Salon Wanderlust | Crooning the expat blues, page 2

Expatriate Blues
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
You've got money, women -- so why aren't you happy?
D E P A R T M E N T S
Road Warrior
Business travel & beyond
The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Pepperazzi unite!
Passages
"Travels Along the Edge"
Cruising Antarctica
By David Noland
Mondo Weirdo
Sleeping with ghosts
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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Sept. 23, 1997

Veritable Venice
By John Krich
A summer resident savors the city's eternal spirit -- and contemporary contradictions
A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

[Detail of Illustration by Scott Lauman]

C O N T I N U E D
all of them share certain experiences, emotions and pitfalls. It is hard moving away from Home Sweet Home, even if you are being chased by federal marshals or importunate bookmakers. You will miss the obvious things: a good slice of pizza, baseball and Seinfeld -- and some things you didn't think you would miss: frozen pizza, Rickey Henderson and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."
And, unless you move to England -- or Canada, which doesn't count as a foreign country -- you miss your native language. Sure, you can get the Herald Tribune or funky local English-language newspapers, but aside from that who-what-when-where English, you may be hard pressed to find anyone to converse with in your own tongue. You soon long to be understood, to be heard, to have someone actually get your jokes. You become tired of always thinking of what to say in a language that for all intents and purposes, until you came to this country, was unintelligible gibberish. And you miss your friends, because who understands you and gets your jokes better than your friends? (The nationalized, inefficient, long distance telephone monopoly in your chosen country will profit handsomely from your hunger to speak to anyone who understands why you miss "The Courtship of Eddie's Father.")
And you become pitifully lonely. The first few weeks are interminable stretches of solitude, punctuated by restaurant meals during which you stare at native couples and families and envy their shared human warmth. You were once part of a family, half of a couple, a section of a circle of friends, and now you are a foreigner, alone in a strange land. That fantasy you entertained of picking up a mysterious woman in a smoke-filled bar who would teach you her language, show you the ropes and initiate you into hitherto unknown rituals of amorous delight was just that, a fantasy. The women in whatever country you go to will at first strike you as so beautiful, so feminine, so totally, completely, and utterly non-American that you will become dizzy riding subways and strolling down streets, your neck will strain from craning and your mind will reverberate with useless English pick-up lines. The reality is that those women will seem unattainable by virtue of the fact that your vocabulary in their native language extends to discussing the weather and inquiring about railway timetables.
But that initial period of loneliness provides a crucial phase of psychic purification; you rediscover who you are when divorced from pernicious influences such as friends, parents and The Grind. You will be surprised to find you enjoy dressing in other colors besides black, really love the early progressive rock of Canadian power-trio Rush and actually don't much like the taste of Jägermeister. There is no one here pressuring you to pound shots of syrupy rum, scoffing at you for wearing a pastel sweater and forcing you to listen to white-label drum 'n' bass releases.
You are molting, shedding your old, American skin and becoming an expatriate. This is a painful but rewarding process. You feel misunderstood, insecure, vulnerable, but you are aware that something is happening inside: You are becoming wiser, more worldly. You catch your reflection in a shop window or some subway doors -- you are wearing a rakish new suit purchased in your adopted land -- and you detect about yourself a hint of glamour, elegance and mystery that had been decidedly lacking when you were living in your parents' house. You are an expatriate, an exile, a fugitive: Henry Miller in Paris, Bogey in Casablanca, Cary Grant in Monaco. Anything can happen now. You are in a position to define your own destiny. You are an American man in a good suit in a foreign land. Nothing can stop you.
Suddenly, the females who seemed unavailable a few months ago are interested, drawn by your newfound confidence, jaunty swagger and improved language skills. And you find that being a foreigner opens many doors -- in part because you're such a rube you can pretend they aren't closed. Opportunities present themselves. That first job leads to other job offers. You begin to make serious money, you pay back college loans and old gambling debts. You realize you are, for the first time, totally self-sufficient. (By the way, Americans living abroad get a sweet deal from the IRS: Your foreign income is tax free up to $70,000 a year.)
You have arrived: You have a better job than you could get back home. You're making more money. And the girl you are seeing is prettier than any girlfriend you've ever had back in the States. But still, something is wrong. You are not satisfied, and here you have arrived at the expatriate's dilemma: Is all this real? This job, this girl, this life, it all happened far away from home, in a strange land that your friends back home can't even find on a map. (Thailand or Taiwan? China or Japan? Sweden or Switzerland? Your friends can never remember where you are anyway.) It becomes a philosophical issue: If none of your friends see you succeed, then did you ever really make it?
When I was 25, two years after arriving in Tokyo, I became the managing editor of an English-language, monthly city magazine. I was paid a handsome salary; I finagled a job for my best friend from New York who flew out to Tokyo; I wore fashionable, absurdly expensive clothing and dated a wide array of females, each of whom, I was sure, would never have gone out with me back home. Life had never been so good. This was during the era of Japan's bubble economy, when speculative frenzy and Japanese purchases of overpriced movie studios and Impressionist paintings made Tokyo seem like the center of the world. For the first few months at that job, I truly felt as if I could have anything I wanted, that life would be a procession of gilded possibilities and golden opportunities. I was young, bright, promising and in the right city at the right time.
But in the evening after work, I walked up Gaien Nishi Dori from our offices to the Aoyama Book Center, where in the harsh glare of white fluorescence, I would flip through American and British publications. Those glamorous magazines would be so slick, so glossy, so packed with photos of celebrities I recognized and bylines I envied; those magazines seemed real. And the magazine I was working on, full of Japanese celebrities no one back home had ever heard of and bylines by writers whose stories I had rewritten, would appear the local rag it was.
One afternoon, a photographer who sometimes shot for us brought a young magazine writer by our offices. The blond, slender writer was a young Brit sent to Tokyo by an American men's magazine. Though he was not condescending, he had absolutely no interest in contributing to our magazine. He was a decent fellow, sharp, clever and eager as young writers are. But as I spoke to him I became envious. I realized that no matter how many stories about Japan I had written, it was this Brit's one story about Tokyo that would actually be read back home.
From that point on I was acutely aware that making it in a foreign country, no matter how far I went, was not the same as making it back home.
And this was actually a symptom of that earlier insecurity that made me leave the States in the first place. You see, it isn't New York or Atlanta or your home town that's the problem; it's you. You go abroad because you feel like a failure. You go abroad because you are depressed. You go abroad, in part, to escape yourself.
Then you discover the truth of the hackneyed new age adage: No matter where you go, there you are.
And that's when it's time to go home.
SALON | Sept. 30, 1997
Karl Taro Greenfeld is a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University. He is the author of "Speed Tribes" and a contributor to Vogue, Details, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and other publications. He has written for Wanderlust on Ibiza and exploring northern Thailand by foot.
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Have you ever lived abroad? Or fantasized about it? Was your experience like Karl Greenfeld's? Share your tales -- and dreams -- in Table Talk.
Does this inspire you to leave it all behind and settle abroad? Check out the wide world of options in the Destinations area of Wanderlust Marketplace.
DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY SCOTT LAUMANN