thesmartexpat
A while back, HSBC’s Expat Explorer posed the question on Twitter, “Are expat’s born or made?” and it started me thinking about what it is that gives us the impetus to move overseas. The question came back to me today in a conversation with a client. Similar to my own experience, she moved overseas at a relatively young age though she had grown up in small towns where many of her peers settled locally remaining close to family and familiarity. In my own case, I moved to New York at the age of 22 with only two suitcases. I had a job and I had an apartment for the first few months, but I knew no one and the sum of my travel experience to date had been a couple of brief student jaunts to Mediterranean islands during the summer holidays. No one in my family travelled much outside of the UK and among my circle of friends and their parents, only a few ventured on camping trips in the South of France or maybe skiing in the Alps. One could argue that my job was what took me on my Transatlantic journey, however I had actively sought out jobs which would give me the opportunity to travel. Clearly something in me made me step so far outside of my comfort zone.
I can’t put my finger on why I wanted to not only travel to another country but to live there. I can remember reading books as a child and being enthralled with the descriptions of life in other countries and I have vague memories of wishing our family would emigrate to Australia. Otherwise,nothing in my early history would hint at the idea that I would move at age 22 and, besides visits, not return to the country of my birth. I’ve considered many possibilities but I really don’t remember the specific thoughts I had at the time, so I can’t even say that it was truly a conscious choice.
Others embark on expat life as an active decision which will take them away from the comfort and ease of the known. In Alan Paul’s Big In China, he describes the moment when he and his wife decide to move from suburban New Jersey to Beijing “We can spend the next three years in China”, [his wife] said “or we can spend them talking about kitchen renovation”. Alan and Rebecca’s decision was more deliberate than mine, but for every couple like them who make the decision to do something different, there are tens, maybe hundreds, of people to whom the idea of living in China is frightening and incomprehensible.
What made you decide to step away from your familiar faces, places and routines to embark on a life overseas? Did you “go with the flow” of a partner’s career or an employer’s offer or did you actively seek out the opportunity? What made life overseas seem attractive to you? Use the comments section for your thoughts or tweet them to me @thesmartexpat
Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Coaching, The Expat Experience
I got totally and completely hooked after Study Abroad. After having those four months of non-stop stimulus and new experiences, I knew that was my life path!
Where did you go for your Study Abroad and did you actively seek out the option to study abroad? What were your travel experiences prior? I’m really interested in motivation – I went to a tiny primary school (first 7 years of school) and among my peers many have stayed fairly local but several of us have moved overseas. Very few have stayed in country but moved further away (though there’s only so far you can go in the UK without leaving the country
)
I was raised all over Latin America and feel that I am made for a life abroad. My husband is from a small town in Idaho. We met during his vacation in Guatemala and lived there for 3 years. Now I am bored of Idaho and he is a little hesitant to take the expat path, so we are trying to decide.
Just curious…what were your first two assignments? Have you enjoyed the hardship tours too?
Thanks,
Sarah
Just to clarify, we lived in Guate for 3 years and now in Idaho for 6 years.
Hi Sarah, my first assignment was to New York (by myself) and the second to Hong Kong (with my husband). I can relate to your current feelings – we moved from Shanghai to a small town in Michigan and really missed the constant challenge of daily existence that one experiences living in a completely different culture. Everything seemed to easy and too convenient.
An international move is tough road to travel if you are not both committed to the experience, so I’d encourage you and your husband to really explore his hesitancy and your own itchy feet before you make a decision.
Our only “hardship” tour was Shanghai which in some ways deserved the label but in other ways was not. We’d love to be assigned to India, but its unlikely to happen.
I wish you the best with your decision making process and please contact me via e-mail, if I can help in any way. Evelyn
Thanks Evelyn,
I think you are quite right that we both need to be 100% committed. I love your blog and will continue to follow. India would be great. I have a friend who was assigned there and LOVED it! What a wonderful world we live in…and yes, Guatemala would be considered hard, yet it never felt that way to me.
Take Care!
Sarah
Thanks for your kind words. The great thing for those of us who are open to moving around is that we have the opportunity to experience the wonderful world. Would love to hear what you decide… Evelyn
I came here by way of Ephemera and Detritus.
I was the child of a US military family, so I learned to pack up and move at a young age. My travelling for myself started when I finished university; my graduation present to myself was a five-week safari in Africa. I started in Kenya, wound up in Zimbabwe with a rip-roaring case of malaria and a friend who is still one of the people I will drop everything for, more than ten years after the fact.
From there, I was hooked. I kept going to Africa, first to South Africa as a grad student, then to Namibia and Zambia and whatever other places I could travel, with side trips to the UK and to Russia and a grand, glorious visit to China with my sister, in which we only tried to kill each other once and we were both very proud of the fact.
Eventually I got tired of living in the northern hemisphere, packed my things, and moved to New Zealand. And hit a brick wall. The city where I lived was pleasant and sleepy, but lacking the energy or intellectual stimuli that I desire. Some small towns have that, some don’t. Added to that my job as a contractor, where I would be gone for months on end, making it painfully difficult to find a circle of friends. I distinctly remember sitting alone in my flat, with no furniture yet, a few months after arrival, alone on a Friday night once again and crying my eyes out. A week later, my furniture arrived, and three days after that, I left for a 5-week job in Malaysia. In that year, I went to India, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, the US, Australia, and Argentina, some for work but most for fun between jobs.
I am stubborn, and I am strong, but I am not immune to the whims and vagaries of the employment market. After the bottom fell out of the market, my boss gently explained that they liked me but business was bad, and they were laying several people off; would I like a transfer to another office in the company? Cue another 6 months of going through an emotional meat grinder. I left NZ with drive and determination and came home 10kg heavier and completely broken of spirit. Seriously. It was the only time in my professional career that my reaction to something was “fuck you,” where I’ve been within 10 minutes of walking off a job, and where the only thing keeping me going was pride. Once in NZ, all there was to do was pack, and I came back to the US feeling very much like I would never travel again.
One year later, here I am. The fire came back some time between summer and winter, and the drive to travel has gotten stronger. I have put in paperwork to immigrate to Australia–gotta get the last commonwealth country in the southern hemisphere–and if it doesn’t work, I’m done. This time, though, I am doing it right–permanent residence rather than a work permit or study permit, going to the city beforehand to meet people and set up a circle of friends, finding where I want to live and the things I want to do, getting my finances in order. It will take about 18 months to get approved (or not) for the residence permit, and after that I have up to 4 years to move, so I can go there with my personal and financial houses in good order.
It scares me now more than it did 4 years ago when I was preparing to move to New Zealand. I’m older, and I’ve been kicked around, and I’m not sure I can handle that kind of stunning failure again. My parents are older and I don’t know how long they’ll be left. I’m not sure I will have good long-term job prospects there but they can’t be worse than here.
Oddly, I’ve found myself in the position of counselor to a friend’s partner, who emigrated from his home country to study. He’ll complain about something, and I’ll say, it’s normal, it’s normal, it’s not just you going mad. Or, here’s how you can get around X, or Y will make things easier, and so on. It’s nice to feel like the beatdown I got in NZ might make life easier for somebody.
Thanks for sharing your story – new expats often just need to hear that they are not alone. Its interesting to hear that a year ago you weren’t planning to travel again but you are already itching to go – maybe for some of us it is innate! I wish you success in your move to Australia – I always think that resilience is a key trait to be successful as an expat and it sounds like you have plenty of it. Evelyn
Absolutely true, there’s something that makes us ‘step away’ (preferably not ‘run away’!). When it’s for a job but not at our instigation, how it turns out is due in large part to us, how we choose to view it.
Wow. I can’t believe I am just discovering your site today. I’m thrilled to read your posts. This particular post really made me think about how I came to be in the French Caribbean. I often feel like a wimp for the way I came, because it was for love. I didn’t tell myself, “hey I’ll go do something scary, just plop myself in the middle of an island where I don’t speak the language and just figure it out”. I came for my boyfriend. Because all things considered it was easier that way than for him to come to the US. Thing is though, I stayed. Learning French from scratch in my mid thirties, suddenly living with two small children in my life, learning the laissez-faire culture coupled with island culture…wow. I never wanted to leave though. Take a break, yes. Quit, no. I feel that I went willingly, and happily, into expat life, but that perhaps I never would have been so bold as to have done it alone. I’m not sure I would have made it frankly. For me, maintaining my staying power was the ‘thing’. Some people seem congratulatory at my staying power, and I admit, whether or not I came here as a brave woman, I came. I learned. I…conquered? If you heard my French I’m not sure you’d agree that’s the word. Thanks for all your work on this site. So thought provoking!