Being Foreign

I just want to write about this because my experience as a stranger in a strange land will soon come to an end and I want to remember it better. A friend sent me this article earlier this week.

Economist Story about Being Foreign

It articulates the experience I've been going through for the past 18 months way better than I ever could. If you don't feel like reading all it, I picked out a few choice sections below.

"“Everyone has the right to live in some society in which they needn’t constantly worry about what they look like to others, and so be psychically distorted, conditioned to some degree of mauvaise foi”, Berlin said in 1992.... "

This is a great explanation of what living in a foreign culture feels like. Your mind can never rest because you're constantly self-evaluating. Your facial expressions, gestures, your everything means something different than at home, so you have to be mindful of that. And I still live in a Western country! It's not even like I went to live in Botswana or Syria or Laos. Spain is pretty similar to the US, but the subtle differences become more apparent the longer I live here.

"Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief."

Yes. This is the thing I will miss most of all when I get re-Americanized in two months. Being "the foreigner" pretty much removes you from judgement. People don't meet me, see the way I look, hear my accent, and automatically put together an idea of what I must be. At least not the same way they do in the US. To be honest, I feel like this is the most myself I've ever been because I'm not busy trying to either comply with or defy the expectations of others. I hope to continue to feel that way when I'm home, but something tells me that who I am is more conditioned by my environment than I'd like to admit.

"Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

It may be this sense of a return to childhood, consciously or not, that gives the pleasure of foreignness its edge of embarrassment. Narcissism may also play a part. While abroad, one imagines being missed by friends and enemies at home. "

Exactly. Just exactly. Nothing to add.

"Foreigners do complain more than they should, and locals do not like it...Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live. Exaggeratedly nice. Avoid even trivial criticisms. You do not go into somebody’s house and start rearranging their furniture...Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?...His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time."

Yes, I complain a LOT about Spain. More than I should, but there are negative aspects to life here. I guess it's just that when you leave your home country, you expect the grass to be greener in every way in your country of choice and it's irritating to realize that it's just the same damn grass after all.

"The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”...The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them."