Anthony Bourdain was the consummate New Yorker: brash, visceral, enigmatic and unapologetic; an unabashed lover of the bizarre and unusual, he was charming and affable, cocky and unruly—a marauding, take-no-prisoners street romantic. On an episode of his show, “The Layover,” Bourdain candidly explained the phenomenon: “You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship is actually pretty short. If you come and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you haven’t totally been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you’re in!” Bourdain loved New York, but he knew that out there, beyond the terminals of JFK and Laguardia, Penn Station, and Port Authority, the other 7.6 billion of the Earth’s inhabitants reside.
The heart of every story belongs to the storyteller, and Bourdain possessed a deep appreciation of that philosophy when interviewing subjects across the globe. But his subjects weren’t merely subjects to Bourdain, or a means to an end, they were people. And they became his friends, they became his family. He was, at his core, a humanist. He held a veritable empathy for the people of the world, their beliefs and aspirations. While accepting the Peabody Award in 2013 for the television series, “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain remarked, “We ask very simple questions: What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook? And everywhere in the world we go and ask these very simple questions. We tend to get some really astonishing answers.”
No matter how strange, desperate or disturbing the world’s political climate became, Bourdain never lost his appreciation for its inhabitants. He realized that each of us, no matter the circumstance, contributes to the contours of our respective societies. Because of that, Bourdain was willing to venture to areas completely foreign to him, or places where his politics might conflict with the local population—most recently West Virginia, a state that he described as “the heart of coal country; the heart of God, guns, Trump and football—all of which I don’t relate to in anyway.” Bourdain engaged the residents and came away inspired. In an interview about his experience with Travel + Leisure, Bourdain says, “We do ourselves a real disservice—those of us on the left, those of us who see Trump as an anathema—to look at everybody who voted for him as an ideologue, a true believer, as a hick or a rube or somehow beneath us…I want people of my political stripe to rethink, or accept the possibility that there’s another way of thinking.”
Forever the advocate for the misfits, the downtrodden, the marginalized, or the forgotten few who live on society’s peripheral borders, Bourdain understood the reality of human depth and the existence of human change—mainly because he was living proof. He shared openly his past struggles with addiction—and his achievements of survival by resilience, care, and adaptation.
We might be tempted to ask, if Bourdain so expertly understood the highs and lows of humanity, if he was able to previously overcome some of his struggles to become the acclaimed chef, writer, television personality and the world traveler that he was, why was he unable to save himself? I don’t think that’s a question we are capable of answering, or should, for that matter. For all that he brought to the attention of the world—the articles, features, and books he wrote; the food he cooked, enjoyed, and shared; the travel series that he produced—Anthony Bourdain had his own story. Like every other citizen of the city that we pass on the street or sit next to on the train, Bourdain contained too a personal life. And he gave us more than enough to go on. Perhaps we should take a page from his book and try just a little bit harder to travel, to learn, to ask the difficult questions, and to listen to the answers. I imagine he would have asked us, What’s so complicated about that?