Being Foreign: The other side of the equation

stumbled across this gem of an article today.. interesting perspective  that i figured should be shared here:

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690

FOR the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a Frenchman in Berlin, a Zimbabwean in London, a Russian in Paris, a Chinese in New York.

The desire of so many people, given the chance, to live in countries other than their own makes nonsense of a long-established consensus in politics and philosophy that the human animal is best off at home. Philosophers, it is true, have rarely flourished in foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Königsberg; Descartes went to Sweden and died of cold. But that is no justification for generalising philosophers’ conservatism to the whole of humanity.

The error of philosophy has been to assume that man, because he is a social animal, should belong to some particular society. Herder, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher, launched modern conceptions of nationalism by arguing that a man could flourish only among his own people who shared his language and culture. “Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself,” Herder wrote.

Even an exemplary modern liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, found this sort of emotional logic seductive. “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, near the end of his life, explaining his support for Zionism.

And yes, no doubt many people do feel most at ease with a home and a homeland. But what about the others, who find home oppressive and foreignness liberating? Theirs is a choice that gets both easier and more difficult to exercise with every passing year. Easier, because the globalisation of industry and education tramples national borders. More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there.

It has long been true in America that nobody can be foreign because everybody is foreign. In the capital cities of Europe that same paradoxical condition has more or less been reached—especially in Brussels, the self-styled capital of Europe, where decades of economic migration have been reinforced by an influx of European Union bureaucrats. There the animosity between Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians makes them foreigners to one another, even in their own country.

To get a strong sense of what it means to be foreign, you have to go to Africa, or the Middle East, or parts of Asia. In South Korea last year 42% of the population had never knowingly spoken to a foreigner. Well, they had better get ready. The country’s foreign residents have doubled in the past seven years, to 1.2m, or more than 2% of the population. And that share could rise: the foreign-born average in the rich world is over 8% of a given population.


Foreigners par excellence
The most generally satisfying experience of foreignness—complete bafflement, but with no sense of rejection—probably comes still from time spent in Japan. To the foreigner Japan appears as a Disneyland-like nation in which everyone has a well-defined role to play, including the foreigner, whose job it is to be foreign. Everything works to facilitate this role-playing, including a towering language barrier. The Japanese believe their language to be so difficult that it counts as something of an impertinence for a foreigner to speak it. Religion and morality appear to be reassuringly far from the Christian, Islamic or Judaic norms. Worries that Japan might Westernise, culturally as well as economically, have been allayed by the growing influence of China. It is going to get more Asian, not less.

Even in Japan, however, foreigners have ceased to function as objects of veneration, study and occasionally consumption. Once upon a time, in the ancient and medieval worlds, to count as properly foreign you had to seek out a life among peoples of a different skin colour or religion. They were probably an impossibly long distance away, they might well kill you when you got there, and if you went too far you might fall off the edge of the world.

At the dawn of the travelling age, writing an imaginary legal code for a Utopian society that he called Magnesia, Plato divided foreigners into two main categories. “Resident aliens” were allowed to settle for up to 20 years to do jobs unworthy of Magnesians, such as retail trade. “Temporary visitors” consisted of ambassadors, merchants, tourists and philosophers. Broaden that last category to include all scholars, and you have a taxonomy of travellers that held good until the invention of the stag party.

To be foreign got much more straightforward from the 17th century onwards, when Europe adopted a political system based on nation states, each with borders, sovereignty and citizenship. Travel-papers in hand, you could turn yourself into an officially recognised foreigner simply by visiting the country next door—which, with the advance of mechanised transport, became an ever more trivial undertaking. By the early 20th century most of the world was similarly compartmentalised.

   

Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition, but in practice it can be a huge relief


The golden age of genteel foreignness began. The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) 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.

Writers in particular seemed to thrive in exile, real or self-imposed. The qualities of it—displacement, anxiety, disorientation, incongruity, melancholia—became the modern literary sensibility. A writer living overseas could shrug off the perceived limitations of country and culture. He was no longer an English author, or an Irish author, or a Russian author, he was simply an Author: think of James Joyce, Christopher Isherwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky. It became, and remains, bad form to pigeonhole a writer by country. All want to be writers of the world, and the world rewards that aspiration. Of the past ten winners of the Nobel prize for literature, five (V.S. Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Herta Müller) have been émigrés.

An earlier Nobel prize-winner, Ernest Hemingway, set the ground rules for the writer as foreigner when he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris: live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (or equivalent), work in cafés, meet other artists, drink a lot.

Not everyone can be Hemingway. Many foreigners today are threadbare students, overworked managers, trailing spouses. The male expatriate in Bangkok is a great deal freer than the female expatriate in Jeddah. The lot of unwilling foreigners is far worse still. A life of foreignness imposed by poverty or persecution or exile is unlikely to be enjoyable at all.

Even so, all other things being equal, foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. 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. Beneath it all there is the guilt of betrayal. To choose foreignness is an act of disloyalty to one’s native country.

That idea of disloyalty is less bothersome now. But a century or so ago it was a mark of deviance for an English gentleman to admit the desirability of living anywhere other than England. The best argument in favour of spending time abroad was that it gave you a better appreciation of the virtues of home. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” wrote Kipling.


I’m an alien
Nowadays, you might rather say that the more you know of other countries, the more inclusive of all humanity your values will become. You educate yourself, beginning with anthropology.

Every foreigner of inquiring mind becomes a part-time anthropologist, wondering and smiling at the new social rituals of his adoptive country. George Mikes, a Hungarian living in England, wrote a book in this genre called “How To Be An Alien”, published in 1946. It was not really about how to be an alien at all, but about a foreigner’s view of English society, and it was very funny. Mikes rightly saw that most social codes partook of the arbitrary and the absurd. If you happened to stand outside them, as a foreigner always did, then life could be a continuous comedy.

Mikes wrote later, tongue in cheek, that he had expected his English friends to be very angry at the mocking portrait he painted of their country. Instead they seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Mikes had been making fun of a culture confident enough to laugh at itself, and his underlying admiration and affection for it were clear.

   

Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live


Still, it could have gone badly wrong. Foreigners do complain more than they should, and locals do not like it. If you were to write a book called “How To Be An Alien” today, and meant it to be a serious manual of instruction for use anywhere in the world, it might consist of three rules only. 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?

The foreigner answers that question by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense. Something within himself has driven him away from his homeland. He becomes even a touch jealous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adventure. How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return?

For the real exile, foreignness is not an adventure but a test of endurance. The Roman poet Ovid, banished to a dank corner of the empire, complained that exile was ruining him “as laid-up iron is rusted by scabrous corrosion/or a book in storage feasts boreworms”. Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American scholar, caught the romance and pain of exile when he called it “a strangely compelling idea, but a terrible experience”. The true exile, he said, was somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. 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.


Of pain and pleasure
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”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

Illustration by C. Corr



Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother.

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. 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.

Excellent read, thanks.

A few points touched me: 
Nostalgia. 
'Home' changes, especially when we're gone for a long time. 
We all make choices and choosing one thing means we forego another.

Definitely a good read.

I'm not sure about us considering ourselves as exiles.

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?

The foreigner answers that question by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense.

I don't see myself as an exile in any form.  I know that when I return to Oz I will create a space for myself, as I have here.  I will have had an adventure, and be willing to move onto the next stage what ever that is, and that the 'grand adventure' will become - incredibly quickly - a dreamlike memory.

Maybe this bit only applies to those who are forever criticising or complaining about being here??  


Anyone identify with the 'exile' statement?

I suppose the only exiles here are those who have nothing in their home country. Those who are fleeing law enforcement, those who are fleeing a hurtful situation where they cannot return, refugees, those who had no financial means to stay.

I will reluctantly return to Australia soon. I have to for study, but China will be calling the whole time I am there. I'm here by choice, not because I am exiled.




This article was a great read. Being foreign is a wonderful and horrible thing all at once.

'Home' changes, especially when we're gone for a long time.  

There was some research done long enough ago that I encountered it as an undergrad, late 60s, on problem drinking among US uni faculty. Higher percentage of males than females had a drinking problem, more likely for older guys than young, ... but the breakdown by academic discipline was fascinating.

Medical profs, engineers, English departments and philosophers all had fairly high numbers, but the top of the heap were anthropologists, and by quite a wide margin. Research into the reason for this ended up coining a term, "anthropologist syndrome", effectively reverse culture shock.

There you are at Berkeley or wherever, and away you go for your field research. You expect some culture shock; after all, the Hopi or Chinese or whoever are pretty different. If they weren't, there'd be no point. You could just stay home and study your neighbors. Actually, there's some good anthropology in that, see https://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html but let's stay on topic.

Months later, when you've learned the language, started believing in the local magic, et cetera, back on a plane to Berkeley. Much there now appears strange and you've forgotten how the office politics works. The dean may not be all that different from the tribal shaman you've been dealing with, but most of the rituals are. Culture shock hits again, and this time it is unexpected and extra confusing.

I feel a bit of this every time I visit Canada. Not a severe case, but there's definitely enough to recognise the syndrome.

Anyone identify with the 'exile' statement?

depending on the day and the mood, I tend to.

I've spent more time living away from "home" than i did living there and each and every time I go back, I can't wait to get the hell out of dodge.
In many ways, the road is my home and that is where i'm most comfortable because it's an open book to be read and written whereas "home" is full of preconceived notions about behavior and culture that i do not care for.

Great article 

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. 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.

I'd have to disagree with this bit to a certain degree. I think we can develop a sense of fraternity with other foreigners. We share a common ground of being foreigners in a different country and that brings people together. However, due to the nature of the industry (people moving to other places / countries) these fraternal relationships are often more intense but also shorter than the ones forged at home.

Sense of belonging is also about a feeling of groundedness and/or security, which in 5 years in Korea and Taiwan, I never really felt a whole lot of. It's funny cos the ideas of freedom verses belonging also apply in personal relationships too. The single person forgoes a sense of belonging in order to remain single.
The temporary nature of friendships in Asia with other foreigners, and the inability to ever fit in with the locals, means one will most likely be on the periphery of society in Asia. I used to think this could be mitigated by learning the language, getting a girl friend etc etc but the longer I've been in Asia, the more my cultural roots and thinking stay stronger than ever. The kiwi guy who runs the stickmanbangkok.com website wrote a really interesting piece along the same lines in his monthly editorial a few months back which i fully agreed with. 

the stickmanbangkok.com website wrote a really interesting piece along the same lines in his monthly editorial a few months back which i fully agreed with. 

That sounds interesting, any chance of a link to the story? (I had a look on the website but couldn't find it).

I think it was "The argument against learning Thai" December 12th 2010 editorial on the website www.stickmanbangkok.com.

Oops, although that story about Thai language is a good read, the link to my argument is in fact "Once a farang, Always a farang?" from December 6th 2009 on the editorial list of that website.

Ahh I read them, they were both interesting. He made some interesting points about reverting to Western ways. I look back at my time in Korea and I can see the same kind of pattern. I guess it's only natural to revert to past ways - I'm trying to find a balance a Western and Eastern ways of doing things.

Thanks for the links.

Thanks for that thoughtful and thought provoking article Nolefan.  As one who has always been in two minds about where home is (as a kid in what was then Rhodesia, I thought of Britain as home, when I went "home" as a young adult I felt nostalgic for my rebel colonial home) I sympathise with everyone who feels a foreigner, whether in a foreign land or in the ancestral homeland.  I offended friends on my last visit to Britain a couple of years ago (I was a reluctant visitor, compelled to make the trip because of a change in Russia's visa laws) by telling them I couldn't wait to go home.  You are home, they said. I'm sure many barflies have the same acquired feeling about China.   

The 'farang' and 'learning Thai' articles were very interesting.  Thanks for the link.

The discussion re learning the language (and even the backing off doing things in a local way)  triggers the question of "Why are you here?"  Not learning the language and living a western lifestyle seem to me to be an admission that there is no deep interest in learning about whichever foreign country you are living or working in. So if that isn't there - then why live in a foreign country at all?  A couple of weeks guided tour should give you all you really want from a country.


I know that there is a fair bit of impatience back home with foreigners coming to work and live for extended periods (and we are talking months, not years!) who don't learn the language, don't adapt to 'our' way of doing things.  How many of our home countries are requiring language skills to be part of a settlement program?  I know of several.  

So is it a form of left-over imperialism that makes us figure we don't need to learn the language, or adapt?  

We aren't refugees, forced to leave our homeland and ending up with little choice in a strange land.  We made a deliberate choice to come here, and even more deliberately for many of us to stay longer than our 'gap year' of 12 months.  

Like a number of people on the forum, I am learning Chinese.  My Chinese is  much worse than I would like it to be - especially as the majority of my friends don't speak English.  I consider myself exceptionally lucky that my friends are incredibly patient with me, and keep working to help me understand.  I would consider myself pretty arrogant to expect people in their own country to speak my language to make my life easier, to do things my way so that I don't have to adapt.  And yet many foreigners do exactly that.  I'm sure we've all met plenty of FTs who don't ever bother with more than being able to say their address to the taxi driver.  

Yes -I'll always be a foreigner here, but I don't have to import too much 'foreign-ness' with me.  I can adapt as much as possible, given language levels, to what is 'normal' for my colleagues who have similar work, similar interests.  This doesn't mean that I have to live in a village (although I can quite happily enjoy myself there as well).  My teacher or business friends/colleagues enjoy reading, and talking about what we have read, we enjoy taking walks or bike rides together, going to concerts, karaoke, eating in local restaurants, collaborating on projects together.  This is all normal daily stuff in most countries.  I haven't found an activity yet that I want to do that not one of my Chinese friends didn't also enjoy well before I came. This level of adaptation is not hard.

If, after some time in a country, you return to 'home' ways - what does it suggest about your attitude to the country you are living in?   Is it time to move on?  Is it a rejection of the people around you?     What do we expect of foreigners at home, the longer they live in our country?    Do we think it's fine for the clumping together in ethnic groupings, or do we see it a a vague threat?  Don't we expect a  more complete adaptation - a deeper fitting in?

Nice post, Lotus.

I think it comes down to motivation and necessity. A refugee coming to England needs to learn the language in order to get a job, fit into a local community and generally get things done. Therefore, they have the motivation to learn since it affects their livelihood.

FTs going another countries don't have this necessity - especially in a big city. It's possible to never speak a lick of Chinese and get by. Motivation only comes if they want to integrate more into the Chinese way of doing things - some people simply don't want to do that.

I completely agree with the whole arrogant thing. I met a fair few foreigners in Korea who would walk into a restaurant or bar and speak in rapid, colloquial English and get angry when the waiter didn't understand. That kind of arrogance is disgusting.