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January 2005 My wife asks where I would like to drink my coffee. I take it on the veranda of our new house on the island of Sumbawa in eastern Indonesia. Feathery clouds float in an azure sky; a soothing westerly breeze ruffles the palm leaves in the front yard. It’s another day in paradise. Paul Theroux, the travel writer, commented in the beginning of Dark Star Safari that when he left on his trip through Africa he wanted to disappear. When I left the United States after 40 years of life there, I cradled the same thought. The American story of male middle-age crisis is the man who leaves the house to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returns. Where do they go? Texas? California? Florida? Bali? Some place warm probably and with a seeming surplus of young, available women. When my entering middle age crisis hit, I had just finished up a long delayed Ph.D., separated from my wife of seven years, saw my son move off to live with his mother after spending most of his life with me, and realized that what I was doing was not making me happy or sane.

Market in Maluk, Indonesia

What is it that makes a person leave their life, family, friends, and country for someplace unknown?

The coming weeks bring up two somewhat significant anniversaries – my 15th year of living in Asia and my 55th birthday. Now generally I prefer to let the birthdays come and go and usually don’t give them much thought other than how much closer I am to retirement, but this one has some weight in that people start to retire around this time and you get to where you can see an end appearing on the horizon. My last birthday, where I became perhaps overly nostalgic or overly analytical, was 12 years ago during the 92 Olympics. My wife, daughter and I were living most of the year in Irian Jaya in a three-bedroom townhouse in a mining community within site of the glacier-packed Puncak Jaya mountain, but during the vacation we were living in two rooms that my wife had built onto her parent’s house. We had a windowless bedroom that served as storage space and a living room just big enough to accommodate a couch and TV. At night I slept on a mattress on the floor in the living room. During the day the mattress was stashed outside the house on top of our bicycles in the courtyard. One night I was lying on the floor watching the Olympics thinking what my father would have thought about me at 43 sleeping on the floor of a tiny house in the middle of a poor Muslim neighborhood on the north coast of Bali. The next day I took some tourists out fishing with a Balinese friend and ended up in the hospital that night with amoebic dysentery. As soon as I got out of the hospital my wife and I started building our first house together. We are now finishing up our third house.

It’s been said of Nabokov that he was obsessed with the past; that could probably be said of me as well. The past has been like a computer program running in the background over the last 15 years – sometimes the focus is on people from the past that I have lost track of; sometimes places that I lived and things that I did there; other times just events that still have enough cathartic charge to pop out at odd times demanding to be replayed (for what purpose?). My memory is probably as selective as most – a blue angora sweater that a girlfriend gave me one Christmas, a runaway kid that I met in Chicago and took to a church that sheltered runaways; throwing up before giving my first big speech as a radical in the 60s; closing the car door on my son’s fingers when he was three; tracing out all the places that I had been to when I was 16 and still living with my parents; reading a WWII novel about an American pilot who ditched his plane over New Guinea; gazing in an apartment window on a winter evening in Lincoln Park wondering what the people inside were doing; wandering down Jalan Legian in Bali looking for some action after five months of living in the jungle like an ascetic.

I look for the signs or omens that led me to this remote island in the Indonesian archipelago where I lived in a shipping container for sixteen months with my wife and children like a post-modern Mother Hubbard. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of a trail – my fascination as a youth with maps and islands; my attempts to teach myself French to impress a girl when I was 12; a Sixth Grade report on sharks and submarines, but most of the time it seems pretty random.
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There have been road markers that I can see in retrospect where I had several choices of paths to take and the ones that I took that led me here. Why I didn’t take the other choices is something that I still don’t understand. I see school kids here running home along a country road, women picking rice in the paddies, motorcycle taxi drivers hanging out on the side of the road waiting for a fare smoking clove cigarettes, dogs barking at passing cars. These things are part of my life in Indonesia. And along the path the ice cream man in Lahore with the same song on his cart that the man in Bali has; Irian women carrying babies and piglets together in their net bags as they move through the jungle; Bangkok bar girls calling out at passing foreigners, I love you big man; feeding the baby elephant on Soi 23 in Bangkok that used to come by for peanuts and donations for his owner. Fairly exotic stuff all this. A good travelogue, some slides or a cd perhaps these days to show your neighbors and family back “home” that you did have a unique vacation, a wonderful life.

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When returning from my son’s wedding in Louisiana a few years ago, I landed in the international airport in Taipei and the first thing that hit me was, Thank God I’m home. I embraced the airport (which I’m not particularly fond of most of the time) like it was my hometown. The flight was actually quite pleasant in Business Class, but I had never been so glad to get to some place as I was when I landed in Taipei. “Expats” (and I use that term somewhat loosely) are an amazingly diverse group – hardly all the adventurers or anthropologist types. I’ve known more people than I care to admit who hated the country that they lived in, despised the people, treated their household help like indentured labor. Then there are the ones who wear their overseas situation like a badge of honor – I live here (actually the name of one person on an Internet forum). Some of these become so ultra-nationalist or regionalist that they could give the local politicians a go for their money. This is particularly evident in Bali where the “keep the Muslims out” mentality is especially strong among the “cultural preservationists” (those foreigners who want to keep Bali for the Balinese but please forget about me because Imawannabebalinese). I wonder when I see these screeds on the Internet if they would be as aggressive about restricting Chicagoans from moving to LA or New York, or Jews from moving from New York to Pasadena, or Methodists from moving from Chicago to Memphis.

Then there is the refreshing breeze of those folks “back home” who give you the Bronx cheer when you whine about how hard it is to get your latest house finished and give you the, “Oh, I live in the tropics and have to pay $20,000 to get my mansion built, poor me.” It’s great to have some reality thrown in. Of course, the other side of this is that there is some angst that goes along with the expatriate life. (I tend to despise the term “expatriate” because so many that call themselves expats are really little more than daytrippers who might spend a few months a year overseas and the rest of their time safely at home with their jobs or businesses). 

The angst and the alienation. Actually, it’s all quite mundane and predictable: we live in a space where unless our spouse or significant other speaks English, we are forced to speak a foreign language for communication. With the exception of the truly gifted linguistically, that means that the expat struggles to transcend formalized and ritualized language exchanges whether it is about sex, family, or business. The free flow of unconscious releasing stream of consciousness talk is absent. Then too, language relies heavily on the use of cultural icons, in jokes, historical references, double entendres, metaphors, and other slights of speech. Most expats miss those and thus miss the richness and multilayered aspect of reality that language gives us.
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We have age and class and culture gaps. Take as a small example of age difference, Steely Dan’s song, Hey Nineteen. Here the singer comes from a different generation than his female companion. She doesn’t even remember the Queen of Soul. And that classic line, “She thinks I’m crazy, but I’m just getting old.” Or “No we can’t dance together, we can’t talk at all.” We spend a lot of time – let me personalize this more in order to be correct- I spend a lot of time in internal monologues. Then after personalizing it, I can go further and say that the expats that I know that are alone – that is not with a partner from their home country – have similar experiences. We trade off easy conversation for whatever it is that we get out of living in absentia from our home countries.  But there are those expats, actually most as far as my personal experience extends, that make up for this isolation by gathering in certain areas of their host countries. For example, expats in the south of Bali have certain bars and restaurants that are known as congregating points for Americans or Canadians or Swiss or Australians. They try to build bridges connecting both of their worlds. And then there’s the too exotic to be true. Ghosts, spirits, a variety of creatures from some other realm that some of us have allegedly seen or want to be known to have seen. These experiences are the spice that the expatriate craves like a drug.

What is there to say about 15 years of expatriate life? It’s like the old song, Up on the Roof: “I’ll get far away from the hustle and crowd and all that rat race noise down on the street, on the roof that’s the only place I know where you just have to wish to make it so.”

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