What does 'expat' have to do with it?

A few days ago, I opened up a message from Mom to Linds, Cass and me. Within the blue iMessage bubble, I found a photo of the four of us getting pedicures six years ago on that date. It was the eve of my move to Ecuador.

It is interesting to read Mom's caption here. At the time, I hardly knew how I would last two years abroad. And now two years has has turned in many more. There is just no predicting ...

The little clock with the arrow going around to the east transported me back in time. I remember coming home from our spa time to opening up two large suitcases in the living room. Piles of clothes were strewn all over. My mind was running amuck about how to even begin to fill the suitcases. And this is where sista-friends always come in first. Linds and Cass developed a system and set to work stowing away the pieces of my life that made the cut to travel south with me, beginning my life as an expat.

So much has changed and evolved and shifted since that evening. Here is something that has not: I still cannot be left to pack my own suitcases. They end up a scrambled 70 pound -- no hyperbole here -- mess that one or both of my sisters has to unpack and repack before I lug them through security.

Those first months in Quito, Ecuador, as a newly minted international school teacher, were exciting in many ways, and excruciating in others. The pain of missing home -- so visceral that it could knock the wind out of me. I had some sanity savers, though, in the friends that I was making. And as Trini, my madre in Spain, had been my earthly angel in my study abroad experience in college, Analuisa, my Ecuadorian cousin in spirit, became my South American angel.

I had met Analuisa many years before, when we were both primary school children when my Aunt Abby and Uncle Tony became her legal guardians. As she became a member of the Baci/Marquart crew, what I remember most in thinking back to those times was what she taught us. She would make empanadas, delicious crispy half moons filled with meet and vegetables, to add to the table for holiday meals. Analuisa also taught the North American chiquitas how to line dance -- she was bound to have better rhythm than us, she hails from a village that salsas day in and day out.

And so it was, that when I arrived to Quito as a thirty-year-old woman, her family embraced me, offering me delicious guaguas de pan and colada morada on the holiday for Día de los Difuntos, and smiling as I spoke to them in broken Spanish.

During my time in Ecuador, I would be fortunate to also join Analuisa's family for her niece's quinceañera in Mascarilla. During this day, I saw how Ana's family joined efforts to prepare a feast for guests, I was a parishioner in the church as the special ceremony took place, crowning Meli a young woman, and I was a delighted but shy participant at the dance later that evening.

walking towards the church ...

looking muy guapo outside the church....

about to step into the ceremony that will mark Meli's passage from childhood to adulthood

The time Analuisa and I spent hanging out together in the city or taking a trip to Mascarilla to visit her family cut through the loneliness and saved my sanity in those most intense months of culture shock.

And then it was, some six months in to my life as an international school teacher, that I reemerged from the confusion, anxiety and stress of culture shock. It would be many more years before I would feel that I was really on steady ground as an expat.

When I was home this summer, during an evening with a dear friend and fellow English teacher, I identified myself as such. "What's an expat," she inquired. "An American living abroad," I replied. I immediately thought of Gertrude Stein and Earnest Hemingway as scenes from Midnight in Paris played across my mind.

As an American passport holder, I chose to move abroad, taking advantage of the privilege afforded me simply because of where I was born. While I struggle with where the Unites States of America is along social, political and philosophical lines, I certainly was not forced out. As a white American, I do not generally feel unsafe within the border of the USA. And I do feel some sense of power to make positive changes were I to choose to live in the United States.

I chose to venture from home in search of adventure; my sojourner spirit had surfaced. With an education that an upper-middle class life afforded me, I was able to land a good job abroad. And thus I get to sit comfortably in a category called expat.

In my experience as an expat at an exceptional international school, I have access to extensive services. I am offered daily assistance on how to navigate banking, housing and my visa. As an expat, I am left rather unjudged at the fact that I know fewer than 200 Mandarin words. As an expat, my working conditions are comfortable and safe. Due to my own privileged circumstances, I can utter things like, "the world is my oyster", feeling empowered to live in just about any country of my choosing.

I do not mean to cast a simplistically fairytale filter onto living abroad. For so much of my time abroad, it has felt like I have had dozens of tabs open in my brain, slowing my processing system to the speed of the super-sized snails that I now see slowly glide across the sidewalk in Shenzhen. At the end of so many days, even getting up to file my nails has seemed an exhausting task.

There can be many initial frustrations to living abroad, and at moments, situations may feel insurmountable. When my close friends Alli and Charles moved from Quito to Shenzhen, Alli found herself on the corner of an unknown street outside of Ren Ren Le (a store akin to Walmart), uncertain of how to flag a taxi, unable to tell the driver the name of her apartment in Mandarin, and so weeping in frustration. Anyone who has lived in a foreign place can recount many experiences like this.

It also warrants acknowledging that an altogether positive time abroad is not every expat's experience. There are spouses that are left alone while their partner travels, those that turn to excessive drinking in order to distance themselves from the difficulties of living and working in foreign lands and expats who have been transplanted by their work rather than a whole hearted-choice. There is resentment, affairs and dysfunction in the memoirs of many expats. I am fortunate that these are not part of mine.

Today, as a rather content expat, I am sitting at a new eclectic cafe that has opened near my apartment as a friendly rain falls outside the floor to ceiling windows, contemplating the privileges of my life while so many thousands of others around the world are having vastly different experiences because rather than expats, they are considered part of other categories: the asylum seeker, the refugee, the immigrant and now the evacuee.

I am remembering back to the year that, as a young girl, Analuisa's visa was revoked, and she was not allowed to return to the States for that school year, for unknown reasons. I am thinking about how more recently we spoke about her returning to the States to visit her North American family, but again, she was not granted a visa for no clear reason.

Recently I was reading an article in The Atlantic entitled, "‘Expat’ and the Fraught Language of Migration". The article provides reflective questions to ponder when considering the connotations that accompany the labels we put on different groups. Yasmeen Serhan asks her reader, "But what defines an “expat”? Does it matter whether you are coming from a richer country, or how long you intend to stay? At what point are you an “immigrant” instead?"

When I think about my own experience as an expat, and what I know about the experience of immigrants -- namely through reading fiction and non-fiction and listening to various podcasts -- to other countries, especially the United States of America, one of the stark contrasts in the nature of the experience is the expectation of assimilation.

Often when an individual or family moves from the USA to a foreign country, they are welcomed into, or at least have access to, an expat community in their host city. Between my own experiences in Ecuador and China, and those of my friends who have lived in places from Doha, Qatar to Aberdeen, Scotland, there are many reports of feeling at home away from home when we have connected with these communities. We celebrate holidays from our passport countries together, enter atmospheres where we hear the familiarity of our native tongues and participate in cultural events such as Fantasy Football drafts.

While peoples labeled asylum seekers, refugees or immigrants may find communities with others from their native lands in their new places of residence, these communities and gatherings are often met with suspicion, resentment or outright hostility. Whether it be on social media, or between neighbors, words of resentment arise towards Latino immigrants when they are viewed as taking away jobs from 'bona fide' Americans; there is a rhetoric of suspicion surrounding immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries; outright hostility rears its head when the sentiment towards Asian and Somalian communities, who are perceived to have overtaken the community in numbers, reaches the boiling point.

Asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees or expats, whichever the category we are all people born in one land living in another. But semantics matter. In the 21st century, political candidates are hotly debating the topic of immigration, not the topic of expatriation. Prior to living abroad, I reflected on my privilege less, largely unaware of how deeply it has affected the way my life has looked in the past and now in my present. Prior to living abroad, I voted in presidential elections, but as a less-informed citizen. Prior to living abroad, I did not understand the very privilege of saying, "I'm just not really interested in politics."

My current life is largely a tapestry of beautiful moments created with and by kindred souls that I have connected with for a few moments, or for many years now. But there is also a shadow side to my life outside of the United States. It is connected to the shadow that has been cast by my home country onto the peoples and places sometimes just across the border, sometimes all the way across the world.

This weekend I began listening to the memoir Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen. As a former expat, Hansen reflects on what she is learning about the United States' role in offering aid to foreign countries, and as she is about to embark on her time abroad as a resident of Istanbul, Turkey, she asks herself, "But what would I learn of America that was beyond good intentions, beyond sympathy, beyond the luxury of time? What else was there?"

As Hansen went on to learn, as I have been learning, what else was there? So much more.

As Hansen recounts her conversations with her new friends, colleagues and those she interviews in Turkey, she goes on to discuss the sense of betrayal that many countries feel towards the United States, the "abuse from America for material gain." It is through her "newly recognized ignorance" that she describes the feeling she has inside as "A persistent dull ache, and a tooth that would never be the same."

My time abroad has led a blind patriotism to wane within me. Perhaps, in the best of cases, the government in office has good intentions, but often the actions of Americans towards fellow Americans, and peoples living within the borders of the United States, as well as America's actions towards foreign lands leads my heart to leak sorrow.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. But how would it serve me to go back to a time of ignorant bliss?

In moments I can find myself sinking in the quicksand of despair, but I do not, in the end, find futility. When I listen to my students discuss global issues, when I consider the selfless actions of so many of my family members and friends, when I look at the goodness in my nieces, I think that there must be hope to hold on to. That even if the fabric of my homeland's government is frayed and flawed, the hearts of so many individuals surrounding me have the capacity to weave together a tapestry of truer love.

The last six years have lent themselves to a great deal of reflection that a government and its people can represent different idealogies; the corruption of a government is not indicative in many cases of the humanity of the people within the boundaries that are governed.

I once again find words from L.R. Knost moving: "It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless." I think that it is only through our own education, and educating our children, whether they be those in our classrooms, or those in our homes, that our eyes will be opened to our calling to bring light.

So then,

“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

― L.R. Knost

Tonight I am here typing, reflecting about the care and love shown to me by strangers in new lands. I wonder how we can all do a little more to offer empathy towards those we encounter who have voyaged outside of the known, by choice or by circumstance? To those living in a space that may seem less than inviting and be devoid of the sounds, smells and hugs of home, I wonder how we can each extend compassion?

note: My colleague and good friend, Faye Krouse, was instrumental in helping me process my thoughts, feelings and words for this post. While when writing about my own experiences, my words flow rather freely, I found myself a bit stuck in composing this post. Faye, thank you endlessly for engaging in so many discussions about life and writing with me. Cheers, dear friend.