I sucked as an expat.
As an inveterate traveler, this was shameful to me, I was embarrassed by the bouts of homesickness. I was ashamed of the days I spent bleakly staring at what was, by all accounts, a breathtakingly beautiful landscape and wishing, with all my might, that I was elsewhere. I felt awkward and out of place at dinner tables even though I was surrounded by people who were kind and hospitable, who complimented my clumsy German while they swerved effortlessly in and out of English. I felt both invisible and too obvious in public, walking the pedestrian avenues of the nearby market town. Supermarkets flustered me — I could not bag my own groceries, translate the amount the checkout clerk asked me for, and count out the still unfamiliar currency at the same time. I was laden with change I was unable to spend because I couldn’t decipher the coins fast enough.
I’ve been reading the journals of a young friend who’s spending a semester in Central America. We go way back — his mom hired me for a job many years ago and we grew into that not-quite-family relationship that you have with people who you are delighted to see uninvited on your porch. I get to read the journal emails the wandering son sends to his extended family back home — they are a joy, he has a fantastic way with words. He declined when I offered to set him up with a blog — too much pressure to produce, he smartly said. I was disappointed because I wanted to be able to share, but I understand and respect his reasons.
Recently, this young traveler wrote about how pleased he was that he’d found a friend, on his own, without the intercession of his hosts. As a failed expat, the significance of his remark wasn’t wasted on me. I promptly hammered off email to his mom. “This is a big deal,” I told her, “and means that odds are excellent that he’s happy.” I was reminded of the time I went for coffee with a classmate in my German for Auslanders course. She was my neighbor, a real pistol of a young woman. Raised Muslim in Kosovo, she’d married a Catholic Austrian, moved into his house on the family farm, and worked night shift at a local factory while learning German during the day. She took me to the place she liked to go, a cafe at the local bowling alley. It was full of refugees, Croations and Slavs smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. We spoke English; she told me how annoyed she was that her husband wanted to name their first son Maximilian, after the emperor. I don’t remember why this irked her but I remember thinking that Emperor Max would have hated her, he wasn’t exactly kind to minorities.
While we sat in the cafe, I was both delighted and sad. I loved sitting there with her, German pop in the background, Bosnians in cheap sweaters smoking at the next table, because I felt like I was a real person, like I was outlined in black. During most of my time as an expat, I felt smudgy and out of focus. The refugees I talked to thought I was crazy; why had I left America? Even after I told them I’d married an Austrian, they weren’t satisfied; why hadn’t he moved to the US? She was something, my neighbor and classmate, carving out her new life by sheer force of will, as were other refugees I met, but we had nothing in common but our outsiderness and sitting with her, drinking strong coffee and breathing second hand smoke reminded me of our differences.
When you travel through a place, you don’t have to participate in daily existence with those who live there. Your eyes can stick wherever they want, you can catch tiny details like graffiti or sweaters that remind you of bad drag queens back home. You can put up with the smoky cafe for the afternoon, you will be somewhere else tomorrow, the next day. You can be lonely and then remember, “Oh, I expect to be lonely, this isn’t my home.” A human connection is a surprise, a delight, not a lifeline. When you shift from passive observer to resident, though, it’s not an minor nuisance that soy sauce only comes in three ounce bottles or that you haven’t had a real conversation with anyone but your mate in three weeks. I get angry when I read cute little expat memoirs that present a quirky yet affectionate view of a magical life abroad because they don’t tell the whole story. Maybe it’s possible to have a mostly seamless transition to life in a new country, to fall into expat life like a comfortable bed. Maybe. But I don’t believe it, not for a minute.
It’s tempting to blame my failure as an expat on Austria herself, but that’s not fair. People were kind and hospitable, the country is beautiful, breathtakingly so, the food is so much better than you imagine. It’s a lovely place. Now that I have expat life a few years behind me, I wonder if it’s not my traveling style that undid me as an expat. Maybe you need a broader view. If you observe too acutely, the graffiti is offensive, the sweaters are sad hand-me-downs. No place can hold up to that kind of intense scrutiny. I never reached detente with Austria, I never stopped looking much too closely, I never backed up to take a longer view. I couldn’t switch off the message in my brain that said, “Hey! We’re in a foreign place so observe carefully, because we might not be this way again.” I woke up every day an outsider, every day a tourist, and looked, hard, at where I was.
Because of that acute sense of observation, I can describe to you, today, many years later, the day I sat on the bench overlooking the lake and felt the season change from summer to fall. This is a fine thing to remember and sometimes, when I want to clear my head, I think of that moment, of the light coming from the west and the green reflection on the water and the slight lift and chill in the wind, like remembering the smell of snow. But I envy my young friend in Central America. He has something better. I am projecting, surely, but I imagine he feels himself coming into focus, his edges sharp against the landscape of a far away place.
With a morning shout to H, may he always travel happy and light. And to my expat posse, D who still lives over there, C who keeps a big chunk of her heart in BC even though her life is in that one country, and S who went home.
Pam,this is lovely and insightful. I think I shall return to it, if and when I get to be an expat too, so that I might try and capture what you describe, and not be lost in that zone that would be so tricky to avoid…
Great essay! When people ask me what my best expat advice is, (okay, not that many people ask, but I’ve been practicing for when they do), I always say, “it’s okay to go home.” So many expats expect that miraculous life abroad that you mention and then do not know how to deal once it never appears. It’s okay to go home! (As a serial expat I don’t think I ever will, but it’s nice to know.)
Pam, thank you so much for this wonderfully thoughtful and delicate piece. I think you are right about making a friend all on your own being an important step towards autonomy in a new culture. That feeling you had of realness while sitting in the cafe with the bowling alley is what makes life as an expat a joyous adventure. That feeling and the other acute feeling of not fitting in, battle for your attention every single day. What happens eventually with the homesickness is that you don’t have a home to go back to: the place you live changes you into a knobby peg for the round hole and the place you came from changes slowly but irrevocably towards something foreign. After living nearly thirty years in Germany, I am “my German friend” to all those I left behind in Canada, but forever “my Canadian friend” to all I know here in Germany. The “real” person is neither.
Lovely words and thoughts!
Certainly, the idea of being an expat and being one are often two very different things. I had always dreamt about living abroad as a child, a romantic notion based on books I suppose, but it was a real shock when I first did it in my twenties in Italy. I had terrible bouts of homesickness and could really relate to your experience.
I think place, age, personality, how well you know the language, how accepting the community is and experience can make a huge difference on how one interprets the expat life.
Austria is a very different culture than Spain. We have spent quite a bit of time there, including renting an apartment & a long hospital stay in a small town. There are also German and English expats in Spain who have lived here 25 years and do not speak one word of Spanish, nor do they know a Spaniard.
I’ve talked to many Europeans who say that the people in Spain are much more accepting of people from other countries than most of Europe. My physical therapist is very fluent in German ( and 3 other languages) and she says if she moved to Austria or Germany, she would ALWAYS be “the Dane” and separate, not accepted.
Yet, she feels part of the community in Spain with many close friends who are Spaniards and has lived here with her English husband for many years. I observe many of the long time expats in our small village in Spain who are very much part of the community in every way with close Spanish friends & even participate in the local government.
Not everyone accepts, even a neighbor from northern Spain has pointed out, those who will not accept outsiders ( this is a village where there are 6 sets of cousins in my daughters small class)…but most do.
We’re slow travelers on an open ended world tour, so not exactly expats, but after 4 years of wintering in the same village, I’ve certainly had a much better experience than my first time of living in Europe.
Perhaps it is because we have a child in the local school, perhaps because it is such a small town, perhaps because I’m older, perhaps because it is Spain and always sunny, but I’ve truly enjoyed our expat/travel existence here and we have not been homesick once.
We are actually more at home here and on the road than we are at home in the U.S. The expat/permanent traveler lifestyle so suits us, I don’t think we ever want to go back to live in America or belonging to just one country.
As someone who once sucked at being an expat to someone who loves it, I can say, things can change. 😉
Whew. Thank you so much for writing that. Spot on, as always. *smooch*
(And hey, my heart will be in B.C. for real again in exactly a month!)
I agree with Soultraveler above – things can change. I’ve been in Italy nearly 10 months now and – without realising quite when it happened – I’m happy. There are certainly elements of my life that aren’t hunky dory, but that’s not to do with being an expat, it’s to do with life not always being shiny and happy. That’s just the way things are, wherever you live.
I still haven’t made an independent friend, though. All my contacts are with people connected to the school where I teach, and it’s hard to get away from that, especially when I still suck BIG time at speaking Italian. It’s a bit of a spiral, as I teach English, so my life revolves around bullying students into NOT speaking Italian.
Lovely writing, as always, from a seriously talented writer.
Very thoughtful piece. Thank you.
My sister has been married for nearly 40 years to a man who grew up in a remote part of east Tennessee. How remote? It was a 7 mile walk to the nearest grocery store. This brother in law was the first member of his family to go to college, in fact, the first member of his family to finish high school. The point is that when he married my sister they went to live for a time in the hollow that he grew up in along with a number of cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. His family could never understand why he didn’t go to live with “her people” after the marriage. It surprises me still the cultural differences just below our seemingly homogeneous surface.
@ST3/Katja: Things can change and they do. But connecting to a place is a deeply personal undertaking. It’s great for you that you’re successful, you’re better at being expats than I. So is my pal in Central America. I’m as clued into the value of that as anyone, perhaps more so given that I failed.
I used to hate it when people would tell me “Oh, you’ll get used to it” or “Oh, it’s just that you’re in place A not place B” because I didn’t get used to it and I couldn’t control the place I was in. It just made me feel worse. I didn’t choose Austria on a whim. I couldn’t decide my life would be better were my husband to be, oh, Turkish and from Istanbul.
Now I think, “Awesome for you that it’s going well. Really. I’m genuinely pleased for you. Now, please excuse me, I’m going to book a ticket home.”
Very well said, Pam. I think the first time we ever “talked” through blog comments was over discussion of living as an ex-pat in Austria. I had a terribly hard time there, too. Now, oddly, I miss it, because the quality of life in Vienna was so high, and because the friends we made ended up being the ones that lasted. But I never felt at home when I lived there, always lonely and unappreciative.
That said, I’ve been a better ex-pat in other places, Russia and Scotland in particular. Maybe it makes a different if it’s a place you choose as “home” yourself, rather than following someone else? My husband loved Austria. I didn’t. He could make it his home. I couldn’t. He’d probably feel the same way if I dragged him to St. Petersburg.
Anyway, beautiful essay.
Thanks for this beautiful piece. I’ve felt the same way more than once since I moved from Puerto Rico to the US – and doubled it with an Albanian boyfriend. There are many feelings that we need to hide in an effort to blend in our new environment, but you exposed them all in an honest and personal way.
Some things can change the experience, like having your family with you, or mastering the language (slang included). But it also depends on how the traditions and day to day life differs from point A to point B, and above all on how much we feel attached to point A. Best case scenario would be finding a confortable place mid way.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I think a lot of people think the expat life is dreamy and romantic, so your insights are particularly interesting. This line specifically stuck with me: “If you observe too acutely, the graffiti is offensive, the sweaters are sad hand-me-downs.”
oh yay. yesterday’s links led me someplace strange, and this led me someplace beautiful. Beautifully developed, and I’m glad you’re where you belong now. Because in a lot of ways it’s all about belonging.
Pardon me while I go shout your latest missive from the rooftops (only from inside, because it’s damn cold here).
I didn’t feel this way at all in Rome – my own book is a cute expat memoir, in fact – but honest to God, I had the freaking time of my life during those first couple of years, and while I missed specific people back home, there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be.
What you wrote above, though, is more like how I felt when I first moved to France. I wonder if it is that you were entering your mate’s world? I know for me, that was my problem in the beginning. Also, it was my first time as an expat in an expat community, and I had no idea what on earth that was all about. I’ve since come to stick with my close expat friends, and shy away from the larger community – it’s just not my style.
@Christine: I’ve heard of these “expat communities” and their pitfalls, but my life in the snow globe was expat community free. Once, I met an English woman who lived in Graz, and a neighbor had a 16 year old exchange student from Maine and, uh, yeah. That’s about it. The Bosnians, they hung out together in town, but where we lived…
Being an expat takes a really special kind of person. It is not for everybody, and travelers do not necessarily make the best long term expats. They are similar but separate skillsets.
I have been living in Germany for over 2 and a half years. I really never thought I would be an expat, but ever a traveler. Now I can really say I am both. I like my German home and have no plans to go back to the US, but I still have dreams to travel the world. Those are two separate urges for me.
To be an expat you need to be able to either be comfortable to live between two worlds or in both simultaneously. I say often that I didn’t fit in at home. I still don’t fit in here, but I am not supposed to so it is ok. For me, I enjoy this double life of being able to be inside the english-speaking community and still a part of the host community. To be able to slip in and out is a great joy of mine.
I also find that the daily hardships can be very useful for personal growth. Being an expat is the ultimate in getting out of your comfort zone, as the times you are truly comfortable have been reduced. I can’t worry so much about life and my decisions if I have to concern myself with getting to the store before it closes.
As a long time expat very good friend of mine says.. “when I think about home, I can say it is paradise on earth, yet have no desire to ever move back there and still this is not a paradox in my mind, it is simply so.”
You obviously needed a gay mafia. LOL
Thanks for what you wrote Pam. I’m new to this world of blogging and as I sit in my wonderful little yellow-walled room on Kauai (in a house where I’ve lived for 15 years) with my notes from letters written while in France last year for a short 2 months to learn French, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be an expat. I appreciate your honesty and imagine you may find my blog annoying (when I add these letters and pictures) because of its generally upbeat tone. But yes, I wasn’t really living there; I was simply passing through, a tourist hanging out to learn the language. But I do know German and think, huh, what would it be like to live in Austria, or Switzerland, or ? ? ?
So, thanks for writing. And what a cool blog you have, and from this position, life. And maybe you’re thinking; wow, she lives on Kauai. Must be wonderful. It is; but travel and other places are always appealing too . . . and yep, one can always “go home.” Mahalo for writing.
As a three-time expat, I found myself doing a lot of murmuring “Oh, yes!” while reading this. Living in a place is totally different than visiting.
We found Japan very challenging, but grew to love it and feel very comfortable there. When we moved to the Netherlands we thought, “This will be a piece of cake in comparison.”
Sure enough, though, at about the 5-6 month mark, the thrill was gone and we were right back in our early days in Japan, thinking things like….WHY don’t the banks operate in a way that makes sense so I can withdraw money without hassle? WHAT are those things in the supermarket? WHY can’t anyone here seem to make an efficient clothes washer and dryer? and etcetera.
If I live outside of the US again, at least I will know to expect to feel confused and frustrated once the newness wears off, until I eventually find my footing and “come into focus.” 🙂
I lived in Cyprus and South Yemen as a kid. In those days travel was an adventure by ship or turboprop airplane. My best memory is of how green Engalnd was to come back to, walking on the grass not the path because it was so fresh springy and green, staring open mouthed at the green of the trees.
I love to travel but there is no place like home, and Englands beauty is special
A really great heart-felt piece. Thanks for writing.
@Andrew being a good traveler or a good expat are different skill sets — I think you’re spot on.
I’ve found my expectations to be a big part of difficulty to becoming an expat. It’s the little difficulties in relating to a new country that are the most haunting, as you mention, not being able to count coins and things. As a traveler, it’s much easier to laugh off these troubles, but when it’s your life, it’s easy to feel like an epic failure.
My Expat round 1 was craptastic, and I’m happy to be back to traveling again. I’m hoping under new circumstances someday, Expat round 2 will be a success. Perhaps you can find the same.
Hey Pam, I didn’t realize that Austria was this painful for you. I would have never made it outside of Vienna either. I have also heard/read similar thoughts from expats in Vienna. Austria and Vienna are two very different things, and they can be very tough on expats, no doubt about it. Everyone writes or tells about the expat experience from their own point of view. There is no way you will know how you will feel until you are actually in a foreign place. Just because someone felt great living in Vienna doesn’t mean you’ll like it there too or make friends with the seam ease. I am quite familiar with the “Auslaender Hass” altough I am not in any of the targeted groups: Muslims, Jews, Blacks, people from the Balkans, etc. I have experienced it in a different setting in Germany, as an immigrant. Yet those are just “bad apples”, not very different from the bad apples back home. Yes, Seattle is a nice rainbow oasis, but how do people treat you the minute you are in Snohomish? I got “the look” from waitresses just 50 miles east of Seattle because I had a Korean with a strong accent in tow. I am not defending Austrian society, God knows they could do a lot better and open up more, but people are people all over the world. The old toothless women in a village in South Korea marveled about the first white person they saw up close (me), just like my own Romanian grandmother, still living in a remote mountain village marveled about the foreigners I brought with me to visit. Societies all over the world are what they are, with cultures and traditions that have shaped them for centuries. We in turn are a product of our own background and environment that has shaped us into what we are. Some environments are easier than others to adapt to, it all depends on how flexible we are or we want to be. At another place in my life I never dreamt I could live anywhere else but the US, but then it wasn’t enough for me anymore. Some day I may decide I want to go back. I have a few places I call home. That is why I never liked the word “expat”, to me it sounds just like “immigrant”. It implies you are out of place. But you are not, you are a world citizen, you chose to be there, tomorrow you choose to be somewhere else. An immigrant does not have a choice, he is constrained to take that path to save himself or his family. To a certain degree you can change your immediate environment, but if you can’t and you find yourself suffering in it, it is time to move outta there. It is not your fault and not the environment’s. It is just the way it is….And then, if you keep looking, eventually you will find your niche, no matter where that is.
Thanks for your beautiful expression of the rawness that can be the expat experience. I hope you don’t mind that I am redirecting my readers to your page as your sensitivity to your own experience really touched me.
Thanks for your honesty!
marie
Great post … glad I got directed here … I love this (first go around for us) life on some days … and hate it on others.
Thanks for being honest.
I love the part about those cute expat memoirs making everything sound so damn peachy. I don’t believe it was so easy for these people either! It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I consider going home daily. Thanks for your honest account of how lonely and difficult being an expat really is.