Interview Jamie Catto Travels the World to Ask: What About Me?

🌍 The Question That Stopped Me Mid-Step

I stood barefoot on damp volcanic soil in a remote village outside Hualien, Taiwan—rain misting my arms, steam rising from a nearby hot spring, the scent of wet bamboo thick in the air—when an elderly woman named A-ma placed a warm bowl of zongzi into my hands and asked, softly, ‘What about me?’ Not in English. In Mandarin. And not as a rhetorical flourish—but as a direct, unflinching invitation to witness her life, her labor, her quiet resistance to being erased by tourism’s tide. That moment crystallized what I’d been chasing since reading about Jamie Catto’s What About Me? project: a way to travel that didn’t extract, but reciprocated; that didn’t perform curiosity, but practiced it—with humility, patience, and sustained attention. This wasn’t just about interviewing people across 40 countries—it was about learning how to ask what about me? without turning the answer into content.

🗺️ The Setup: Why I Carried a Notebook Instead of a Backpack

It began in early 2022—not with a flight, but with a pause. I’d spent five years moving through Southeast Asia and Latin America on tight budgets: hostels booked via last-minute apps, buses missed due to translation errors, meals negotiated over hand gestures and shared laughter. I was good at getting by. But I wasn’t good at staying—truly staying—in one place long enough for the surface to soften. When I read about Jamie Catto’s decade-long solo journey—visiting over 40 countries, filming conversations with strangers who responded to the simple prompt ‘What about me?’—I didn’t want to replicate his film. I wanted to understand the discipline behind it¹. How do you hold space for someone’s story when your own visa expires in 12 days? How do you listen without editing for shareability? And crucially: how do you fund that kind of slow, open-ended travel without institutional backing?

I sold most of my gear, kept only a 12kg backpack, and bought a one-way ticket to Taipei—not because it was ‘on trend,’ but because it offered what I needed most: accessible public transport, low-cost homestays, and a culture where elders still sit on street corners mending nets or folding paper cranes, visible, unperformative, unbranded. My plan wasn’t to interview 100 people. It was to ask what about me? three times—in three different contexts—and see if the question landed differently each time.

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Question Fell Flat

The first ‘what about me?’ happened in a co-working space in Ximending. I approached a young graphic designer named Lin, explained my intent, and asked gently: ‘What about you?’ She smiled politely, answered in fluent English about her freelance workload and rent hikes, then excused herself to take a call. Her words were articulate—but her posture had closed. Her eyes flicked toward the door. I’d mistaken accessibility for openness.

The second attempt was worse. In a rural tea farm near Lugu, I sat with Mr. Chen for two hours—shared oolong, watched him prune bushes with calloused hands—then asked the question. He paused, looked at me, and said: ‘You came here to write something. I know this. So tell me: what will you write?’ Not hostile. Just weary. Accurate. I hadn’t earned the right to ask yet—I’d shown up with a notebook, not a commitment.

That night, under a sky pricked with stars so dense they blurred the Milky Way, I realized the flaw in my approach: I’d treated what about me? as a linguistic tool, not a relational contract. Jamie Catto hadn’t traveled the world to collect answers—he’d traveled to practice asking in ways that made answering safe, possible, even desirable. My conflict wasn’t logistical. It was ethical. And it couldn’t be solved with better translation apps or longer stays—it required relearning how to move through places as a guest, not a gatherer.

🌅 The Discovery: Learning to Wait in the Silence

I stopped asking. For ten days, I worked alongside A-ma’s family harvesting rice in Yuli Township—not for pay, but for permission to stay. No recordings. No notes. Just showing up before dawn, bending, rinsing seedlings in the irrigation channel, eating lunch on a plastic sheet under a tarp. On day nine, A-ma handed me a steamed sweet potato, wiped her brow, and said: ‘You don’t ask. You wait. Then I tell.’

That was the pivot. I began to notice what preceded speech: the way a fisherman in Taitung adjusted his net twice before speaking about losing his boat to typhoon season; how a retired schoolteacher in Pingtung paused mid-sentence to feed stray cats before continuing her story about teaching during martial law. Listening wasn’t passive. It was active noticing—of gesture, rhythm, silence, repetition. It meant carrying less gear (I ditched my voice recorder after A-ma gestured to her ear and said, ‘If you hear me, you remember. If you press a button, you forget.’), and more patience.

In Kaohsiung, I met Javier—a Colombian teacher who’d lived in Taiwan for 17 years. Over strong coffee at a neighborhood café de barrio, he told me how he’d learned Mandarin not through classes, but by volunteering at a senior center, letting elders correct his tones while he helped them video-call grandchildren abroad. ‘Language isn’t grammar,’ he said, stirring sugar slowly. ‘It’s the willingness to be wrong, repeatedly, in front of someone who’s seen more than you have.’ That became my new metric: not how many interviews I completed, but how often I allowed myself to be corrected—not linguistically, but relationally.

Practical insight emerged organically: staying in family-run guesthouses (min-su) instead of hostels meant shared meals, not just rooms. Eating at local markets—not food courts—meant vendors remembered my face, my order, my hesitant Mandarin. I stopped using ride-hailing apps and walked or took the bus, arriving late but arriving *with* people—not past them. One rainy afternoon on Bus #812 from Hualien to Taroko, an older man noticed my notebook and slid over. He didn’t ask why I was writing. He pointed to a landslide scar on the mountain wall and said, ‘My father rebuilt this road. Twice. You want to know about me? Start there.’ And I did—spending the next week with engineers documenting post-disaster reconstruction, not as a journalist, but as a learner who showed up with thermos of ginger tea and questions that began with ‘How did you decide…?’ instead of ‘Tell me about…’

🚌 The Journey Continues: From Interviewer to Witness

By month four, the structure dissolved. I wasn’t ‘interviewing’ anymore—I was participating. I helped paint murals with youth in Taichung’s arts district after learning their stories weren’t about aspiration, but about land rights. I joined a women’s weaving cooperative in Hualien, learning how indigo dyeing rhythms mirrored tidal cycles—and how younger members were reviving patterns nearly lost to industrial textile imports. Each act of participation recalibrated my understanding of ‘budget travel’: it wasn’t just about spending less money, but investing more time, attention, and reciprocity. A shared meal cost less than a museum ticket—but its value compounded when I returned with ingredients for the next one, or helped transcribe oral histories into bilingual booklets for local schools.

When I finally crossed into Vietnam—via land border at Móng Cái—I carried no script. No list of questions. Just notebooks filled with sketches, phrases, names, and addresses of people who’d said, ‘Come back when the lychees ripen,’ or ‘Ask my daughter—she remembers the stories I forget.’ In Hanoi’s Old Quarter, I sat with Ms. Lan, a 78-year-old former textile dyer, for three mornings. She taught me how to fold cloth for traditional áo dài pleats—not because I’d asked, but because I’d brought her granddaughter’s university acceptance letter to show, and stayed to help mend a torn curtain. On the third day, she unpinned a faded silk scarf from her chest and said, ‘This was my mother’s. She wore it when French soldiers left. What about me? I kept the color. That is all.’

💡 Reflection: What Travel Demands of Us—Not Just What We Take

This trip didn’t teach me how to travel cheaper. It taught me how to travel *slower*—not as a luxury, but as a necessity for ethical engagement. Budget travel, I realized, isn’t defined by hostels or hitchhiking alone. It’s defined by where you allocate your finite resources: time, attention, emotional bandwidth. Choosing a $5 homestay over a $25 hotel matters—but choosing to eat breakfast with your host every day, asking how her son’s job search is going, remembering to bring medicine for her arthritis—that’s where real cost savings happen. Not in currency, but in trust built, access granted, stories entrusted.

I used to think ‘what about me?’ was a question for others. Jamie Catto’s work showed me it’s also a question for the traveler. What about *me*, when I enter a space? What assumptions am I carrying? What power dynamic am I reinforcing by holding the pen—or the phone—or the passport that lets me leave when I choose? The most practical skill I gained wasn’t bargaining at markets or deciphering bus schedules. It was learning to sit with discomfort—the silence after a question lands, the awkwardness of mispronouncing a name, the humility of accepting correction without defensiveness. That discomfort wasn’t a barrier. It was the threshold.

📝 Practical Takeaways: Lessons Woven Into Motion

These insights didn’t come from guides or blogs—they emerged from repeated, imperfect attempts to connect:

• 🌏 Start with contribution, not inquiry. Before asking ‘what about you?’, offer something tangible: help carry groceries, fix a leaky faucet, teach a basic digital skill. Reciprocity isn’t transactional—it’s relational scaffolding.
• 🚋 Use public transport as your primary social interface. Buses and trains force proximity, shared waiting, unscripted exchanges. In Taiwan, I learned more about intergenerational land disputes riding Bus #202 than in any formal interview.
• 🍜 Eat where locals eat—then return. Not once, but repeatedly. Vendors notice consistency. They begin offering unsolicited advice, sharing news, inviting you to festivals. This isn’t ‘access’—it’s gradual inclusion.
• 📝 Carry analog tools only. Pen, paper, small sketchbook. Digital devices create psychological distance—even when turned off. A notebook signals presence, not documentation.
• 🤝 Learn three essential phrases—in the local language—not for convenience, but for accountability: ‘May I sit with you?’, ‘How do you say this correctly?’, and ‘Thank you for your time.’ Say them slowly. Accept correction. Repeat.

“The deepest stories aren’t told in response to questions. They’re offered in response to presence.” — A-ma, Yuli Township, Taiwan

⭐ Conclusion: Travel as a Practice of Attention

I didn’t return home with a film reel or a viral article. I returned with 17 notebooks, three pairs of worn sandals, and a changed relationship to time. ‘What about me?’ stopped being a question I asked others—and became the compass I use to evaluate every travel decision: What about me, when I book this tour? What about me, when I skip the homestay for a ‘better-rated’ hotel? What about me, when I translate someone’s story without naming their village, their craft, their actual words?

Jamie Catto’s global journey wasn’t about answers. It was about sustaining the question—across borders, languages, and silences—until it reshaped the asker. That’s the quiet, uncompromising work of intentional travel. Not seeing more—but seeing deeper. Not moving faster—but arriving more fully. And sometimes, that means standing barefoot on damp volcanic soil, holding a warm bowl, and finally understanding that the most radical thing you can do with your privilege is to wait—and let someone else set the pace.