A guest abroad and a foreigner back home

Note: This post is part of the newly-conceived 'Lost Laowai' Group Writing Project, based around the theme of “If I Knew Then What I Know Now”.



Up until recently I was not sure where the semantic boundary lay with the word “expat”, but I felt that I existed somewhat outside of it's borders. It sounded so final, terminal. Like a state of being had fundamentally and irrevocably shifted, or come to an end. Like being an ex-president. Or an ex-parrot.

Yet, ironically, I know realise that the word expat (or “expatriate”, in full) is etymologically less harsh, and not so bound in finality as it previously sounded in my ears. It refers as much to an individual living in a country other than the one to which they possess citizenship as it does to people who have left their home nation for good. It is, then, simply a Latin and Greek hotch-potch meaning something like “out of country”. Sort of like setting your status to 'Out to Lunch' on MSN messenger.

My failure to grasp the true meaning of the word 'expat' perhaps stems from the fact that I never envisaged being on the other side of the world for any length of time. When it first occurred to me to go overseas to work, back in 2001 when I was living in London, I had quite a few friends, workmates, former-classmates and random drinking mates of international origin, as is inevitably the case in London.

A few snapshots, faded, curled and condensed, as memories often are: a few drinks with my Japanese artist friend one night; dinner with an amazingly pretty fashion student newly arrived from Hong Kong the next; timeless, ambient goth music-soundtracked smoking sessions with Russian film students; a beautiful Brazilian girl breathlessly recounting the latest Paul Coelho novel she had read, and how I later ran to Waterstone's to buy that self-same book so I could continue the conversation next time I saw her...

And yet I never thought at that time to ask them about the experience of being an expat, as surely that's what they were then as I am just now. It didn't occur to my limited life experience at the time that the mere act of being transported to another land for a long period of time is both a challenge and a delight, running the gamut from frustrations to intellectual enlightenments on a daily basis.

Disorientations
Although the etymology of 'expat' is fluid, it neglects to encapsulate the head-fuck situation whereby, having just about acclimatised to the notion of being a guest in a host country, one is effectively rendered a foreigner when back home. There is no adequate word to convey this. “Reverse culture-shock” comes close, but seems too cumbersome.

Thus, when I am back in the U.K., I find that over half of conversations I have are about my being overseas, or about China in particular; and while the curiosity and eagerness of friends and relatives to hear stories and get a clear picture of life from my own mouth is heart-warming, it seems to partly render me a foreigner in my own country, possessing an element of the 'curio' there as much as I do here on the streets of Suzhou.

Even my own interactions with my own country become cross-referenced with other cultural experiences, and I have been known to bemoan the British railway system by saying that Chinese trains may be slower, but at least they're a hell of a lot cheaper and more reliable, and most other things I now tend to view through a prism of bi-cultural thought. Sometimes it can throw up some interesting perspectives; often it is distracting, disorientating, and alienating.

Yet... And yet, while I'm still not too keen on applying the moniker 'expat' to myself or my friends here, I relish the challenges as much as the lifestyle, and would not change the decision I made back in 2001 to leave the high-rent rat-race of London for a broader range of working opportunities.

If only I could create a single Latin-and-Greek word for the sensation of feeling like a foreigner when back home, then I would somehow have a better understanding of it, too.