Cutting Back by Leslie Buck

Himeji, Japan

My time here in Japan has one fatal flaw:  no garden.  Yes, there are gardens everywhere to admire, but there is not one bit of earth here I can call my own. At moments like these, it heals the heart to live vicariously though someone else's experiences.

Cutting Back:  My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto by Leslie Buck was all that for me and more.  If you are a migrant/expatriate and a gardener, I think you will love this memoir.  And for those among you who aren't particularly enchanted by the finer points of Japanese pruning techniques, I would still recommend it for insights into the Japanese system for training craftsmen and women.




Buck is from California and when she left for Japan she was 35 years old and the owner of a landscaping company in the United States.  She had studied under Japanese craftsmen living in the US and had a portfolio of her work.  This is a definite advantage that craftsmen and artists have because they don't have to rely entirely on language;  they can actually show what they have done.   

How she managed to get the apprenticeship in Kyoto is illuminating.  Much of it was about using a Japan-US migrant/expatriate network.  Through one contact she found a place to live in Kyoto.  Through another master gardeners from Japan living in the US gave her names and letters of introduction.  A very kind woman at an party translated her cover letter into Japanese.  Another contact introduced her to a neighbor in Kyoto who spoke English and owned a landscaping company.  And yet another person went with her on an interview as a translator.  Her approach, which was a combination of persistence, determination, and humility, was successful and in the end she had two offers.  The power of a transnational network?  Absolutely.

How did she make her choice between the two companies?  One was very tempting because the company was close to where she lived in Kyoto and the owner spoke English.  The other was a very well-known company but it was much farther away and she was told before she interviewed that no one in the company spoke English (something that turned out to be false by the way).  She chose the harder road and became an apprentice at the Uetoh Zoen company.

And it was hard in so many ways.  What makes her book a cut above many other expat memoirs is how forthcoming she is about her many mistakes and things that she found particularly difficult.  She was integrated into a hierarchical, all male work crew and since she was the latest arrival, she was almost at the very bottom of the hierarchy.  The work itself was physically taxing (6 days a week) and sometimes very frustrating because there was almost no spoken guidance given.  She was given a tree to prune and if she did well, she was given another.  If she did poorly, she was yelled at and told to start hauling brush.  Learning was 90% observation and 10% negative verbal feedback.   She writes,  "Working with the men was a codependent's dream job!  The company hierarchy kept the momentum going. No one stopped to discuss a plan.  You do as you're told, or guess and accept the consequences."

Among the many things she found odd was the requirement that she wear white gloves when working.  If you've ever gardened than you know that anything white will turn grey within the first hour.  The boss of the crew mocked her when she tried to get away with reusing her gloves.  All of us migrants/expatriates have experienced these moments when something just doesn't make any sense to us and we search for why the culture asks this of us.  Buck did, in my view, exactly the right thing which was to obey and buy a pack of fresh white gloves at the store.  And only then did she attempt to make sense of it. 

Her conclusion was, "By asking me to wear new white gloves every day, I think Nakiji was trying to teach me that if I act like a premier craftsperson, I might feel like one."  That may or may not have been true but her after-the-fact reaction feels more like an attempt to rationalize obedience.  Here is a strong independent woman needing a reason to put aside her own thoughts and beliefs and performing an act of humility when faced with a cultural difference.

The nadir of her apprenticeship occurred toward the end when she was temporarily assigned to another crew.  It was snowing and when the crew broke for lunch they climbed into the truck to warm up and eat and the crew chief handed her a sandwich and told her she had to eat outside by herself.  "Fine, I thought spitefully, I can adapt to this situation, like all the other workers would.  I ate my lunch with my back turned to the men, my silent protest."

Cold, wet and physically exhausted she was in that state of cultural confusion where one begins to imagine all kinds of nefarious intentions on the part of the natives, she stubbornly sat there even when a woman came out from the nursing home and invited her to come inside.  When she wouldn't move the woman brought her a cup of hot coffee.

"As I sipped my cooling cup of coffee with lovely, icy snow falling around me, the woman came out again to retrieve the cup.  I looked at the ground so she couldn't see my tears.  But she kept saying something to me over and over.  I finally looked up.  I must have looked a sight.  I watched her expression turn from polite friendliness to horror then to tenderness in the space of a second. She understood... I struggled not to feel ashamed.  Surely she must have understood my determination to act strong, like a dedicated craftsperson.  But deep down, I felt expose and overly sensitive.  What I believed was our female pact, to suffer in silence, made me cry even more."

I think many of us woman migrant/expatriates can relate to this experience though our reactions and actions might have been different.  When entering another culture a woman has to find a way to fit that does not do deep damage to her deepest self.  Buck was fearful from the very beginning that she would be treated differently because she was a woman and she went to great lengths to prove that she could keep up with the men.  Being yelled at, for example, was (she was told) a good sign: "You'll be lucky if your boss yells at you.  That means you're being treated like one of the guys, not an outsider." Buck wasn't asking for positive special treatment, but here was a situation where she was experiencing negative special treatment: isolation from the crew. 

Was she treated this way because she was a woman, a foreigner, or just the lowest person in the hierarchy?  Buck didn't know a culturally appropriate response to what was happening. And that is a situation I have encountered many times in my workplaces in France.  What actions can you take and which options are not acceptable?  Only time and observation can give you answers.  Watch what men and women actually do (and not what they say) in order to solve the riddle of gender relationships in the host country workplace.

A really fine book.  I have not written nearly enough about the gardens and how hard it is to make a Japanese garden look "natural."   There is every bit as much work as there is in a formal "unnatural" garden like Versailles. 

"We picked up every last pine needle by hand.  On top of that we cleaned up a gravel area around a sitting bench, per Nakiji's request. All he had to do was point and grunt. I knew instantly that the area wasn't up to his standards, that I would have to grab a bucket, move the rocks aside, square foot by square foot, dust the ground and replace the rocks."  

The great Japanese gardening classic (Sakuteiki) says  that nature is the guide but the act of creating a garden is one of interpretation, not re-creation. Gardening is a craft and an art. And I think there is an analogy here to integration.  The culture is the guide from which we take inspiration but we ultimately are the interpreters.  I like this notion much better than the one that says culture is static and something to be bullied into learning by rote. Because as every landscape, every garden, is unique, so are we.

Review: Notes on a Foreign Country - An American Abroad in a Post-American World

It is always deeply satisfying to find a book that I can add without hesitation to the Flophouse American Diaspora reading list.  Notes on a Foreign Country:  An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen is such a book.  It is certainly one of the better takes on living abroad that I've read in the past few years.  Not only did it satisfy my desire to better understand how American identity changes through emigration,  it is a fair accounting of  the innocence with which Americans at home (and sometimes abroad) view the home country's relationship to and place in the world.  For make no mistake, Hansen believes in the decline of American power, prestige and influence in the world.   She is "an American in a post-American world."  

Before I tell you what I liked about the book I will start with a caveat emptor and some of the things I didn't like.  This is not a book that attempts to be neutral or objective - in fact, Hansen suspects that objectivity is simply impossible.   Notes on a Foreign Country is not an academic book but it isn't a typical expatriate biography, either.  You won't find much in the way of citations and you won't learn a lot about what it's like to live in Turkey.  Much of the book is about her discovery of the history of her own country in Turkey, Greece, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

If you studied Political Science or History she covers things that you probably already know.  Read it anyway to see the process of discovery.  In spite of an Ivy League education she seems to have been completely unaware of just how deeply intertwined the US was with those countries.  She came from a conservative background in the US and one could say that with each migration she became less so.  Sometimes the book feels like one is listening to a convert which can be rather tiresome.

There is also a complete absence of other Americans abroad.  It is as if she is the only American in Istanbul which we all know is not the case.  She did not solicit their views for the book which is a shame.  It would have been interesting to hear from other resident Americans, especially those who had been in the country for twenty years, say, instead of ten.  It is also sometimes irritating when she claims this or that characteristic for all Americans which may be true in her part of the US (East Coast) and in the socioeconomic circles she was raised in but is less applicable in others. Sometimes she qualifies this by reference to race: "White Americans."

I don't know quite how to describe her politics but I will say that there is much in the book that will anger American conservatives and a few things that will surely anger progressives. I certainly was not amused by her using "missionary" as one of the examples of "terrible" things Americans can be in the world.  She is deeply critical but generally thoughtful and that was enough for me to have kept reading.

Migration: Hansen left the US in 2007 for Istanbul, Turkey on a writing fellowship and has lived there ever since .  Like many Americans abroad she arrived abroad as a young adult after she had completed her university studies.  The era in which she left the US is important, I think, to understanding her perspective.  Growing up in what we might call these days "Trump country," she was a child during the Reagan era and still young when the Berlin Wall fell.  Thus, the three national events that mark her consciousness are 911, the Afghanistan/Iraq wars and the Great Recession.   The first was a direct attack on US soil, the second was military interventions that did not end well (did not, in fact, end at all) and the third an economic crisis that left many Americans impoverished. Her conclusion is that these things profoundly changed Americans.

"[T]he lives of American citizens, who have long been self-sufficient and individualistic - the masters of their own fates- have become entwined with the fate of their nation in a palpable way.  It is also perhaps the first time Americans are confronting a powerlessness that the rest of the world has always felt, not only within their own borders but as pawns in a larger international game.  Globalization, it turns out, has not meant the Americanization of the world; it has made Americans, in some ways, more like everyone else."

"More like everyone else."  Yes, and Hansen, in some ways, is no exception. Intentionally or not, she joined the 200 million or so people on the move in the world.  In fact she is a migrant twice over. First she migrated internally from a small regional town to the big city; from Wall, New Jersey (pop. 25,000)  to New York (pop. 8 million) and then she finally landed in Istanbul (pop. 14 million.)  She describes her hometown in the US this way:

"My town, populated almost entirely by the descendants of White Christian Europeans, had few connections to the outside world...I don't remember much talk of foreign affairs, or of other countries, rarely even of New York, which loomed like a terrifying shadow above us, the place Americans went either to be mugged or to think they were better than everyone else."  

Every step of the way Hansen was drawn by opportunity:  the chance to go to university and later a fellowship to go abroad and write.  She stayed in Turkey for what sounds an awful lot like economic reasons: there was work in Istanbul  and the economy was booming.

When my fellowship finished in 2009, the financial crisis whittled away any desire of mine to go home either in the short term -there were no jobs- or in the long term.  The financial crisis made me stop looking at my future as I once had...[I]t was no longer clear that our lives would get exponentially better, as our country had always promised us. 

Identity:  What led Hansen to leave the US was more complicated, however, than economics.  She believes that she was in the midst of an identity crisis which was not about sex or class or calling but about her nationality.  What does it mean to be American in the 21st century?  What is America's place in the world?   Americans were always told that "they were the best, that America was the best, that their very birthright was progress and prosperity, and the envy and admiration of the world." Recent events seemed to contradict that; her emigration confirmed it.  Her first glance at the airport in Istanbul in 2007 was where her sense of America as the "best" was wounded.  The Istanbul airport was cleaner, more modern, and more efficient than "the decrepit airport in New York I had just left."

Returning to the US on two occasions she was able to look at the US with new eyes and to see and experience an America she had not known before.  In the first she encountered the American health care system without insurance: "flies lived in the public hallway showers" and "that night in the hospital was one of the two times I viscerally understood how degraded America had become for many of its people." In the second she went to Mississippi to interview a doctor serving African-American low-income (or no-income) patients who had the audacity to suggest that America might want to look at Iran's rural health care program because something about the American system was not working. "Half of HIV-positive Mississippians didn't seek or receive treatment, because the vast majority of the people didn't have health insurance."

What does it mean to be the citizen of a country where one isn't sure that life will be better, where the infrastructure is crumbling, where schools do not teach about the wider world, where a hospital is dirty and unpleasant, where people with life-threatening illnesses cannot be treated because they have no money?  There are countries like that all around the world, but Americans never thought their country was one of them.

Ignorance and Innocence:  Hansen's argues that Americans'  ignorance of the world and professed innocence about their country's presence outside the US are a terrible combination and has done enormous harm at home and abroad.

"We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance - our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without their attention and concern."

And I would add here that going abroad is not necessarily a cure.  However well-travelled, however long Americans stay abroad, my experience has been that they know precious little about the history of the relationship between the US and the host country.  Many seem to have no idea that as Americans they don't just walk into another world where all agree that the slate is clean, where they can completely reinvent themselves without reference to the past and the relationship between the US and that country.  From that comes an arrogant expectation that they should be deemed personally innocent in any encounter where that country's citizens raise uncomfortable topics .

Americans were liberators and occupiers in France.  They were conquerors and occupiers in Japan and after seeing a picture of Osaka in 1945, I will never look at the skyline of the city from my balcony in the same way ever again. It is very easy to say, "I wasn't born then and I had nothing to do with it."  But it is worth thinking about whether or not many of the migrants I know (including myself) would be Americans abroad in France or Japan today if those things had not happened. Are we, in a sense, beneficiaries of someone else's tragedy?  That, I think, is an excellent topic for discussion.

What is not, in my view, reasonable is to simply disavow any connection to these things at all. To say there is no empire and, in any case, it has nothing to do with me.   What Hansen shows is that despite ignorance and self-proclaimed innocence, the people of the countries we enter know quite well what that history is and have their own feelings about the responsibility of Americans for their nation's actions past and present.  Perhaps one element of local integration for Americans abroad is acknowledging those feelings and accepting that history in its entirety.

A book written by an American cannot end without a proposed solution.  Hansen argues that one antidote is "love" and I scoffed at that until I read further:

"[i]t is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person's physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person was hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you."  

 This is a call for Americans to learn to love the world and to stop viewing it as "a place where Americans go to get hurt and to hurt others." This, Hansen admits, was her starting point for thinking about big American cities and the world beyond America's borders.

 The second is acknowledging that we are imperfect like the rest of humanity.  ("Less than the gods and more than the beasts...")   "We are benevolent and ordinary and we are terrible things, too; we are missionaries and oil speculators, racists and soldiers, bureaucrats and financiers, occupiers and invaders, hope mongers and hypocrites."  And what would it cost us, really, to cast off the veil of innocence?  In any case, as Hansen points out, local citizens who know their history don't believe it of us anyway.  And, in my view, it makes us even more untrustworthy.

Hansen ends by conceding that she doesn't know what Americans and American identity will become but this is what she aspires to:

"Whoever Americans become after this time of reckoning, it will, hopefully, not be about breaking from the past but about breaking from the habit of its disavowal.  If this project of remembrance requires leaving our country, then so be it, because it is not an escape; we will find our country everywhere, among the city streets and town squares and empty fields of the world, where we may discover that the possibility of redemption is not because of our God-given beneficence but proof of the world's unending generosity."

Flophouse Book of the Week: Dealing in Desire

Last night I finished Kimberly Kay Hoang's Dealing in Desire:  Ascendancy in Asia, Western Decline and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work.

Kimberly Hoang is a Vietnamese-American scholar, an associate professor at the University of Chicago.  Dealing in Desire is the product of years of research into the sex trade in Ho Chi Minh City.  She spent 7 months in Vietnam in 2006/2007, and then returned in 2009 for another 15 months.  She actually worked in the bars and hostess-clubs so that she could observe and conduct interviews over a period of time.   She finished her dissertation and published her book in 2015.

The sex trade is a very controversial subject.  Countries like Thailand and Vietnam are not necessarily thrilled to be known as great places for sex tourism, and there certainly has been a lot of criticism of this trade coming from the West with concerns about trafficking, women's welfare, and the spread of some deadly diseases.

However, Hoang is very respectful of the women and men who work in this business and went to great lengths to determine if this was a choice that the women were making.  She contends that it was - at least in the bars and clubs where she did her research.  And she succeeds in doing a very fine analysis which looks at this as a business with niches, opportunities and risks at a time when the Vietnamese economy was booming.  According to the World Bank they are still seeing GDP growth at about 6% in 2014 and the country is classified as "lower middle income."

How the economic and social mobility opportunities are leveraged in the sex trade is fascinating because as Hoang shows they are framed by:  nationalisms; Asian, pan-Asian and Western identities; and socioeconomic status.  In short, these entrepreneurs know their customers.

Hoang identifies these three niche markets in the sex trade in Ho Chi Minh City which range from the high-end, the most exclusive and expensive clubs, to the lower end which caters to the tourist or the marginal Western migrant/expat on a budget.

Exclusive Bars/Clubs:  This is the high-end where a client only gets in if he's invited by another client.  They are frequented by elite local Vietnamese businessmen who sometimes invite their counterparts from China, South Korea or Japan. These are places where men make deals and contacts in a relaxed and informal atmosphere:  expensive whiskey and beautiful elegant Vietnamese women.

The bar where Hoang worked "generated around U.S. $150,000 a month in revenue from alcohol sales alone." (Hoang 2015:41)  The women, who ranged in age from 16 to 22, did not earn a salary but were paid in tips:  about 2000 USD a month for serving and entertaining at the bar and about  150-200 USD if they left the bar with a businessman. (Hoang 2015:42)

Viet Kieu Bars/Clubs:  A level down are clubs that cater to overseas Vietnamese - migrants who left Vietnam (or their parents did) and have returned.  Unlike the high-end bars Westerners were more welcome (sort of).   At the bar where Hoang worked Viet Kieu with reservations got in immediately and everyone else had to stand in line outside to be seated:

"Though the length of the queue primarily depended on capacity, it was an unspoken rule that Western men generally had to wait in the queue unless they were accompanied by a group of overseas Vietnamese or local Vietnamese men.  The symbolic and systematic denial of Western men from these bars made Lavendar one of the most attractive sites for Viet Kieu men." (Hoang 2015:43)

This looks very much like some of the clubs in Tokyo where Westerners are met at the door with a "Japanese only"and denied entry.  And I do wonder if the motivation is similar - the creation of a space where Western people get to experience a little of the discrimination that Asians have perhaps felt in Western countries.  In Ho Chi Minh city, says Hoang, "Viet Kieu men displayed a class-based transnational masculinity by consuming alcohol and sex in spaces that were often explcitly unavailable to white men." (Hoang 2015: 68)

The Western Expat Bar:  The lower-end.  These are the bars where mostly Western men congregate.  The owner of this type of bar Hoang says, opened it "in 2008, to capitalize on the growing number of Westerns transnational businessmen who had suffered during the 2008 financial crisis and traveled to Vietnam to rebuild their professional lives." (Hoang 2015: 46)  The women don't make nearly as much money (about 250-300 USD per month which is about 10 times less than the high-end bars) but they have other ways of generating income.

Hoang calls it "benevolent remittances."  The sex workers at this end of the market convince Western men to give them money for projects or for their families.  As one worker explained: "If you make them feel sorry for you as a poor Vietnamese village girl, they will give you a lot more money." (Hoang 2015: 62)

If you are from Europe or North America you may have read this far and have the sense that the world has turned upside down ( perhaps you are simply offended by the blatant discrimination). Maybe you are asking yourself:  Since when did white male Westerners lose some of their privilege in Asia?  And the answer is:  Since Asia got rich.  The larger frame to this story, Hoang argues, is how Western investors were replaced by Asian investors and entrepreneurs, and this was particularly obvious in Vietnam just after the Great Recession.

Between 1995 and 2005, Australia, Canada and the United States were the largest providers of FDI in Vietnam.  However, by 2009, Western nations played a much smaller role in Vietnam's market economy as countries within the Asia-Pacific region began to take over.  And by 2010, the six leading contributors were Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong." (Hoang 2015:8)

There is a great story (or one that might make you wince) in the middle of Hoang's book that goes like this:  after an evening at one of the high-end bars the businessman host pulled out his credit card and said "'Oh wait.  These things don't work anymore. Americans broke the [global credit] system." He leaned back, grabbed his briefcast, pulled out a wad of cash, and instructed me to count out VND 42,000,000 (U.S. $2,100).  Then he pulled out another wad of cash and tipped each woman two crisp VND 500,000 bills (fifty U.S. dollars). (Hoang 2015:54)

That reorientation toward the nationalities and classes that are perceived to have the most money is undoubtedly true of a lot of sectors (cars, pharmaceuticals, luxury goods, department stores in Paris, shopping centers in Osaka and so on) and so it should not be a surprise that the sex industry has done exactly the same thing.  And, as Hoang notes, this has really destroyed the image of Western masculinity dreaming of "the world order modeled on older tropes of Western global power..." and allowed another image, an Asian one and equally masculine, to come forward. (Hoang 2015: 60)

Cynthia Enloe says that a gender analysis is not just about asking Where are the women?  It's also about asking Where are the men?.   So, how have the Western male migrants/expatriates in Vietnam reacted to this?  Hoang interviewed those who hung out at the bar where she worked and she found an interesting mixture of resignation and defiance.

Most had lost their jobs in their home countries in the recession and came to Asia because they were offered work.  One of the expats/migrants Hoang interviewed said:  "None of the guys will ever say this, but we all sort of know it...The guys who are working here in Vietnam are men who for the most part couldn't make it in New York, Hong Kong, or Shanghai." (Hoang 2015: 64)  There were also scenes she witnessed where the men made cringeworthy attempts to get the Vietnamese women sex workers to say that Western men were better in bed than Asian men. On the Vietnamese side Hoang saw Vietnamese men portraying Western men as poor and cheap (not willing or able to tip well).

These competing masculinities must have been very amusing to watch.

Back to the women.  Hoang goes into great deal of detail about the women's lives and their aspirations.  It's not a fairy tale profession, by any means.  The women can't necessarily save as much as they would like; some tried to turn a client into a boyfriend or husband and were deeply disappointed; and they experienced negative reactions from people in their home villages when they went back for a visit.

And finally there is the problem of age.  In the high-end clubs the women are relatively young, in the lower-end bars there were women in their 30's.  But at some point the women are too old to work in the clubs or bars and Hoang doesn't go into details about what happens to them if they haven't saved enough money to invest in other businesses except to note that some are able to back to the village and get married.  Some.

A very fine book on a subject that I have always shied away from or mentally shelved under "trafficking" or "sex tourism."  Hoang does not glorify their work but she's not judgemental about it, either.  At the very end of the book she talks more about how she felt doing this research - some of the biases she had, and some of the problems.  For example she found it impossible to behave as a stereotypical submissive Asian female (in her role as sex worker in expat bar) with the Western men because "I was far better educated than many of them..." but some of them tried nonetheless to put her in her place.  I'd say that with the very public exposure of their comments in this book, she has achieved a delayed but very sweet revenge.

I recommend and if any of you pick it up, I would love to know what you think of it.

Flophouse American Diaspora Reading List

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Time for an update of the Flophouse American Diaspora Reading List - the best books and articles I've read recently about American people and communities abroad.  New books are in green.  As always, please feel free to add to the list.  

This list has three sections:  Upcoming titles - Books that have not been published yet but that I plan on reading; General books/articles - the larger view.  Some talk about specific issues (like citizenship), others are studies, portraits or serious research about Americans abroad;  Expat autobiographies - Accounts of Americans in different countries.  These are not books that tell a potential American migrant how to live abroad.   These are personal accounts that talk about what happens to American identity when it gets transplanted somewhere else for a year or two, or for a lifetime.  

Upcoming Titles:

The Citizenship of Americans Living Abroad: Democracy and Those Who Leave by Katya C. Long.   A Flophouse reader says the Routledge website indicates that this one will be published on November 30th 2015.

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General books:

Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1995) by Robert D. Kaplan.  Kaplan is one of my favorites.  I don't always agree with him but he writes beautifully and he does his research.  This books has excellent portraits of the American communities in places like Lebanon in the 19th and early 20th century.  They were not just missionaries, they were educators, explorers and advocates.  Kaplan draws a line between that American expatriate "localitis"  which was passed down to their intellectual heirs in the late 20th century, and the diplomatic debacle behind the first Iraq war. 

Revoking Citizenship: Expatriation in America from the Colonial Era to the War on Terror (2015) by Ben Herzog.  Not as good a book as Sovereign Citizen by Patrick Weil, but still a fine read. The US has a fine tradition of making and unmaking citizens.  Who was not worthy to remain an American citizen?  In one era it was race, in another it was having the wrong ideology, and in our time it is support for terrorist organizations.  Herzog quotes extensively from Peter Spiro's work and argues that it is the duals who are the most vulnerable today because, he posits, we are living in a period where dual citizenship is merely tolerated, not accepted.

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era (2008) by Kevin K. Gaines.  In 1957 the British Gold Coast colony in sub-Saharan Africa became the independent state of Ghana.  A number of Americans of African descent left the US at the time to live, work, or simply lend their support to the new state.  People like Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Richard Wright.  The Civil Rights Movement in the US had an international dimension and many activists saw their fight for rights in the United States as part of the larger context of African national independence movements.  An amazing story with a not so happy ending - a military coup took down the regime in 1966.

The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (2013) by Patrick Weil.    Really superb book. Excellent research into the un-making of American citizens in the 20th century. 

The Other Side of the Fence:  American Migrants in Mexico (2010) by Sheila Croucher.  A book that came out of a study that Ms. Croucher conducted on US citizens residing in Mexico.  This is not a definitive book about Americans in Mexico in the first decade of the 21st century. It's a sketch that leaves out a lot and once we have that firmly in our minds, we can look more closely at some of her arguments and the questions she asks about the meaning of this group in the larger picture of regional migration on the North American continent. Flophouse review here.

Round-Trip to America:  The Immigrants Return to Europe (1996) by Mark Wyman.  Fascinating look at the immigrants who came to America and then turned around and went back home.  How many?  Hard to know but in the brief period where the US government tried to track it (1908-1923) the inflow to America was nearly 10 million and the outflow was 3.5 million of which 88% were Europeans. Wyman notes that these remigrants represented an important connection to the United States and were viewed as "americani" and "Yanks" when they resettled in their countries of origin.  Worth reading to remind us all that migration is not an aller simple.

The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941 (2014) by Nancy L. Green. I was really looking forward to this one and it did not disappoint (gave it four stars on Goodreads).  The American community/colony in Paris has always been far more diverse than one might think:  businessmen (and women), lawyers, doctors, dentists as well as students and artists and writers. Green does an excellent job of broadening our perspective about this community which has existed since before the American Revolution.  I highly recommend this book and all of Nancy Green's work.

Civic Myths: A Law-And-Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007) by Brook Thomas.  There is citizenship as the law of the land which defines who is legally "in" (or "out") but there is also the social context around it which influences how we feel about that citizenship.  Thomas shows how the "good citizen" or the "immigrant citizen" were portrayed in popular American literature.  The most interesting for me was his discussion about the very famous essay The Man Without a Country which may still be influencing how Americans feel about expatriation (renouncing or losing US citizenship).

Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity (1985) by Peter H. Schuck and Rogers Smith.  My review is here.  This is a book that argues against the rather broad application of US jus soli citizenship laws.  I think it reads very differently for an American living outside the US who is aware that these laws have created something that is being referred to now as an "Accidental American." 

What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013) by Mary Louise Roberts.  Well-researched and has so much information in it that I was in awe as I was reading it.  However, I'm not so sure about the conclusions she drew from that research.  I think I need to read it again before I can give it a fair review.   If you have read it, let me know in the comments section what you thought. 

Migrants or Expatriates?  Americans in Europe by Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels. This one came in 2014 and is THE book to read if you are interested in knowing something concrete about just who those absent Americans (7 million or so of them) are:  socioeconomic status, political affiliations, host country, integration, identity and so much more.  Short Flophouse review here and an interview she gave about the book here.  

The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804 by Douglas Bradburn.  This came out in 2009 and it examines the development of US citizenship in the post-Revolutionary War period.  Fighting over citizenship in this newly independent state was influenced by what was going on in Europe (the French Revolution), the arrival of yet more immigrants and the naturalization question, and expatriation (how to give up US citizenship).  For the last look no further then the fascinating case of one Gideon Henfield, an American who, when accused of privateering, invoked his "right to expatriate" and informed the court that he was no longer an American, but a Frenchman.  He was acquitted in 1793 and allowed to leave and go about his business. 

Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization by Peter Spiro (2008).  This one is already on the Flophouse Diaspora and International Migration Reading List but it definitely should go here as well.  What has happened, in his view, to US citizenship in a globalized world?  I am planning on re-reading it with my American abroad eye taking into account what has happened in the world to US citizenship since 2010.

Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept by Nancy L. Green.  This article (available on-line) was published in 2009 in the The American Historical Review. Great essay about American expatriation in the legal and cultural senses.  How did the right to expatriate (the right to leave) go from a mechanism for "nation-building" to one of excluding Americans from the nation?

Americans Abroad: A Comparative Study of Emigrants from the United States by A. Dashefsky et al. Published in 1992 this is a study of Americans migrants in Australia and Israel (Canada is briefly mentioned as well).  It asks provocative questions about motives for leaving, adaptation in these countries, and why the migrants stayed, returned to the US, or decided to move on to a third country.  In the final chapter are some interesting conclusions and proposals for policies around this emigration one of which is: "Deter efforts to force migrants to change citizenship or otherwise make a permanent, formal commitment to one society or another."

Leaving America:  The New Expatriate Generation by John Wennersten.

Published in 2007, a very interesting book that re-examines the "American Dream" in the light of American emigration.  Talks about Americans in Canada, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.  It's one of the few I've found that includes African-American emigration and women migrants.  Some good statistics (or at least estimates) at the end of the book.

The Unknown Ambassadors: A Saga of Citizenship by Phyllis Michaux.

Published in 1996, this is the story of how Americans abroad organized around issues of particular importance to Americans living outside the US:  citizenship for the children of Americans who were born abroad, voting rights, and many other issues like Medicare from the 1970's to the 1990's.  This is the diaspora going to the homeland government for recognition as a distinct group with particular interests.  It's a battle that is still ongoing but this book is important because it's the only one I know of that gives the the history and the context behind today's efforts.

"Gilded Prostitution": Status, Money, And Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914 by Maureen E. Montgomery.   The title is a bit off-putting but if you are an American woman married to a foreign national this is a good one.  The marriages examined here are between elites (U.S. and U.K.) over a century ago and yet some of the negative (and positive) attitudes about women who marry foreigners and leave America are all too familiar.  Under it all, of course, were questions of citizenship (should women lose their citizenship because they marry "out") and taxation where money followed these women abroad.

Americans Abroad, How Can We Count Them? This book which came out in 2010  is the transcript of a hearing held in 2001 by the U.S. Congress House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Sub-committee on the Census,  on the feasibility of including Americans civilians abroad in the census.  This is the diaspora meeting the homeland government directly and the interplay between homeland interests and the interests of Americans abroad is fascinating.  In particular the testimony of the representative from the U.S. State Department shines a light on the relationship between the US Embassies/Consulates and the American communities in the host countries.  

Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad by Gabriel Sheffer. This is a general book about diaspora politics but I include it here for two reasons: 1.  It will put the efforts for recognition in the three previous books on this list in a much larger context.  There are patterns, general strategies that all diasporas use or try to use as they attempt to manage the relationship with the homeland over different issues and 2.  He examines the question of whether or not the American communities abroad (some of which have a history that goes back to the American Revolution in the 18th century) constitute a true diaspora. 

A Gathering of Fugitives:  American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965 (2002) by Diana Anhalt. a fascinating portrait of American political expatriates, a "small group of controversial Americans who found refuge in Mexico during the late 40's and throughout the '50's..." Flophouse review here.

Innocents Abroad:  Americans Teachers in the American Century by Jonathan Zimmerman.  

This book focuses on one of the largest and most visible group of Americans who live and work abroad: teachers. Zimmerman talks about the distinct differences between those who went abroad in the first half of the 20th century and those who left in the latter half. Though the social, historical and political frameworks changed over time, he notes that there has always been a diversity of opinion and a debate about just what these Americans were doing (or supposed to be doing) abroad. There are things in here that will make Americans wince - not just how some Americans viewed the countries where they worked (especially those that were a part of the American empire like Puerto Rico or the Philippines) in the first part of the 20th century, but also how this continued with a different twist in the second half of the century.

Beyond Borders: Portraits Of American Women From Around The World by My-Linh Kunst

A beautiful book about American women abroad - the photography is stunning.  These are ordinary women who have done (and are still doing) extraordinary things outside the US: Jean Darling (Ireland), Yuzana Khin (Thailand), Gillian McGuire (Italy), Kim Powell, (France), Lucy Laederich (France), Marcia Brittain (Uruguay), and Jane Cabanyes (Spain) to name just a few. The book came out of a FAWCO (Federation of American Women's Clubs Overseas) project and is the work of two members: My-Linh Kunst (photography) and Charlotte Fox Zabusky.  A longer Flophouse review of the book can be found here.

The Transplanted Woman by Gabrielle Varro

Gabrielle Varro is a CNRS researcher in anthropology and sociology who has studied bi-lingualism, immigration and the sociology of mixed-marriages. This book came out of a study that she conducted with AAWE of French-American marriages and families over generations.  Some of it is about the dynamics of cross-cultural marriages but it also looks at American identity as it is transmitted through the American wives of French men.  A Flophouse discussion of Varro's work can be found here.

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Autobiographies:

At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman's Journey of Discovery (2010) by Rebecca Otowa.  I was not impressed by the first half of the book and almost put it down.  But I perservered and the second part was all that I could hope for.  Flophouse review here.

Foreigner in My Own Backyard (2014) by Travis Casey.  I found this when when I was looking for a copy of Bill Bryson's book.  The author is an American who has been living in the UK for 20 years (he's a dual US/UK citizen) and who has had to come back to the US for a short time to care for family.   These are his first impressions of life back in the homeland.  It's funny (and sad sometimes).  Some of his stories show just how ambivalent Americans in the US are about Americans who leave.  If you are an American abroad and have ever toyed with the idea of going "home" for an extended visit, I think you will enjoy this one.

The American (2007) by Franz-Olivier Giesbert.  A rather dark book but with a unique perspective.  The author is an Accidental American in France who wrote about his relationship with his American father.  Flophouse review here.

Second Skin (2012) by Diana Anhalt.  Some stunning poetry from the author of A Gathering of Fugitives. She writes about her host country (Mexico), languages (English/Spanish) and much more.  One of my favorite lines from her work:

"Today I speak Spanish to survive,

but I write in English for its punch,

for the way it slices through excess, draws blood,

attracts sharks. (They know this voice and come to me.)"

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language by Katherine Russell Rich

All about the trauma of losing identity and forming a new one in a new language and country.  Very honest account of how she felt during the process.  A longer Flophouse review of the book is here.

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball:  The best of Joe Bageant edited by Ken Smith

The musings of a "redneck socialist" which are mostly about homeland politics but there are some excellent essays in this book about his time in Belize. His political views are pretty clear:  "Capitalism is dead," he said, "but we still dance with the corpse." Really engaging writer and his expat perspective is one you don't come across everyday.  Just have a look at his bio.  

Tales of Mogadiscio by Iris Kapil

This is a series of essays written by an American woman in a cross-cultural marriage (her husband is Indian and they got married in the 1950's).  She was a serial expat but this book is about the two years the family spent "on the economy" in the capital city of Somalia in the 1960's.  Beautiful descriptions of what that city was like before the country descended into chaos and became the epitome of a "failed state."  Kapil has a fine blog called Iris sans frontières.

The Invention of Tradition

A curious title of a book I picked up a few days ago.  It caught my eye as I was trolling for my next read in the usual places.  When I saw that it was edited by Eric Hobsbawm, I bit the hook.

How can a tradition be invented?  The word implies continuity - something we do today that has its roots in the past.  It's supposed to be an unbroken chain from our ancestors to us and our job is simply to cherish it and pass it along to the next generation.

Saying that a tradition is invented is to call into question its authenticity.  It's no longer something we receive as a gift from our forefathers, but an artificial construct shaped and sold to us gullible moderns in order to further a social or political agenda.

That is exactly what Hobsbawm and company are saying:  that many traditions we hold dear were deliberately created for a particular purpose.  And that purpose was not at all about honoring the past;  it was about shaping the present.

Old countries that gradually became nation-states reached back into their pasts to find rituals that could be manipulated to give an illusion of continuity.  David Cannadine's essay about the British monarchy between 1820 and 1977 shows how the coronation ceremonies of the monarchs changed over time in response to modern realities.  When the political power of the monarchy was still formidable, a coronation was a more or less private event attended by the ruling classes:  the aristocracy, the church and the royal family.  It was their tradition, not that of the common people.   At that time (with one exception under George IV) there was no interest in making this ceremony a grand public occasion.

Cannadine talks about the sheer incompetence of the clergy in the performance of  ritual and the low quality of the music.  "For the majority of the great royal pageants staged during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century oscillated between farce and fiasco."  Drunk coffin-bearers, fights, gate-crashing and general ineptness made these ceremonies something far less than solemn and dignified.  Following much self-flagellation, the consensus at the time was that the British people had no talent whatsoever for pomp.

Tell that to the millions of people who watched the glorious, glittering and flawlessly-executed wedding of Di and Charles in 1981.  Today the ceremonies around the British royal family are a kind of gold standard for public pageantry.  What happened?  Cannadine argues that as the real power of the monarchy waned, and political and social instability rose, "the deliberate ceremonial presentation of an impotent but venerated monarch as a unifying symbol of permanence and national continuity became both possible and necessary."

What we see today on television bears no resemblance to what the same ceremony would have looked liked in the early years of the nineteenth century.  And if we went farther back than that who knows what we might find?  Yes, there is continuity here in the sense that the methodology for anointing a new monarch has been around forever, but the ceremonies broadcast for the viewing pleasure of the masses are a fairly recent innovation, not a tradition.

Compare this use of tradition with that of new nation-states:  ones that are young and don't have much of a collective past to draw on or those that want to distance themselves from a past they don't like.  It's not just countries like The United States, Australia or Canada, but also France and Scotland.  Bastille Day is an invented tradition that began in 1880, almost 100 years after the actual event.  The custom of wearing the kilt (philibeg) was, according to Hugh Trevor -Roper, the invention of an Englishman in the early 18th century.

Part of making Americans (or Canadian and Italians) was coming up with unifying symbols and rituals that everyone could participate in and rally around.  They were all invented at one time or another. Think of the power of Thanksgiving in the U.S.  In 2014 46 million U.S. citizens filled the airports and the highways to go home and have a meal with their families. (Just think of the carbon footprint.)   The day did not even become a national holiday until 1941, but the tradition is taught in schools and is presented as a recreation of a seminal event that occurred in the 17th century, years before the United States came into existence as a country .  (And somehow I really doubt that the Pilgrims  made green pea and pink marshmallow salad the way my grandmother did.)

Why is cherry-picking the past so powerful?   Because whatever our claims to being modern and enlightened, we are susceptible to an emotional appeal to the past.  Conservatives, take heart!  There is still reverence for the old ways.  They are hardly alone in perceiving anachronisms as virtuous - just try taking away some of the rituals and symbols that are part of the civil religion of secular nation-states and listen to the collective howl.

Even people with very new ideas point to the past for legitimacy.  We have a tradition of  [insert idea here] in this country.  People use this argument in support of such diverse concepts as multiculturalism, religious tolerance, bi-lingualism, mono-lingualism, and secularism.  A solid strategy in support of such causes but also a dangerous one because there are simply too many unsavory ideas that others can point to and say that these too have been the custom of the country since time immemorial.

The thing that holds people together in a country is definitely not "the rational calculation of their individual members." That said, do we work with the irrational or against it?  I agree that there are "great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom."  One of those forces is that we are hardwired to want continuity to counter uncertainty.  I would go so far as to say that in so many ways we are better when we feel part of something larger than ourselves.  We need rituals, symbols, customs and traditions and when we don't have them in our lives, we make them up.  It's not a bad thing, it's a human thing.  Or so I think.

What I am more skeptical of, after finishing this fine volume of essays by nit-picking academics, are efforts to manipulate the past in order to further an agenda which may serve an interest but not necessarily a positive collective one.

So when an American politician starts using the "Founding Fathers" as an appeal for some cause that he espouses, that's a sign that we should be extra careful about what he really wants from us.  This holds true everywhere powerful symbols from the past are being evoked.  They may have a more recent pedigree than we think.   And we can perfectly well continue to genuflect in their direction while asking sharp questions of those who would use and misuse them.

One Good Read Leads to Another

If I don't pay attention my entire time in Osaka will be spent reading in my blue chair.  Not that having my nose in a book is a bad thing but the muscles tend to atrophy if I don't get out of the house and walk every few days.  Same for the social skills which degrade through want of contact with other human beings.

When I was a kid, I did exactly the same thing.  I'd sit in my room all day reading until my father would come up and kick me out of the house mumbling something about getting outside in the fresh air and playing with the neighborhood kids.  Which I did, and even enjoyed.

But I wasn't happy in my own skin and other kids made me feel awkward and socially inept.  At 50 I do not have a single friend from my childhood days.  I don't even remember their names.

But I do remember the first time I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.  I reread that one in paperback until the cover fell off.  So it's fair to say that my best friends, the ones I've kept for decades, are stories written down on dead trees.

According to my Goodreads list I have read 116 books this year.  Don't get too excited because not all those books were hard reads.  I'm an eclectic reader and my tastes range from paranormal romance to scholarly works on international migration.  It's all good because within each genre there are authors who shine so bright.  Whenever I read something by Nalini Singh I sigh and say to myself, "God, I wish I could write like that."  I am in awe of the research done by Nancy Green or Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels and their ability to produce books that are readable and enjoyable for a non-academic, general reader like myself.

Out of those 116 books which ones are my new friends and which ones were people I wish I'd never met?  I won't waste words on the latter.  In fact I don't think I've ever written a review panning a book I didn't like.  I just can't do it.  Writing is hard.  Putting yourself out there is painful.  Anyone who has that kind of courage has my admiration even if I don't personally care for the result.

So here are a few I liked (where one book led to another) and I'll do my best to explain why.

Cultural Amnesia:  Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James.  This man is a brilliant essay writer - every single one is well-crafted.  So well-crafted that I can't read too many of them at one time - it's like standing in the sun too long. I started this book over a week ago and I'm only halfway through.    In each essay James talks about a person - famous, infamous, and someone he thinks should be pulled out of the obscurity that was his or her lot when died died.  It's in alpha order and if we peek at the M's, for example, we'll meet Norman Mailer, Michael Mann, Chris Marker, Czeslaw Milosz, Montesquieu and a few others.  "Meet" is the correct word here - we can't pretend to know these people or their work through James' words.  He's just telling us what he thinks of them and what they accomplished in their sometimes very short lifetimes.  It's up to us to further the acquantaince.    So far I've been moved by James to read two books that I had never heard of:  one by an author I know a little about and another by someone completely unknown to me.

The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald (edited by Edmund Wilson).  In my time The Great Gatsby was required reading in high school.  I have no idea if that's still true but having been forced to read it as part of my American Catholic convent school education,  I never picked up another book by Fitzgerald until The Crack-Up - though I did re-read The Great Gatsby last year and still don't get why it is claimed to be one of the Greatest American Novels Ever Written.

I did not enjoy most of The Crack-Up (the book).  In particular his letters to fellow authors and friends were boring.  Yes, they were well-written but I'm not at all interested in reading Gertrude's Stein's letter to him telling him how wonderful he was.  Two things saved the book for me:  the actual essay called "The Crack-Up" in which Ftizgerald lets it all hang out: depression, anger, self-loathing, sense of failure.   "In the dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."  Yes sir, it most surely is.

The other was a poem at the end written by his friend Edmund Wilson and I have read these lines over and over again:

"The hour of utter destitution
When the soul knows the horror of its
loss
And knows the world too poor
For restitution.

Past three o'clock
And not yet four-
When not pity, pride,
Or being brave,
Fortune, friendship, forgetfulness of
drudgery
Or of drug avails, for all has been tried,
And nothing avails to save
This soul from recognition of its night."

Beautiful.

Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg.  This is the memoir of a woman who was arrested during Stalin's purges in the 1930's and sent off to prison and camps where she languished for 18 years.  I'm assuming (though Amazon does not say) that this is a translation.  It's a good read - the prose style is a perfect match  for the story.  This is her personal catastrophe where she lost everything - work, spouse, children, reputation -  and she describes how it happened simply and with such clarity. A pleasure to read and I did so in one sitting.  

I really sat up and paid attention during the part of the book that described her arrest, interrogation and trial.  Nearly 90 years later and totalitarian systems may be long gone, but the totalitarian impulse is alive and well.  Worlds where the law is what the powerful say it is and can be changed arbitrarily (or applied in some cases and not others), where accusations of wrongdoing are rampant and innocence is irrelevant, where people get caught up in a political or bureaucratic machine that simply spins and spits a broken person out, where those lucky enough to escape it say to themselves that there is no smoke without a fire and X must be a terrorist or an "enemy of the state"  because the powers-that-be are basically benevolent and wouldn't do this to someone who is blameless?  Seen any of this around lately?  I have.

All those people who end up no-fly lists for no reason that they can discern and no one will tell them?  Citizens who get deported even though they have proof that they are citizens?   Millions of people presumed guilty of criminal activity and lumped into a group labelled "tax evaders" (the new "enemy of the people").  Protests are met with sly statements that if they don't cooperate in the "war of the day" then they clearly have something to hide.

And just as the loyal, "I will die for the Party" Ginzburg was stunned to be labelled an evil counter-revolutionary based on no reason she could find, so are ordinary people astounded to wake up one morning and discover that they are awaiting deportation, signing away their rights, and being refused travel or basic bank accounts.  Granted, in our day none of these things is a death sentence or 20 years in a work camp but I get the impression that there are still plenty of  True Believers out there who are nostalgic for the Good Old Days of the 20th century.

These books led me to other books which filled my to-read folder very quickly.  And isn't it pure joy when that happens?  Reading Fitzgerald reminded me that I hadn't read anything by Robert Graves in years.  So I added Count Belisarius and started reading last night.  So far I find it disappointing.  Can anyone tell me if it is worth soldiering on and giving it a chance?   The Demon by M.J. Lermontov is also on the list.  And one that James mentioned about the life of Lady Hoshokawa Gracia which I can't find (a play written by a Catholic priest?) but it looks like there are many books about her and if anyone can recommend one in particular in a language I understand (French or English), I would be most grateful.

 I don't want to give you the mistaken impression that I have some sort of impossible standard that I'm trying to meet when I read.  I'm just not that virtuous (or pretentious).  When I pick up a book I am hoping for a future friend, not someone whose name I can drop.  

So let me balance the above with a few other books that I am reading or desperately want to read:    The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes (self-help for writers), Dark Instinct by Suzanne Wright (x-rated paranormal romance), Magic Shifts by Ilona Andrews (brilliant urban fantasy) and The Blood Mirror by Brent Weeks (publication date is 2016 and I want to kill the son of a bitch for making me wait so long for volume 4 in this fantasy series).

I am going to stop there and give you a chance to tell me what you are reading. Have a great weekend, everyone.

At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman's Journey of Discovery

"The question "Who am I?" really asks, "Where do I belong or fit?" We get the sense of that "direction" -- the sense of moving toward the place where we fit, or of shaping the place toward which we are moving so that it will fit us -- from hearing how others have handled or are attempting to handle similar (but never exactly the same) situations. We learn by listening to their stories, by hearing how they came (or failed) to belong or fit.”

Ernest Kuntz

The Spirituality of Imperfection

Underlying my search for good expat/migrant autobiographies are my own identity issues which come up at the most inconvenient moments.  20 years of living outside my home country has not silenced the committee in my head that seems to want to provoke me into a constant examination of identity. 

There is no such thing as the unchanging self. If I had never left Seattle, USA I would still be a very different person today - a person bearing little or no resemblance to the callow youth I was at 20.

That is the road never travelled. The path I took instead led me a distant shore - across the ocean to a world with a new language and culture, and a life that is very different (but not better) than the one I might have lived if I had stayed in the world where I was born.

I am hardly the first woman to do this and that is important to acknowledge. On the darkest days when we (the foreigners) feel alone, lost, or depressed it's tempting to think that one's personal expat/migration experience is unique and special and no one could possibly understand how we feel. Granted, it is unique in the sense that we are individuals and live out our life experiences differently in different places.

However, there are commonalities and I think one of them is that we have all gone through the process of integration/assimilation which leads us to some uncomfortable questions about who we are and how we fit (or don't) where we have landed.  Culture is a powerful force and when we walk into a new one we are changed in ways that can both exhilarate and terrify us.  We often grieve for what we were and for what we might have been, even as we are expressing to the people around us our deep contentment and happiness at being in this country at this time.

There is no sure-fire method for working through those feelings which can linger for a lifetime, but in a good, honest examination of a life lived abroad we do find things we can identify with, things that resonate with us.

I found a lot to identify with in At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman's Journey of Discovery by Rebecca Otowa.  Yes, there are many differences:  she went to Japan, I went to France;  I was graduating from high school when she was having her first child in Kyoto;  she lives in a rural area and I ended up in a big city;  she came to Japan via Australia and I went straight from Seattle to Suresnes.

But there was so much in her experience that sounded familiar:  struggling with the language, fitting in with the community, coping with the very different status of women in the new culture, and working out the relationship with the mother-in-law:

My mother-in-law's teaching task was formidable:  I was not only from another family, but from another country across the world, my ignorance seemingly bottomless.

This description of her wedding brought forth feelings about my own ceremony that I have not examined for over 20 years.  I, too, did what I was told for very similar reasons:

Most of the preparation, except for personal details of hair and costume, went ahead without me, and I did whatever I was told.  Did I really feel that I was getting married?  It was a huge inscrutable Event Extraordinaire, which carried me along on its own momentum, dazed by all the tiny details which formed a hypnotic kaleidoscope of otherness. 

And this passage which perfectly captures that sense I had in the first years in France that I was losing myself and feeling cowed by what I felt was constant criticism:

My own sense of self sank without a trace;  in those early years, the few times I dared to voice my true feelings or opinions, I was scolded as though for some unpardonable rudeness.

After finding so much that I could personally identify with, it was a bit startling to come across something that made me stop and reflect because my first reaction was one of strong disagreement. 

As I was evolving in my expat life, the Japanese people around me looked at me and saw a gaijin - an outsider, one who could never belong.  This is the heartache of the foreigner in Japan, and it makes it a wholly different experience from that of the expat in, say, parts of Europe, or Australia. 

This is one to discuss because while I cannot speak for expats in Australia or other parts of Europe, I do know quite a few in France and I cannot count the number of foreigners I've talked to who feel (rightly or wrongly) that they will never be French no matter how long they live there.  Yes, living in Japan is a very different experience from living in France, and a foreigner of, say, European origin is easy to spot.  However, my sense is that there are other markers of difference besides physical appearance that are just as important (perhaps even more important) in other contexts.  

Otawa is a good writer and her book is organized as a series of well-crafted essays.  Nevertheless, I almost gave up on the book after I had read for about an hour because the first half contained lovely descriptive chapters about her house and life in Japan and that was not at all what I was looking for. 

It was the second half of the book where I found that honest exploration of what happens to an individual's identity when it is transplanted into an unfamiliar culture that made the book a powerful read for me.   And I felt this electric shock of recognition toward the end of the book when I flipped the page and read, "How am I different from what I would have been had I never come here, never elected to spend my life in this foreign land?"

I would not think of depriving you of the pleasure of discovering for yourself her answer to that question.  This is a "mind worth exploring" and I highly recommend this book to you.

The Sprituality of Imperfection

Last week I read this one again and found it just as delightful the second time around.  Here is the review that I wrote two years ago.  Enjoy.

 The Spirituality of Imperfection:  Storytelling and the Search for Meaning by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham is a remarkable book. I don't think I've read anything so moving, so powerful, so darn useful in a long time.  The authors offer up the idea that there is a spirituality that is thousands of years old, exists in many forms, and has a common theme:  imperfection.  Not a jaundiced and cynical view of people as incorrigible "sinners" but rather an simple and honest acknowledgement that we are human and flawed:

"To be human is to be imperfect, somehow error-prone.  To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and to ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try to find ways to healing through the hurt.  To be human is to embody a paradox, for according to the ancient vision, we are, 'less than the gods, more than the beasts, yet somehow both.'"

Spirituality, as it is presented here, is definitely not religion though there is a link between the two.  All of the world religions have contributed to the search for meaning:  Greek philosophers, the Desert Fathers, saints, mystics, rabbis, Zen teachers, imams and even doctors/psychiatrists like Carl Jung.  

Though their words, images, deeds and stories (especially stories) they teach us in a very indirect way something so true and terribly profound about ourselves and how we might live.  And yet, spirituality and religion are not the same though we have a hard time explaining the difference.  There is a saying, "Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell.  Spirituality is for people who've already been there."  That is a bit unfair and yet there is something to it.  When religion is reduced to doctrine and religious practices become mere habits, it sometimes takes a catastrophic life event to send someone back to the church, synagogue, temple or mosque to start asking deeper questions.

Spirituality is more about the search and not so much about the framework.  That is not to say that the framework is irrelevant but, I believe (and feel free to disagree) that the religious tradition I follow would be a hollow thing indeed in my life if there was not a strong spiritual foundation under it.

Spirituality is also not therapy. Both attempt to heal but in very different ways.  Therapy assumes that we are somehow "sick" and there is something in us that needs to be "fixed" and seeks reasons and techniques to make this happen.  Spirituality agrees that there is something wrong, "with me, with you, with the world," but it says that, "there is nothing wrong with that, because that is the nature of our reality. "

That acknowledgement that we all have a dark side, that there is pain and suffering in life, and that this is simply part of the human condition, is not only objectively true (realism at its finest) but it is also very liberating.  When we no longer seek the impossible goal of perfection (or see ourselves and others as instant improvement projects) something in us that was wound very tightly begins to relax. We can, as this Buddhist teacher put it, "lighten up," and see ways of gently progressing without beating ourselves up for our failure to meet an impossible standard in all circumstances.

Kurtz and Ketcham do an superb job of explaining all this and so much more.  I find their argument that the organization AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) is a good example of this ancient spiritual tradition (transposed into a modern setting) to be very convincing.  Woven into each chapter are tales from different religious traditions and philosophers.  Spirituality, like many experiences, cannot be described directly or precisely.  It is only through telling stories to each other that we see (in a very indirect manner) a "truth" that speaks to us.   I will let this story from the book serve as an example of what I am rather clumsily trying to say:

Around the end of the 19th century, a tourist from the United States visited the famous Polish rabbi Hafez Hayyim.  He was astonished to see that the rabbi's home was just a simple room filled with books.  The only furniture was a table and a bench.
"Rabbi, where is your furniture?" asked the tourist.
"Where is yours?  replied Hafez.
"Mine?  But I'm only a visitor here."
"So am I," said the rabbi.