I told a similar tale in my novel “The Lower River,” some 30 years later and in many short stories; the theme has been much on my mind. I spent 27 years, between 1963 and 1990, as an expatriate (six years in Africa, three in Singapore, 18 in Britain). I was not joyriding; I was first inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, one of the wisest and most eloquent ever delivered — sentiments unspoken today — “Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.”
But under my cloak of idealism, I was procrastinating about my future, and I felt I’d find answers by being alone and far away. I became a teacher in Africa and found myself transformed — so enlivened by the experience, I kept traveling and working abroad, until I quit teaching in 1971 and, with three novels published, moved with my small family to Britain, devoting myself wholly to writing. I don’t think I changed anyone’s life much as a teacher, but I know that expatriation was the making of me: liberated me, humbled me, revealed to me who I was and what I wanted my life to be, as a writer. I often thought of Rudyard Kipling’s lines, “God bless the just Republics / That give a man a home.”
Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes, passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, “Well, you Yanks ….”
There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading “Trespassing.”
My travels have taken me to many of the places where Americans have sought refuge in spite of local conditions. Portugal with its parking problems, Costa Rica with its venomous snakes, Italy and France tangled in red tape, cartel-beleaguered Mexico, overcrowded Bali and many others, which, of course, also have their salubrious compensations — food, flunkies and sunshine. The Republic of Malta attracts many seeking fine weather and island life, retirees and expats, among them a disillusioned Ryan Murdock, whose excellent recent book “A Sunny Place for Shady People” depicts Malta as corrupt and violent, the food revolting, the islanders xenophobic and a risky place for any Maltese to criticize the government.
