The Expat/Emigrant Lounge

stray · Feb 19, 2013

Born in the UK, moved to Bangkok, Thailand when I was twenty-four. Still here twelve years later. I love the pollution, the crazy lights, the madness of the crowds. Travel and relocation is great fodder for fiction.

AbsoluteKoala · Feb 19, 2013

Sign me up to the nomad group! Originally Scottish and lived there until my mid-twenties, but since then I've lived in the Netherlands, briefly in Canada, San Francisco, London, Sydney and now Denver.

We were in Sydney for eight years and I felt very settled there - I now have joint UK/Australian citizenship. Denver is good so far, but I still miss my Aussie home.

L M Ashton · Feb 21, 2013

Lils said:
My dream right now is to relocate for a couple of years or so to Singapore, because I've loved my visits there!

We've been in Singapore for the last year. The cost of living here is very high, so be warned. But leave that aside, and life here is wonderful. Multicultural, lovely cuisine, cheap and efficient mass transit, clean and green city...

Receding Waters · Feb 23, 2013

How have I just found this thread? Insane.

I've been living and teaching in Dalian, China for about a year and a half. Lookin' to stick around for a few more years. The language is a blast even when some of the customs and negative effects of Guanxi aren't, but I love it all. Except maybe the pollution. Back home in the States I went three years with barely a sniffle, but I can't seem to go three months without thinking I'm dying of some rare disease here.

I've gotten to a few places here in China and met some great people from all around the world that I still keep in contact with, but most recently I visited Thailand. That was pretty cool, but I'm not a fan of the heat. I like me some fall and winter.

I've been kickin' around some ideas for a new story that include blending a few details about European history and the Chinese legends of the White Snake. I'm a few thousand words into it, but I'm taking my time on the story. Still focusing on polishing my latest MS before moving on.

I'm interested in learning how living abroad has influenced other writers' writing. Not just the experiences that make for good story-telling, but the mentality or the thought processes that have changed because of the expat experience.

Any thoughts?

Jordan

TimGavin · Mar 6, 2013

Born in Ireland, came to the US when I was fifteen. I love Americans, they are some of the brightest and kindest people I know, even if they do have a habit of speaking through their noses.

GypsyKing · Mar 21, 2013

TimGavin said:
Born in Ireland, came to the US when I was fifteen. I love Americans, they are some of the brightest and kindest people I know, even if they do have a habit of speaking through their noses.

I also am an immigrant from Ireland. And my name is also Tim!

Small, small world. Well, at least our island is small. And very interbred.

Ghostwriter-Mom · Mar 21, 2013

Wow, almost every country (or continent at least) is represented here.
I'm Nigerian and I live in Malaysia - been there for 3 years now. What do I miss? I don't know...the food I guess and of course my family's in Nigeria. But my husband and kids are here so that's good. What do I love? I love how laid back Malaysia is and it is a truly beautiful country!

L M Ashton · Mar 21, 2013

Ghostwriter-Mom said:
Wow, almost every country (or continent at least) is represented here.
I'm Nigerian and I live in Malaysia - been there for 3 years now. What do I miss? I don't know...the food I guess and of course my family's in Nigeria. But my husband and kids are here so that's good. What do I love? I love how laid back Malaysia is and it is a truly beautiful country!

Howdy, neighbor! We haven't made it to Malaysia yet, sadly. I want to visit, but... The husband's Sri Lankan, so he has to get a visa ahead of time for nearly every country in the world (with the exception of the Maldives and Singapore), and that's a pain in the patootie... Someday.

GypsyKing · Mar 21, 2013

Ghostwriter-Mom said:
Wow, almost every country (or continent at least) is represented here.
I'm Nigerian and I live in Malaysia - been there for 3 years now. What do I miss? I don't know...the food I guess and of course my family's in Nigeria. But my husband and kids are here so that's good. What do I love? I love how laid back Malaysia is and it is a truly beautiful country!

That's good to hear. I'll be honest, I have minimal personal experience with either country, beside there being a large Nigerian immigrant population in Ireland. But from what I hear on the media, I've been under the impression that both nations are a bit tumultuous and somewhat repressive. Is this not the case?

xamich · Mar 21, 2013

I miss Bangkok terribly!

I'm Korean, grew up in Singapore, went to university in Switzerland and spent a year working in Bangkok. Now I'm in Canada because my family and I were granted permanent residency.

PowerWriter · Mar 21, 2013

Born in Wisconsin and have lived in Canada 42 years.

DeaK · Mar 22, 2013

I was born in Denmark, moved to Canada at 12 years old. Moved back to Denmark at 25 (to answer the question Am I Danish or Canadian, or what?); moved to Sweden at 26 (well, the answer was neither!); then San Fran, USA for 2 years; and now back to Sweden, where we're planning on staying for a while. It's still winter here, in late March. I miss Cali.

iLion · Mar 28, 2013

Great thread idea... thx.

US born American, but grew up in Venezuela where I lived in larger cities like Caracas and Maracaibo, but also in jungle bound communities like Tamare, LaSalinas, Lagunillas, and others for maybe 15 yrs. Loved it. Love the country and the people, exept for Caracas insanity. Life in the jungle is nothing compared to life in that city in terms of crime and poverty, political unrest and high cost of living. I lived there many yrs.

Travel around Caribbean was always incredible.

Now I am so restless... it's killing me to live in the same place (Ohio) so long now. Would go back to certain So. American jungles or the Andes or Caribbean islands in a heart beat.

Every American politician (Feds at least) should be required to live elsewhere for maybe 2 yrs minimum.

I've also lived in PA, TX, FL, WY, TN, WA, and OH. Have been to every state except HI and RI. I love CA and TX the most, but people are amazing and mostly wonderful where ever I go.

JDwrites · Mar 29, 2013

Canadian here, just returned from almost a decade in Asia with a few gigs in Europe along the way ... trying to wrestle time to increase my writing.

trocadero · Mar 29, 2013

Just saw this thread. I'm Australian and have spent the last six years here in Hong Kong. In two years time, I think I'll be looking for an adventure elsewhere—maybe middle east or eastern Europe.

Hong Kong is an amazing city, but very polluted. Great SCBWI group, and lots of authors seem to swing through.

calling33 · Mar 30, 2013

Just seen this thread. I'm a Brit who's settled down in Sydney, been here for over three years and loving it.

Chris P · Mar 30, 2013

I've seen this thread for a while, but never checked it out for some odd reason. I'm American, lived in the former Confederacy for a number of years (well, it FELT like a different country!) and now I'm in Uganda with the Peace Corps.

I guess what I miss the most is the music (progressive rock, alternative, etc) and pay-as-you-go internet doesn't lend itself to streaming. I also miss anonymity! Everybody notices when the muzungu is around. I like just going about my day and not attracting attention. I don't mind the attention from kids until they are all looking over my garden wall watching me do laundry, and I don't mind it from adults as long as it's not followed by "give me!"

Snitchcat · Mar 31, 2013

trocadero said:
Just saw this thread. I'm Australian and have spent the last six years here in Hong Kong.

Wait. How did I miss that you've been in HK for the last six years??? o,0

Permanent resident here.

Radzeer · Mar 31, 2013

Born and raised in Hungary, I have been living in the US since 2001, but lived in Canada for some time too (miss that very much!). Cheers!

njmagas · Apr 9, 2013

DeaK said:
I was born in Denmark, moved to Canada at 12 years old. Moved back to Denmark at 25 (to answer the question Am I Danish or Canadian, or what?); moved to Sweden at 26 (well, the answer was neither!); then San Fran, USA for 2 years; and now back to Sweden, where we're planning on staying for a while. It's still winter here, in late March. I miss Cali.

Ah~ Danish is in the top three of my sexy languages list, much to the chagrin of my Finnish friends.

I was born in Canada and spent most of my life there before briefly living in San Fran and then moving to Japan where I've been living for three years now with no plan to return any time soon. The original plan was a one year stint, but there's so much to love about Japan, Kansai in particular. The history alone is keeping me mesmerized here.

Things that I miss? Real cheese, cheap produce, clothes that fit me, and the ability to easily raise reptiles.

Ollyj777 · Apr 17, 2013

Hi, I am UK born, moved to the USA in 2012. Any other Brits hanging around in Connecticut, or the surrounding area?

Describli · Apr 25, 2013

Hi everyone, just saw this thread too

My family is British (English, Scottish and Welsh) and I was our first person born in the US. Since then I've lived in the US, England, and now Armenia. We're posted here for 2 years, then maybe on to UAE, Malaysia, or Austria (we don't get to choose).

I would say not getting to choose where I live gives me a go-with-the-flow attitude that transfers over to my writing. Does anyone else have experience w/ that?

Creative Cowboy · May 3, 2013

Lonesome Cowboy A Long Way From Home

Hi there. Creative Cowboy here – the Lucky Luke of expats: a lonely cowboy a long way from home. I came to Poland in 01. In fact, this month is my 12th anniversary. I have lived in Vienna for a short time in ‘88. This gave me the luxury of traveling around Europe while having the base I needed to pursue a career in journalism with UPI and a job at ORF – radio free Europe. I did not accomplish either but what a time, so full of promise for a young university dropout! I returned home to concentrate on business and that was the last I wrote creatively (until recently).

I was self-employed in public relations strategy development (not press writing) between 89 – 01, when I left to come to Poland. I came to find a wife (with what I thought were traditional values without she being a slave). I had enough of the platitudes “be yourself” in response to my complaints about serial dating. I wanted someone that would size me up and be serious.

Anyways, lots of water under that bridge, and I crossed it and found myself broke in Poland. Destitute broke not whiny whinging broke but cannot afford food broke. Food is first, then shelter then clothing. It broke down for me in reverse order until I was ready to eat dry pet food. Ye-haw.

No stories, just the facts. Then someone took pity on me and, well, I eat and have Internet access today. I even got to meet and discuss my story with a big time author a couple of years ago. What a different life. I am now back to writing and working to be a successful writer so I can return home, alone if that’s the way my life plays out, but smart enough to know that if I do not enjoy my writing, it ain’t worth reading. It’s a business model based on the way I used to love writing before I went away to study English literature and began moaning how I will never be the next Fitzgerald. Today it is “do or die” and I better not have that attitude or I will die. So I am in a kind of a happy bubble today despite my continuing dire straights.

I am originally from the place where no one wants an English person like me: Montreal, Quebec. If you know the politics of language there and the problems they cause everyone regardless of which language they speak, you know of what I faced. Not unlike Poland but Poland is more welcoming: polite if not friendly. It was really difficult to give up my entrepreneurial habits –those enculturated knee-jerk reactions to every good opportunity to come my way and to energetically develop every possibility to find work that has not paid but drained my coffers in Poland. These habits make great procrastination tools when staring at a blank page – and they rationalize so well.

So, for the meantime, I am content with being a bum and I have an understanding sponsor. Now top that if you can for something to be grateful for/to! I am also honest. I call’em as I see’em, which translates to “take from me what you like and leave the rest.” Beware that when I offer criticism, which is the reason I have returned to AbsoluteWrite!

It is my turn to repay the help I have received here.

A) What's it mean to you? What do you miss, what are you glad about?

Being an expat means different things to different people. I fell out of the sky into Poland and that colours my picture of the situation as surely as the seconded CEO sent from HQ has a different colour of Poland. I am absolutely alone. I am a ghost – a nondescript form wandering the streets with only my own internal dialogue for company to wrestle me to life. Everything is foreign to me, including the foreigners. My isolation matches the loneliness in my heart. In that respect, I finally fit. So it’s a paradox.

I miss many things and I have had to turn to eBay over the last decade to return useful items to me. You would be surprised what material goods Poland lacks.

Razor blades not made out of crap aluminum, which nicks me and easily dulls
Irish Spring soap
Decent staplers (to staple 30 pages, not 2)
File folders
Duo tangs
Standardized toilet seats because one-size does not fit all here
Paint that stays on the wall when the wall is wiped
Cast iron frying pans
Universal healthcare
Coffee that tastes like coffee and not Confederate chicory
Peanut butter
Smoked meat sandwiches
Access to North American hockey and baseball
Woven material that has substance from flimsy towels to sheer thin underwear
Tube socks that seem to last me forever, unlike the painted nylon that feels like pantyhose

I miss other things too, not just consumer goods:
Personal effects of great sentimental value I lost in Canada, like my deceased father’s belongings
Big English book stores that I used to wander into to soak up what’s new on the shelves
A library – period
Speaking with people and arguing points on interesting topics bordering the philosophical
Being friendly and open to everyone
Being on time because it just does not matter in Poland
Relying on people to do what they say because it just does not happen in Poland
Stable friends – i.e. close friends, not beer chums I no longer have the money to support

And, of course, having some basic control in my life beyond how I choose to meet death 24/7.

Then there is the surprising one you won’t read about in Fordor’s Travel Guides: a communication barrier. This is due to an over reliance on getting everything nailed down in the local language that features four dialects (actually 4 different languages so they say) and no one trust amongst anyone because of this over reliance and the multiple languages. This affects everything from buying tickets for the bus at the automatic machine where my benefactor cannot read her own native Polish well enough to know the cost to traveling north or south from Warsaw where they speak a German-Polish (Gdansk area) or a Slavic-mishmash-Polish (Tatra mountains). And you think understanding a Scotsman is difficult?! Or, the situation in Belgium that has three national languages plus Flemish? Poles understand the Czechoslovakian people better than they understand the Tatra mountain Poles. So language is right out, and no one trusts anything less. This I think is the most depressing thing in Poland and it hardly affects me, a foreigner, but it does affect the national character of the people here: polite but not friendly.

So that’s all pretty dismal but not so bad for a shut-in like myself. I have thousands of miles of English Internet radio in a language, dialect and even slang I understand. I also have Youtube. The world is my oyster. This I am grateful for, and Powell’s eBay bookstore as others have mentioned in the last 9 pages. By the way, Powell’s has a Polish connection too.

But there are things in Poland I am grateful for as well.
Excellent bead. I just ate a whole cranberry dark bread the other day.
Superb public transit – published times, routes and on time! No really, on time unlike everything else.
Doctors make housecalls, something when I had the money was important to me – but more so the fact doctors sneak me into their office, treat me like a worthy case and do not charge me when I need their help because there is something more than money left in this profession – just do not mind the unhygienic hospitals. I also like their simple remedies like the time I thought for sure I was dying (and I do not over exaggerate the pain) the paramedics gave me a glass of tomato juice and it worked to my utter astonishment. This kind of common sense foundation to dealing with health problems appeals to me greatly.
Flowers and vegetables have a beautiful perfume here that is as pungent as smelling salts back home
I have a bicycle and there are many castle ruins in the area. Since I write fantasy as well as crime stories this opportunity to spiritually connect to my writing is an unspeakable bonus to me

eBay and Amazon have been godsends to me. My strategy for survival and future sustainability has been to try and return my environment to my teenage years as one way to re-immerse myself into the joy of writing. So I have been able to buy a few vintage teenage things I might blush at relating being a man nearing 50.

And whether I am in Poland or not, I am incalculably grateful to my benefactor who assists me to buy the Bambi sheets I currently sleep in, in the first place. A dedication to this patron is not good enough. And, in this regard, I have many people to whom I am grateful over the years including one that is not a person: my pet ferret who taught me the meaning of perseverance until his death on 4 December 2011.

For the last year, since his death, I have been coping with dramatic depression something that is finally lifting. I am very blessed to have a default attitude that is positive. So the paradox of being a shut-in, shut away from all the negativity that is Poland itself, works like a tonic for me.

B) I'm interested in learning how living abroad has influenced other writers' writing. Not just the experiences that make for good story-telling, but the mentality or the thought processes that have changed because of the expat experience. - Receding Waters

Well, I have mentioned much concerning the diversity of Polish thinking as a foundation of the distrust within the nation. And this allows me to write better characters by shifting points of view – not unlike what GRRM has done with Jamie Lannister. Except, rather than just artificially copy GRRM’s style of portrayal, I can continue to develop my own style from what I have seen occur.

I have always been a pacifist. Sometimes an angry pacifist but still a pacifist and my thinking about characters has been rather black and white to match the dichotomy of those who fight (bad) and those who must fight (good). Watching locals deal with each other and deal with foreigners, getting the stories secondhand from foreigners and natives alike as well as having my own rough times dealing with the same issues, has given me some insight into different culture: the bad and the good.

As I mentioned, thinking I was not the next Scott Fitzgerald was not so much the cop out it sounds as it was the lack of love in my own voice. Now, because of how I must (and I must) deal with my future financial well-being, I have come to appreciate my ability to write more. When I start sharing my work here to seek critique and approbation, I will have that going for me. I am not entirely satisfied with my voice but I know it exists and it is valuable even if it does not currently star Robert Redford or Leonardo Dicaprio.

I have a crime story too and one of the interesting facts I learned about Poland is that a private detective may NOT investigate someone unless there is police activity already on-going with that person. This certainly puts a sharper edge to my noir writing, as well as the experiences I have had in both the expat scene(s) and with the locals. It gives me a certain unique selling point that if I craft it right, would make for a much more interesting telling of the Maltese Falcon, for example.

I also learned that that is just as credible an objective for a writer as is writing the original masterpiece. Harlequin romance and classic literature stand on the same pedestal in my contemporary mind and I no longer listen as much to “great literature.” James Joyce’s Ulysses certainly has that pretext going into its writing but I’d rather Coles Notes it myself. Henry Miller is certainly not in this class and yet? Gatsby is just a fine example of good patient writing. Yet, they all attend to the same pillar in the imagination of English literature. This is not a conclusion I could come to in university because everything I was supposed to read was grand. But, since coming to Poland, my appreciation for this truism has really hit me.

It hits me so hard that I say to myself every time I see Steven Brust’s wikipedia article: Why have I waited this long to do it! That’s a pretty powerful paradigm shift if you ask me. I have to be grateful to that. And time will tell if others are as grateful. LOL.

----
Now look what I found but could not edit into my signature:
I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine. - Raymond Chandler

GBin13 · May 19, 2013

not really sure what this section is about. everyone has been somewhere abroad and writes: that is it or am I missing a point or two? GB

Creative Cowboy · May 21, 2013

Expat Defined

GBin13 said:
not really sure what this section is about. everyone has been somewhere abroad and writes: that is it or am I missing a point or two? GB

I think the idea of an expat is residing somewhere abroad in a foreign culture. I've been in Poland 12+ years, and I hail from Canada.

So living in a different voivod (Polish for "state" not the music group) for some time in years would be my idea of an expat. Filling taxes in (or from, if double taxed) a different country is a dead giveaway.

The Expat/Emigrant Lounge

stray

AbsoluteKoala

L M Ashton

crazy spec fic writer

Receding Waters

How much for a cheeseburger?

TimGavin

GypsyKing

Mischief is an art

Ghostwriter-Mom

L M Ashton

crazy spec fic writer

GypsyKing

Mischief is an art

xamich

Sescha Young

PowerWriter

DeaK

iLion

Why do I say these things?

JDwrites

trocadero

calling33

Chris P

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred

Snitchcat

Dragon-kitty.

Radzeer

The Man from Eastern Europe

njmagas

Ollyj777

Ollyj777

Describli

Creative Cowboy

A Reader Is A Writer's Best Friend.

GBin13

Creative Cowboy

A Reader Is A Writer's Best Friend.