Little Patriot by Karol M

“Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live … in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.”
- Anatole Broyard

I once visited a zoo in Kathmandu, Nepal. The zoo was like a poorly-tended hospice; a wasteland of sickly, under-nourished animals who’d been abandoned to die. The lion cage was lined with garbage and the hippos waded through a thick soup of sewage. But perhaps the worst off, were two twin black bears who’d gone insane from being trapped in a six by six foot cell. They paced their cage, back and forth and back and forth and each time they paced past the barred window that faced the entrance of the zoo, they’d bash their heads against it.

This morning I woke up thinking about those bears. Sometimes I feel so trapped here in the US; so stuck. ‘Clawing-at-the-walls desperate to escape’ sorta stuck. And it’s frustrating because I can’t pin-point why. There’s nothing specific about my life here that I dislike, it’s more just this general feeling of unease; this haunting need to break free.

I think Bill Bryson described it best in I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after 20 Years Away, when he wrote:

“I felt as if we’d made a terrible mistake. I had nothing against America, you understand. It’s a wonderful country, splendid in every way. But this felt uncomfortably like a backward step – like moving in with one’s parents in middle age. They may be perfectly delightful people, but you just don’t want to live with them any longer. Your life has moved on. I felt like that about a nation.”

Recently, I visited in an old friend from high school. As teenagers, we had a lot in common. Our mutual love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, our crush on Ben Afleck and our shared habit of cutting class to watch tapings of MTV’sTotal Request Live in Times Square…These were the bonds that held teenage friendships together.

But about 20 minutes into our lunch in New York two weeks ago, it became clear that our lives had diverged in two completely opposite directions. And after playing catch-up and reminiscing about some of crazy shenanigans we’d gotten ourselves into back then, we found we had nothing to say. The friendship was familiar and comfortable, but at some point over the years it’d gone stale. It had expired.

And that’s precisely how I feel about my relationship with America. It’s expired and no matter how hard I try to breathe new life into it, it’s too late. We’re just too different.

Related posts:

1. Dear America, Stop Trying to Change Us! Love, an Introvert
2. Roots
3. Alice in Americaland

Alice in Wonderland by Annie Leibovitz

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

“So how are you adjusting to life back in the US?” That’s a question I’ve gotten asked a lot in the six weeks since I returned ‘home’. Particularly this past week while I was in Canada visiting the older brother and his family. Frankly, I’m surprised I’m still here. I guess a part of me just always assumed that I’d marry a European and would be living on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean by now. The idea that this whole living in America thing could be permanent makes me more than a little uncomfortable. Whenever people ask me where it is that I live, I have to think about it for a second before replying uncertainly: “California…I think. Sorta. Well, for now anyway.”

Reverse culture shock has definitely set in. It feels a little like trying to squeeze into this four poster canopy water bed I had in Elementary school. I’ve completely outgrown it and no matter which position I scrunch myself into, there’s always an arm or a leg that’s left hanging over the side. I don’t fit anymore…and I haven’t for years. And yet it’s so familiar and I have these vivid memories of when it felt comfortable and comforting. It’s a very odd feeling.

Will.i.am (from the Black Eyed Peas), compared returning home after an extended period abroad to walking back into your house and noticing for the first time that it’s got a ‘funky fish smell’. The fish smell had always been there but it was so familiar you’d never noticed before. It was only after you’d left for a while that you realized that what you’re friends had been telling you all along really was the truth: The place you’ve called home all these years smells…really weird.

Not that I think America stinks. I don’t. I’m actually really happy to be back…but Home has definitely taken on a foreign, alien quality. First of all, in Americaland, people smile at each other. All the time. They also like their food served with a double dose of dairy; (everything comes swimming in Ranch dressing or cheese). And then there’s the health food store New Leaf. It’s like the mothership of bizarre American culture; as large as a super Walmart and instead of frozen TV dinners, it sells organic potato chips (75% organic!), organic boxed Mac n’ Cheese (with organic ‘natural food coloring’ and organic sodium phosphate) and books on how to lose weight without exercise or dieting.

Sometimes I casually mention these observations to friends or family and am usually met with a glassy-eyed stare in return. I worry that with each passing day I’m further cementing my outsider status. Give me another few decades and I’ll be ‘kooky ol’ aunt Re…always going on about how everything is better in Japan/Europe.’ I’ll be the Uncle Fester of the family and banished to the crawl space under the stairs.

But I can’t help it…I think that if you live abroad long enough, you stop being able to identify with your home culture and instead develop this curious culture hybrid. I’ve subconsciously picked up habits and characteristics from each culture I’ve visited and have consequently turned into this science experiment; a test tube mixture of cultures. I eat European style, with a knife and for (thanks, Germany) and I nod and “Mhm” non-commitally at everything anyone says (thanks, Japan). I drink Chai all day and put coconut oil in my hair (thanks, India) and the other day my mom walked in on me wolfing down leftover fried fish at seven in the morning.

In short, I’m freakish. I should just start over on some uninhabited tropical island somewhere. Set up my own artist colony for other lost transplants.

Eight Ways to Know You’re Home for Awhile pretty much sums up my life at the moment perfectly.

Related posts:

1. America, I Love you but…
2. Roots
3. Dear America, Stop Trying to Change Us! Love, an Introvert

Globe Trotter by Carolyn B. Metro. I love this girl’s art!

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
- Freya Stark

Everyone has their people; their ‘peeps’, their posse. You know, the people to whom you can talk in vague terms with and just know that you’ll intuitively be understood. The Grateful Dead have the Deadheads. Clay Aikan has the Claymates. And Jesus has about 1/3 of the planet.

Well I had the expats. Those were my people, my support group. Or at least they were until I decided to move back to the US….Now I’m back to being an island of one and feeling a little like Britney singing without a voice synthesiser; lost and vulnerable.

It’s funny because on the surface, my expat friends in Japan and I had nothing in common. Our group consisted of actresses, engineers, embassy translators, English teachers and grad students and we hailed from drastically different corners of the planet; countries like Iran, Italy, China, Scotland and Kansas city. We’d moved there for different reasons too (college scholarship, job opportunity, a boyfriend, an anime collection), and held opposing opinions on everything from religion to beer. Honestly, sometimes I wondered why I was friends with them at all. And it wasn’t until last weekend that I was able to put my finger on exactly why that is.

I spent last weekend with my friend Tyler. Like me, Tyler’s lived in Austria and Germany and like me, she’s taught English abroad (in Spain) and like me, she’s having a tough time coping with ‘a suburban-American existence’. And I think that she hit the nail on the head when she said:

“I just can’t handle people who don’t step out of their comfort zones.”

That explains my love of expats precisely. Expats are risk-takers. They’re adventurers. And they’re willing to risk failure, shame and embarrassment in order to step outside of their comfort zone and try something new and scary. And I’m not just talking about moving to a foreign country either. They were the people who consistently chose the uncomfortable over playing it safe. Maybe it was something small, like seeing a movie in the cinema alone or asking out a perfect stranger for a cup of coffee. Or maybe it was something big, like quitting a job to
pursue their dream of starting their own business.

Not too long ago a famous expat in Japan made a list of things she’d felt she’d miss if she ever left Japan. It surprised me to realize that if I ever made a similar list, the only thing that would make it on the list would be ‘my expat life’. Occasionally I miss the subways and the karaoke bars and every once in a while I get a craving for some takoyaki. But mostly I just miss my friends.

The Six Characters You’ll Meet at Every Expat Bar describes some of the more prominent expat personality types you run into abroad. I laughed out loud reading it because I recognized myself in at least three of the characters.

Related posts:

1. Roots
2. Why I like Living Abroad
3. The Hippies in Guatemala

Sad Tree By Melonhead83

I had a friend in Japan who was one of those curious ‘between cultures’ people who didn’t identify with any one country’s beliefs or value system. She’d grown up in Tokyo, Chicago, Bangkok, Oregon, New York and Sydney and was a free-thinker, a non-conformist and completely unbothered by other’s opinions of her. In other words, she was very ‘un-Japanese’. And yet, technically speaking, she was. She was born in Japan and spent the first eight years of her life there. But as far as her mentality towards life was concerned, she was no more Japanese than I was.

Which was why I found it surprising to learn that she’d purposely abandoned her life as an inspiring photographer in Australia, to return to Tokyo to try to reconnect with her Japanese roots. The process was very ‘square peg, round hole’ and I couldn’t understand why she bothered. To me, it was like a butterfly trying to squeeze back into a cocoon and remorph back into a caterpillar; a real step back in the evolutionary process. She was a far more interesting and fascinating specimen the way she was, why try to hide that part of her to fit back into mold that she didn’t value or even wholly respect?

She told me repeatedly that she’d returned to Japan to “learn how to like it.” It was important to her to learn to appreciate Japanese culture because for better or for worse, it was “home”.

Sometimes I think that she might have been right and that maybe I should follow her lead. I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged in America, but maybe I should try. Maybe I should ‘learn to like it’ too.

But there are few words that scare me more than: ‘settled’. It’s rivaled only by the anxiety-provoking phrases ‘growing roots’ or ‘growing up’ or the dirty words ‘mortgage’, ‘car payment’, ‘mini-van’ and ‘soccer mom’. Just typing those words makes me want to permanently relocate to a hammock in Tahiti.

But maybe all the anxiety I have around staying in one spot is a sign. Maybe that’s precisely what I should be doing. I mean, they say that you should do what scares you. Well, living abroad isn’t scary anymore. I lived abroad for three years (four if you count my time working on a cruise ship), and I feel like my world has shrunk to the point where it seems like the entire planet is my backyard. I could live anywhere and be happy. It seems almost too easy. It’s no longer a challenge. But living in the US…now that’s frightening.

My mom tells me that I should ‘bloom where I’m planted’, meaning that all of the lessons I need to learn in life I can learn from right here. I don’t need to travel to the ends of the Earth to find or challenge myself. I can do that from my own backyard. And I almost believe her.

But then I look at that ‘Sad Tree’ photograph. He looks so trapped…He’s stuck in the mud and I can imagine him longing for a life as a sailboat on the open sea. Or maybe he dreams of being transformed into a kite or an airplane. Or the dashboard of a car. He looks like he’d rather be anywhere other than rooted in place and all alone.

And it makes me feel so…I don’t know, conflicted.

Related posts:

1. Alice in Americaland
2. Why I like Living Abroad
3. The X(pat) Factor

My life Stateside feels like a chapter out of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I’m (temporarily!!!) staying at my parents house in Northern California and not only does it feel like my life in Japan never existed, but it also feels like the last 16 years of my life never existed as well. I’m friendless, carless, jobless and phoneless. I snack on PP&J and granola bars while watching reruns of Law and Order and last weekend I went with my parents to the Mall’s cineplex to watch Star Trek. I can’t help but think that I’m living the life of a 10-year-old on summer vacation.

I no longer have a driver’s license (it got suspended due to excessive moving violations) so I’ve inherited my mom’s three speed bike, which I pedal back and forth to the library every other day. It’s turquoise and is decorated with Hawaiian flower decals and makes this annoying whirring, clanking noise. So not cool. The kids at the local skate park all stop and stare whenever I ride by and I pretend not to notice.

My best and only friend is my mom’s dog. His name is “Happy Camper” and he’s a vegetarian. His favorite foods are carrots and apple cores. He looks like a mop. Together, we take walks along the beach and read books about brain science.

“But you have a bank account.” This was the reason my dad gave to contradict my assertion that I’m living the life of a 10-year-old.

“Dad, 10-year-olds have banks accounts,” I argued. “And they probably have more money in their savings than I do. And…” I added, “They have cell phones.”

I know that this is only temporary. And I know that soon I’ll be off on adventure number 345 and I’ll look back fondly on this month- long vacation in Limbo. But it’s hard to look at this as a summer break when all of my thoughts are preoccupied with the stress of jump-starting my Adult life all of over again. I have to start from scratch, beginning with pin-pointing where in the wide World I want to live next.

The options are limitless and so overwhelming that it’s enough to make me want to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep until my mom comes in and scolds me for not doing the dishes.

Related posts:

1. Little America