Self-Redefinition

In this month's National Geographic Adventure magazine, a handful of writers who are featured in this year's Best American Travel Writing gave short quotes on traveling. Adam Gopnik observed that the central experience of travel is self-escape. I think that's pretty accurate and I was musing on that as I discussed living in Budapest with my friend Chris (who had) and his brother Mike (who hadn't). Mike was asking why I loved living in Hungary so much and when I couldn't come up with anything less abstract than "It felt right," he suggesting it was because there I was the foreigner and thus special and unique. He didn't quite hit the nail on the head in my case, but he was close. If travel is about self-escape, ex-patriation is about self-redefinition.

When you move somewhere else, you remove the constraints of context and history that make up a large part of who you see yourself as and how others see you. Most people experience this in a small way when they move to college or take on a new job. Your new peer group doesn't remember you spilling chocolate milk on your dress at the 8th grade dance or already have you pegged as the perpetual designated driver, so you can be who you have evolved into and not have to fit into a pre-existing role.

When you move to a new country, however, the unmooring is much more comprehensive. Parts of your identity that you think of as fixed - your race, religion, region of origin, ethnic background - mean entirely different things (or nothing at all). When I moved to Hungary, one of the things that really changed for me was how I viewed the political spectrum. I've been a bleeding-heart since junior high and I have always held that the left was the side of the aisle that stood for goodness. After all, in America, liberals are the champions of women's rights, gay rights, helping the poor, and improving public education. Clearly, left is always good. Not so in a post-communist country. To Hungarians, the left side of the spectrum meant communism which meant a brutal and repressive dictatorship. Suddenly my political place - what I stood for and who I fought against - had changed. Not only were my beliefs much closer to center, but many of the issues that place me on the left in the first place - free education, separation of church & state, health care for everyone - are either non-issues or come at from an entirely different perspective and base of experience.

The other great impact that expatriation has on identity is in meeting other ex-pats. I know a lot of people completely eschew the ex-pat scene and I agree that it's cheating and a waste to move to Japan just to hang out with a bunch of your countrymen. But spending time with other ex-pats (including those from other countries of origin) can be awesome. You suddenly find yourself among a group of people who share your sense of adventure and willingness to try new things and who have likely started to gain the kind of cultural sensitivity that only comes from understanding that other cultures may be different but they aren't Other.