Life as an Expat

I wanted to share a beautiful letter that one of my friends and colleagues in China has written about herself that I think describes exactly what life as an expat is like. She and her husband have been in China for several years - and love the international life. They are both originally from Oklahoma - and her letters captures exactly what it is that is so frustrating, yet fascinating, about living overseas.

I've become more than a case of a missing identity. Gone are the days of crazed youth. Not that I ever had any, any to speak of that is. Growing up like most American teens in the 70's, I didn't miss much. Lots of TV, some junk food, bunches of dates, lucky guys with cars, losing my virginity to one of them - a guy in a car. Marrying relatively early, having a kid, getting divorced, and sorting out a rather fear-led life gave me the same lens to view the world as most people in the USA.

However, in my 30s I began to depart from normality. I earned a Masters Degree at age 39, married my best friend, sent my son off to college, and began traveling the world. Since then, the focus of my life seems a bit distorted to those back home. Now, I live in an exotic city on the other side of the world. At age 50, I ride my bike, rain or shine, everywhere. I meet exciting and fun people who rotate yearly out of my life. I SKYPE close family, use email to communicate with dozens of friends, and live in a lovely furnished home that I could never afford in America.

What do I give up for this kind of life? Not much, in my estimation, but a whole lot to some of those who grew up with and around me. Too much for those who still live within hollering distance of friends and family - those who have grown so close that glue between the sole and the shoe is no longer necessary. Their camera shots all come out the same, unchanged, a little time worn, smaller in scope, and typical in setting. Another year, another birthday party, another loss, it is all the same to them, yet it keeps rolling forward: without me.

Here is where I feel the distance. I could never blame them. I could never say they ostracize me, make me feel like and outsider, make me want to stay away. We go home to visit, our two-point-five weeks of alloted time once a year. We make the journey back into their worlds. They view us from afar, wondering what foreign fungus has attached it self to our external features, asking just enough questions to verify our strange speech, or to recoil from our unsolicited ideas.

One question for them remains the same: when are y'all coming home? This question arises every year in the midst of short conversations flavored with home-grown foods and sugar filled iced-tea, hovering around comments like: "I don't know why ya'll want to live over there in that God-forsaken country," or "Why, I couldn't live where human rights are violated every day by hard-nosed politicians." And, yet, they do.

I've ceased trying to respond with any kind of logic. It will always remain far from their scope or frame of reference. In fact, it ceases to bother me if they fail to make the connection, or try to see how attractive life in a foreign country might be to an expat American. I've come to accept the world as a very large place, with dozens of colors of skin, hundreds of nationalities, millions of viewpoints. I am one sole fish in an ever-shrinking ocean of cultural identity.

One of these days, I fully expect I won't be recognizable to my own kind. I will blend in with the masses because I feel at home with them. I will go my own way because I like being anonymous, an expat living large in a beautiful world. Even now, they might wonder where I've gone, but it seems too far away from them to squint and comprehend. In many ways, I've become unidentifiable, complex and strange. I live half way around the world with those people - those they don't know. They can't identify with them. Next, they'll begin to ask, what I've become.