He Didn’t Find Himself, He Found the Next Step

NATIONWIDE -FEBRUARY 2026 - (USAnews.com) It starts with a man running. Not from the law or a lover, but from grief, raw, newly minted, and heavy enough to sink him. His body is broken, his heart cracked open, his compass spinning wildly. Yet somewhere between bars, boats, beaches, and backroads, Kao Lee’s flight turns into something quieter and stranger: a pilgrimage. Out of that chaos comes A Drunk With a Passport, a travel memoir that doesn’t promise redemption, only the next breath, the next laugh, the next step forward.

But this isn’t just a story of one man’s survival. Every dollar earned from Lee’s book will go directly to the poor, a radical act of literary generosity in a world where most memoirs are built to serve the self. “I’ll document every cent,” Lee promises. “If I’m going to tell a story about finding meaning, then that meaning has to exist beyond me.”

A Journey Born from Ruins

Lee’s journey didn’t begin in a bookstore. It began in a refugee camp ,  a boy clutching a half-forgotten dream of flight, escape, and belonging. Decades later, that same boy, now a divorced man nursing both a broken spine and a broken heart, found himself wandering across continents, seeking solace in the blur of airports and the clatter of bar stools.

The book’s pages are soaked in sweat, salt, and whiskey, not as symbols of ruin, but as evidence of survival. In one scene, Lee describes a night of drunken karaoke with strangers who remind him of who he used to be. In another, a storm at sea forces him to confront what it means to keep moving when everything inside you screams to stop.

Through it all, he never romanticizes the fall. Instead, A Drunk With a Passport captures grief as a companion, unwanted, yes, but human. “Healing isn’t the absence of pain,” Lee writes. “It’s learning how to carry joy and damage in the same body.”

Between Humor and Holiness

The memoir’s voice is as startling as it is intimate, funny, profane, poetic, and profoundly spiritual. Lee’s narrative dances between confession and comedy, between the absurdity of self-destruction and the holiness of small mercies.

Unlike the glossy travel influencers who turn suffering into spectacle, Lee’s lens is stripped bare. His travel isn’t curated; it’s chaotic. His enlightenment isn’t tidy; it’s interrupted by hangovers and hospital visits. Yet it’s precisely this refusal to perform that makes the book resonate.

Written from the perspective of a former refugee and first-generation immigrant, A Drunk With a Passport offers a cultural lens rarely seen in travel literature. It treats the act of moving, through space, memory, and pain, as both an act of resistance and return. The landscapes he crosses aren’t just geographic; they’re emotional and ancestral.

A Book That Gives Back

For all its rawness, A Drunk With a Passport is not an exercise in self-pity. It’s a work of service. Every cent earned from the book’s sales will go directly to supporting the poor, with full transparency. On his website and social media, Lee documents each donation and the organizations that receive them.

“I’ve already lived the story,” he says. “Now it’s time for it to mean something beyond me.”

That decision, to give away the book’s profits, reframes the memoir as an act of faith. It’s not redemption through sales, but through stewardship. In turning his own pain into sustenance for others, Lee fulfills the book’s quiet thesis: that meaning is not found at the end of suffering, but in what we choose to do with it.

Refusing Resolution

Most memoirs promise a tidy ending, a healed heart, a lesson learned, a sunrise after the storm. Lee rejects that. A Drunk With a Passport ends not with a revelation, but with a realization: that the next step is enough. That wholeness isn’t something you find; it’s something you build out of the ruins.

The book’s defiance is its invitation. It’s for the burned-out, the divorced, the faithless, the lost, for anyone who has ever laughed while falling apart. Readers looking for a roadmap will find only footprints in the sand, but they’ll know which direction to walk.

About Kao Lee

Kao Lee is an author, traveler, and storyteller whose work explores the intersections of identity, diaspora, and grace. A former refugee and first-generation immigrant, his writing dismantles the myths of travel as escape and instead reimagines it as a return, to self, to memory, to the divine.

His debut memoir, A Drunk With a Passport, is available now at adrunkwithapassport.com. You can also follow his journey on Instagram and Facebook.

Take the Next Step

A Drunk With a Passport isn’t a manual for healing. It’s a companion for the walk, an honest, irreverent, compassionate reminder that your story doesn’t end where it breaks. And by buying the book, you’re not just reading about redemption, you’re helping write someone else’s.

Visit adrunkwithapassport.com to order your copy and follow Kao Lee’s mission to turn one man’s reckoning into a global act of grace.