In his memoir, Coming Alive on the Ride: A Memoir of Motorcycle Travel, Self-Discovery, and Korean Heritage, Michael Yang weaves together his motorcycle adventures with his immigrant story and entrepreneurial adventures in Silicon Valley from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

I spoke with Michael to learn more about motorcycle touring and understand how this form of travel offers a unique slow travel experience.

I love the Korean concept, shinnage (shin-nah-geh), that you introduce in your book. It feels similar to the slow travel invitation of savoring the moment. What is shinnage?

Shinnage is an emotional state of bliss and enthusiasm. It’s a positive, alive feeling when all your attention is focused on one activity. It has the quality of child’s delight. When we play, that’s shinnage, and we can experience it individually and with other people.

Riding a motorcycle is clearly an important way you connect with shinnage.

Yes! I bought my first motorcycle, a green Yamaha, when I was 15 for $200. It was empowering to buy something with my own money that was so fun and freeing. For four months, I rode it everywhere. Unfortunately, it was stolen one night from where I parked it at our San Jose apartment building, and that put an end to my motorcycle riding for a long time.

Young Korean man in a green t-shirt with the number 42 on the front. He holds a helmet under his right arm and stands behind a green Yamaha motorcycle in a residential neighborhood.

You go on your first multi-day motorcycle adventure in November 2018 when you were 57. It feels like an adventure that showed you another path in life and that transformed you. What was the catalyst or the various life events that led to you going on this trip?

I’d sold my company mySimon.com, was remarried and had two young kids, and my new startup was going sideways. I was feeling a lot of stress. I also had extra time and felt the itch to ride a motorcycle again, to do something fun for myself. So, I bought a motorcycle and did some local touring in California. I’d just go for the day, but I reconnected with my joy while riding a motorcycle. It was very freeing.

Two men in motorcycle gear: Michael in gray on the left and Karl in safety yellow on the right making a thumb's up. Between them is a 0km marker in a bricked plaza. — Trans-Canada Highway 0km in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada. Michael on the left and Karl on the right.

My friend, Karl, also enjoyed motorcycle riding. He lived in Seattle and said, “Hey, let’s go ride together.” He came down to California, and in November 2018, I went on my first overnight motorcycle tour with him and another friend, Robert. The first day of the trip in the mountains near San Diego was wet and cold, and I was nearly hypothermic, but we made it to lodging without a problem after stopping at a rest area to warm ourselves under the hand dryers. The rest of the trip was beautiful, and I loved the whole experience. Since then, I’ve been on trips all over.

You clearly enjoyed riding solo on day trips. What kept you from doing overnight trips on your own?

I think it was just the unknowns of everything. I had all these questions about what I might run into: weather, terrain, sketchy neighborhoods. There was always the possibility of accidents and bad things happening. What if I got stuck or had mechanical issues? What if I encountered bad people?

It wasn’t that first overnight trip, but when I did get stuck, other people who were also out traveling helped me. Karl was ahead of me that time and didn’t know I was stuck, but everything worked out. So, it was the combination of going with a friend who was also a rider and having the experience of overnight trips that helped build my confidence to go on long solo trips.

How does your wife feel about you going on these motorcycle trips, and how do you balance family life with adventuring?

Michael Yang in his motorcycle gear with his motorcycle. A short woman is next to him and his four children: three boys and a girl. The youngest boy in the foreground on a bicycle waves to the camera, and the girl holds a small white dog. — Michael with his family

Part of why I ride a lot of miles each day on a long trip is because I can’t be away from home for long periods of time. Maybe I can only take one big trip a year, about a month at most. My wife, Sunny, understands that these trips are something I love, but it puts a lot of extra stress and responsibility on her with the family and her own work.

Sunny really enjoys skiing. We go on family on ski trips, and Sunny also goes skiing with her friends a few times a year to partly compensate for my long motorcycle trips. Once a year, we go on an adventure as a family, which everyone enjoys. My kids call me the adventure dad.

When you’re traveling, do you ever feel discrimination because you’re Korean?

Not really. There was one experience during a trip in early 2020 when I was headed to Seattle. There were a lot of places in lockdown because of the pandemic. I’d been posting updates about my trip on Facebook, and I was in Northern California when I received a message from someone in a motorcycle group in Oregon. He said, “Don’t come into Oregon.” COVID was rumored to have originated from China, and because I’m Asian, he assumed I was Chinese. Other than that, my Korean identity hasn’t been a factor to make me worry.

Are you networked within the motorcycling community or do you just have a few friends that you like to ride with?

In southern California, I ride with a group of Korean American motorcyclists. It’s a group of people with loose relationships who come together to ride. I guess you could call that a network for me.

I also recently joined the South Coast BMW Riders group. There’s a nominal fee to join and then you get to go on rides with other members of the group.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve met motorcycle riders around the world by posting about my trips. There’s a long-distance motorcycle travelers group, a motorcycle touring group, and Horizon Unlimited Motorcycle Travelers. Even if we don’t ride together, we connect in other ways through these groups by sharing information about areas and routes.

How do you select a route, and what are the most pleasurable routes to ride?

I love to see new places, and I especially like places with natural beauty like deserts, mountains, fjords, and forests. I also enjoy very remote places.

I like to visit places with notoriety like Mt. Everest basecamp in China, Mt. Evans, the highest elevation motorable road in America, in Colorado, and places where the road ends, like Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, Nordkapp in Norway, and Ushuaia in Argentina.

Places with history and culture also appeal to me. Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Medows National Historic Site is at the end of the road and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is the place where Lief Erikson landed about 1,000 years ago. It’s the oldest documented European landing and settlement in the Americas, 500 years before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.

Because I’m an immigrant, visiting L’Anse aux Meadows offered me a reflection on my own journey. When I left Korea and arrived in the U.S. in 1976, I had to learn new values and norms. Like the Norse people who landed at L’Anse aux Meadows, I had to adapt to a new environment.

So when I’m planning a trip, these are the kinds of experiences I seek. Long trips are hard, and the challenge of undertaking them and the difficulty of completing them come with a great sense of accomplishment. I get to experience raw nature, which I really like. Many of these places are also bucket list destinations for motorcycle riders because of the challenge.

What are some of the physical experiences you enjoy while riding a motorcycle?

It feels like flying a few feet above the ground. Sometimes, because it’s fun, I might go through curves faster. Riding a motorcycle feels a little bit like a rollercoaster, but I think it’s better. While it may not be as thrilling or exhilarating as a rollercoaster, you are riding the engine, which means you control your speed and aren’t locked into tracks. It’s very free and the experience lasts much longer than the few seconds of a rollercoaster ride.

In your book, you mentioned getting sleepy. How does that happen? I imagine it’s similar to driving because you’re not using your body to power the motorcycle.

Yeah, sleepiness happens when the body is warm, and it can be dangerous. When you start riding in the morning, the air temperature is typically cool. When you add the windchill of moving 60-70 mph, it’s cold. To deal with the cold, you wear a jacket and maybe other layers underneath. By the middle of the day when things have warmed up, you don’t need as many layers to stay warm, and that’s when you can start to feel sleepy.

When I start feeling sleepy, I’ll look for a place to pull off the road and take off my jacket or a layer and then keep going. I also keep gum in my pants pocket where it’s easy to get to while I’m driving. Chewing gum helps me wake up.

What prompted you to write Coming Alive on the Ride?

I started a memoir in 2001 when I sold mySimon, but then I put it on pause because I was going through a divorce and not in a good mental state. I started thinking about it again in 2022 during my trip from Los Angeles to Newfoundland.

While I was riding, I had lots of time to reflect: How am I so lucky? How did I get here? I had a very humble beginning in Korea, so how did this all happen? There was a moment when I was crossing the Rocky Mountains – the clouds, the mountains, the sky – everything was so beautiful. I felt happy and full of gratitude.

I’d been posting on Facebook and getting appreciation and admiration from people. The shinnage came through. Several people encouraged me to write a book with my experience of startups in Silicon Valley and motorcycle travel.

Writing a book can be an arduous undertaking even for people practiced in the craft. What challenges did you experience writing your book?

English is not my mother tongue. It’s a foreign language for me, and that was a challenge. I’m also not a writer. I studied electrical engineering and computer science in school and have a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). While I write business communications, writing a book was a new undertaking. I took some classes at the local community college on memoir and also accidentally ended up in a scriptwriting class. I did the best I could to start writing. There were moments when I felt like giving up on the idea because it didn’t seem like a good story or a good book. But friends and family encouraged me, and I kept at it.

One of the things I worked on a lot was story structure. The writing improved, but I didn’t feel that the manuscript was ready to be published. I called a friend who had published a book and asked him for advice. He suggested I work with a ghostwriter who could help me with the story structure and refine the writing.

I worked with a ghostwriter for about a year. This writer suggested I share more about the motorcycle travels and alternate chapters between the motorcycle story and the stories about my Korean heritage and Silicon Valley.

Black and white photo of a small Korean child standing next to a stone wall. He's wearing a collared jacket with four large white buttons and plaid pants. He has rosy cheeks and a look of delight.

For people who are looking for a change in their lives or interested in exploring shinnage, what advice do you have?

Think back to what you enjoyed doing as a kid. We often forget as we get older the pleasures that brought us joy. I invite all of us to step out of our comfort zone toward fun. That’s where we find shinnage.

I like motorcycle touring, but other people might find shinnage closer to home or in other activities. You don’t have to go far to find it.

If you’re not sure how you find shinnage, tune into your body. What’s your itch?

Connect with Michael:

Get your copy of Coming Alive on the Ride
Follow his motorcycling adventures on Facebook
Explore more or email him at michaelyang.com

Michael Yang experiences shinnage while traveling by motorcycle

Book review - Coming Alive on the Ride