prophetic or psychotic; scratch that, it could also come from a backpacker.

I will do my best to reconstruct it as told, leaving judgments of truth and falsehood to the reader and to future scrutiny. But first--seriously--you should have seen this guy...

...he was wearing faded, short-clipped cutoff jeans, a ragged t-shirt, and a black, many pocketed polyester vest, each compartment bursting with untold tiny scraps of paper. A cacocophony of hair proceeded from his head in every direction, from the long, fraying, and graying ends of his beard to the volcano-shaped crown of his sculpted ginger dreadlocks.

Sean asked me where I was from, and I told him, instigating conversation of a manner that, at least as I've seen it, is second nature among traveling folks. It's a species of secret handshake, done per geography quiz, and offers the chance to launch into stories of one's own travels. Oh, boy did Sean launch.
"America", I said.
"Oh, which state?"
"North Carolina."
"Ah, where in North Carolina?"
"Wilmington."

"Oh ok yea yea, down in the southeast, on the coast. I've been to Wilmington a bunch of times. That was a decade ago but yeah, yeah, I've been there, looking for antiques. Back in the day I went to just about every antique store in North Carolina." He spent a minute summoning lucid memories of my hometown, how he liked it, liked the beaches, liked the antique stores and the waterfront and the battleship. Wow!--was he from North Carolina, I asked?

"Oh nah, I wasn't a local, I'm from Philadelphia."

Asked what inspired him to such zestful antiquing, Sean told me he was a designer, maker, and prolific collector of eyeglasses. "My specialty is modernist glasses, man, like Le Corbusier glasses, you know, stuff that Ivy League guys wore in the 1920s, exactly like Gatsby wore, you know, but Gatsby probably wore fake ones." This joke made sense at first. Shameless status hound, Jay Gatsby, probably would be donning the hippest European eye-wear he could muster. But wouldn't Gatsby be more inclined to the snobbery of not buying the knockoffs? I then realized the question was moot, because Jay Gatsby is a fictional character who never existed, and neither did his eyeglasses.

While Sean said he was a freelancer, he mentioned with a note of nonchalant pride that he used to work for the biggest names in his business. I tossed out the first one that came to mind: "Okay, like Oakley and such?" Blastoff.

"Oh god, yeah I worked for Oakley, you had better watch out for Oakley man , they're all eveil sons of bitches at Oakley, they're trying to mess with my life man, mess with my family, they're trying to shut me up."
I paused for a moment, unsure of how one ought to respond to such a claim, then reached for my notebook.

“No shit? How’s that?”

And so Sean began to educate me about his epic, yet-unfolding struggle against…really, one can hardly describe it…the powers that be, globalization cabal, the establishment, the Man of many names and faces.

The incarnation that sought to silence Sean Michael McWilliams was comprised of no less than the richest man in Italy (“richest or second richest, I'm not sure, but he's got 3 billion dollars.”), the Italian government (“corrupt as hell man, the Italian customs agency is the most corrupt in the world”) fashion moguls Ralph Lauren and Donna Karen, (“disgusting people, demons, man, both of them”), the Mafia (the Mafia’s not like everyone thinks man, they don’t play around with small shit like money laundering, it's big time, man, like government stuff”) Blackwater mercenaries, in the employ of one or more of the preceding, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (“California Mormons are scary, man”).

So it all began when Mr. Italian Billionaire, optics tycoon, (never got a name for this guy) decided to buy out Oakley. This guy’s company apparently made the glasses for Versace and other designer labels. New acquisition at hand, a new sinister fashion synergy was in the works: enter Ralph Lauren. This Italian guy and Ralph Lauren, Sean told me, were tasteless hacks, both of them, bereft of any aesthetic or ethical standards. The spawn of their union was a line of sunglasses with the mark of the Ralph Lauren beast, each pair produced for six bucks a pop in a horrid Shenzhen factory, thirty minutes by train from where we stood, and sold for hundreds, “complete trash glasses, man.” Their scheme, though it sounds like corporate business as usual, was described with a convincing air of high conspiracy.
All of this happened while Sean was working as a highly paid design consultant for Oakley. But once he was tuned in to the nature of that sick outfit, he wanted out, and he wanted his contract paid out in full. When his bosses told him to go to hell, he threatened to go public with the story of the company's designer scammery.

It was after this that matters began to get serious. Sean was still living in Milan, and Italian customs—bone-corrupt as always—were first to bring the hammer down, initiating proceedings to deport him. Since Sean is not only an American but also an Irish citizen (who would've thought, with a name like his?), he would normally be allowed to live and work freely anywhere in the European Union, but these were obviously extraordinary circumstances. Lesser men than Sean might have upped and left, but Sean was “taking their asses to court in Milan right now man, I’ve got my story all together, they’re so screwed.”

That, of course, meant war: in retaliation, the Man doubled down on all fronts, launching a literally global campaign of intimidation and psychic warfare against Sean. In no jurisdiction could he avoid surveillance: the Mafia was on him in Italy, the Mafia was on him in Philly, and three Blackwater agents (“you gotta watch out for Blackwater, you know, a lot of these guys have backgrounds with the State Department”) tracked him all the way to his remote new home in Sanya, on the Chinese island province of Hainan in the South China Sea. At every juncture, the various agents put folders on his doorsteps, all containing pictures they had clandestinely taken of him and his family. Sean said that the Blackwater guys had even taken the (utterly incomprehensible) step of Photo-shopping his head into scenes of gay pornography (“I'm not gay man, they’re just trying to screw with my head.”)

Sean had been on the run ever since, and he had embedded his entire being even more deeply into this broader struggle. Sean had gone to the source, seen it first hand, that awful sunglasses factory in Shenzhen, “not so bad by Shenzhen standards,” where the workers live in attached dormitories, hardly ever get to leave, and are subject to daily “brainwashing” over the PA system. Despite admitted not speaking a word of any Chinese language, Sean had somehow found himself living in the factory dorms, though not working there, and avoiding detection by the ruthless overseers. Not only could Sean empathize with the poor souls whose lot it was to do Ralph Lauren’s dirty work; he had played basketball with them.

As I said before, Sean launched into this story…like one of those satellites shot past Neptune, on a mission with no conclusion.

I should let the reader know, still, that faced with this mother of all traveler rants, I managed to retain only a fractional, degraded version. There was a lot more going on. I learned about Philadelphia design schools, the night-life in five-star Hong Kong, Oakley’s hand in the dirty contracting Bonanza of occupied Iraq (overpriced frames and goggles for soldiers, it seems), the honorary Irish Consul to Milan (what?), who is apparently a formidable lawyer, and beaches in Italy that nobody knows about that are “fucking great, almost as good as Thailand.” I heard repeatedly about how, lowly as he lay next to a scheming billionaire, Sean could “hit him where it hurts man, hit them in their pride.” All he would have to do is take pictures of his own glasses collection and post them on the internet; just the sight of all Sean's treasured frames, culled from 'round the world, would make these high-rollers shade their eyes in shame.

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Just as I was on my way out of Hong Kong, lamenting how I hadn’t yet run into any interesting, maniac backpackers, Sean Michael McWilliams exploded into my morning with a tale so full of traveler tropes that I will need a while to digest it. Sean's outlandish story is a superlative artifact of the value system of the backpacker culture. Central among these values is the exalting of people like Sean, who, through years of traveling and unstructured, self-directed education, have acquired a formidable and idiosyncratic knowledge of the world. And, importantly, Sean could pack his knowledge into a story, and deliver it on the sidewalk to some stranger wearing a backpack.

And I stood there in the sun for an hour and listened respectfully, keeping my mouth shut probably 95% of the time (not my usual habit.) But my personal inclinations came second here to my own adherence to the norms of the traveler culture; in that context, I was the neophyte, perched before my first solo excursion, and Sean was the consummate guru, whose obvious years of experience demanded a level of respect.
In my next post, I will analyze these kinds of social encounters in light of academic scholarship about the backpacker culture. In particular, I will try to explain how the backpacker ideal relates to Antonio Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual.