So much travel fare seems to treat travel as the concrete experience of places, people, events. Go here, do that, eat this. Top 10! How to! Where, when, why: timetables, addresses, translations, names. You will taste vinegar and you will see red phone booths and you will experience the gray established oldness of Europe. Satisfied, you will fold up the guidebook, crumple up your lists, and go home.
But it’s not that. Travel may hit you over the head initially with the concrete, but it sinks in slowly and indefinitely in the abstract. It’s a gulp of potent alcohol that burns initially but then eases into diverging trails of taste. It gets you drunk slowly – at first you think you can define that trace of peatiness, the woody, sultry elements, the malt, you think you can sort out the elements one by one in neat succession, but eventually you wind up in a slow-swirling fog of perceptions that keep colliding with one another and overlapping. Travel ferments in you.
The gulps and burps of fermentation have already started in my brain and I can still hear the popping. There’s the Arch hotel library with it’s high windows giving out onto the placid front of Madonna’s house, the gritty taste of haggis nestled between nips and tatties, the soft pies and ales and cheeses, the swapped stories of New York life, the white British bathtubs, the whir and buzz of airplane engines, the myopic views of city lights from above, the shacks bumping shoulders on the outskirts of Mexico City on arrival, the flooded streets, water sloshing up against the windshields of cars, the familiar hills of Oaxaca at night dusted with lights, all wooshing around in my head making a delirious, complex liquor.
Trav-el-ling, each syllable weighted. Each time I roll it around on my tongue it takes on different flavors and meanings. It contains all the varied manifestations and shapes of restlessness, from the desire to be in a moving vehicle listening to a certain song with a book on one’s lap to the need to uproot one’s life and move 14,000 miles away. It contains a concept of home that’s constantly defined and shaped by away, and a sense of away that becomes part of home.
A broken-down bus chugging across South America is the baseline, the elemental bottom of my travel whisky. The particular grain from a particular year (in my case, 2004) on which the whisky is based. The fermentation process – Chinese alleyways, Japanese apartments and universities, Mexican cafes and sweating sugar cane fields – has been different and varied but always loops back to the base note for inspiration. There’s some star anise in there, some dumpling steam, rattling trains and Sichuan peppers, white sand beaches and the gorged leaves of Bornean rainforests, but all of it returns to that simple underlying note of the rumble of buses across the pampas.
Occasionally, through the stupor of the whisky comes the why. Humans have evolved to not be shocked and stimulated by their environment every new day. Travel is anathema to this little evolutionary strategy. So perhaps, in that light, traveling is a bizarre mutation. It remains to be seen whether it’s a healthy one for humankind or not. Maybe it’s a mutation thrown into the mix to move humans from complacent stability to heightened sensitivity to difference and detail; to evolve humans into creatures of a persistent, insatiable creativity and curiosity. Perhaps its meant to satiate the positive desire humans increasingly have to escape the confines of their own dinky repetitive little self-consciousnesses; to jolt them into a hunger for awareness that makes them more empathetic, more connected to other people and the world at large.
I’ll tell myself that since I can barely see straight from exhaustion. I’ll tell myself that because sometimes I can feel the part of myself (what would we call it, the pragmatic part? the rational one? the “normal” one? – who might have a steadily unfolding career and a home and who might follow the neat narrative arc of those established life stages) step back and say, wait a minute, what? Why are you here and there, woman?
When a friend asks me, “Why do you always need to go?” I don’t know what to say. I can list all the factors – the checklist of symptoms…but it’s not enough. The real why nags at me from someplace I can only circumvent with curiosity like a boat swirling on the rings of an eddy. The real why is the subtle flavor deep in the whisky you can’t quite put your finger on, which lingers a little longer than the others.
The Never-Ending Cycles of Cultural Adjustment
The stages of cultural adjustment have been written about a lot. It’s nothing new to highlight the honeymoon stage, the hostility stage, the acceptance stage, and the (somewhat dubious and too often too early too triumphantly declared) home stage. Here in Oaxaca that might be called the mole-n’-chapulines stage, the WTF traffic/construction/machismo/why-does-it-take-30-minutes-to-get-that-coffee-I-ordered? stage, the oh-Mexico stage, and the “bienvenidos a casa” stage.
These are in no way, however, fixed stages. It’s not like in January you’re in rapture, in March it’s persistent corrupting bitterness, in June you’re awash in a warm fuzzy glow of acceptance and in September you’re a born Mexican. Unfortunately, it goes in cycles. Kind of like food poisoning. Just when you’re breathing shallowly, clutching your gut on the bed and thinking, “oh, it’s over, the worst has passed, I don’t care about being whistled at on the street anymore and I’m just going to eat Ritz and drink Sprite and feel alive again” then BOOM you’re heaving it all out, restraining the urge to throw chile-covered mangos at the dude in the street. It never fails. So, in cultural adjustment as in the curse of the tainted taco, you’ve just gotta ride it out.
My friend got hit with an unexpected bout of it recently. I suppose it’s not really unexpected – his dog was almost attacked by another dog, his girlfriend was robbed, the city is being ripped up Mexican-style with no rhyme or reason, meaning you turn a corner to find a previously navigable street a chaotic ruin of dirt, concrete, and yellow-hatted men perilously jerking around in bulldozers. I left him on the verge of a fall into the hostility stage and, unfortunately, did little to quell it. “Yeah, sorry,” I shrugged in sympathy, “and hey, I’m going to stuff myself with cheddar cheese and microbrews! Cheerio!” It’s hard, when you’ve pulled out of one of those stages or are evading it by jaunting northward, to indulge in it vicariously as a sympathetic gesture. I guess the lure of the expat frustration is so great that you’ve got to fend it off with all of your powers – you can’t let yourself be tainted by association.
So when I got back he was full on in the grips of it, the paroxysms of irritation taking him by storm on a daily basis. I have nothing but empathy for him; I have been there many times before. He got me thinking about just how hard it is. I’ll take a moment here for all of you stuck in the slug of six months of gray, dragging winter, or mired in jobs you don’t like or wishing you could down a fresh-squeezed orange juice for a buck to hate me for saying this. Go ahead, I don’t mind. But really, this expat thing is hard: yes, in developing countries it can be a physical challenge, trying not to get fired up about the want of basic services (where’s the damn gas truck we called two hours ago?) or the choking traffic or the faulty boiler, but it’s not really the physical challenge that’s so hard. Which is why I don’t think that expats only face these stages and hurdles in developing countries, although perhaps they’re more pronounced in these countries.
I think the hardest thing about expat life is the inner battle – the struggle to get beyond judgments and frustrations and the old reliable tendency to look down on the host culture in order (to borrow a line from a Jon Katz book on dog training I love) to be a better damned human. This does not, read, does not mean glossing over Mexican or Italian or whatever culture as a precious flower to be admired on the basis of difference alone. I don’t want to fall into the cultural relativism void. What it means is learning how to navigate the maddening along with the captivating, and to distill one’s hostility so that in the end it becomes part of a deeper empathy. This doesn’t mean spouting maudlin, vaguely condescending platitudes about how “it’s just the poverty that makes them want to rob us, really, poor guy, he’s got a family to feed.” It means finding or creating the capacity to roll all the anger and the annoyance up with the awe and the gratefulness, the true overwhelming gratefulness that comes at times to be living in another culture and another place and to discover and marvel at it, and to take them both in with the kind of complex love attached to home. The foreign culture doesn’t have to be home and you don’t have to lay out the cheery faux grass welcome mat to try to make it such – but by allowing it to be complicated and maddening, familiar and empathetic, you give it the depth and the freedom of home. You allow it to be many things at once.
Doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t moments and days when you want to scream in the middle of the street, “IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK TO STOP FOR A PEDESTRIAN, A-HOLE??!?!” These moments or days might be followed by a misty staring off into the distance over a plate of barbacoa and a shot of mezcal, mentally gushing over Mexico like a study abroad student in love. That’s just how it goes.
I still find it so hard not to get taken too far in either direction, not to be filled with resentment or oozing with gratefulness. It comes in ups and downs and ups and downs and I still can’t find the steadiness. I still believe in trying, though, and I guess that’s what counts. When you lose that – give up the struggle to balance the inevitable irritation with the amusement and awe — I think you lose the point of living abroad. It might be time to go.
Sometimes, as in China with Jorge and I, the experience simply leans too far to one side and you’ve got to acknowledge that and take off. After a year in Beijing that was it, I was done, there was no delicate back and forth to be had any longer. But Mexico is different. I think anywhere I live, the U.S included since it has now become for me just another country with another bizarre frustrating/illuminating culture to be navigated, there will be the up and the down and the push and the pull. So the question is in what place are you willing to commit yourself to the back-and-forth of it, in what place are you willing to work to make yourself a more insightful, more committed, more empathetic human, to love your cultural partner through the fights and the vows and the needy spells? In what place are you willing to come home sweaty with frustration and go out again and shake it off and love it the next day because in the end, it’s worth it?
Right now, I say, I’ll do that for Mexico. I live in constant fear of being overtaken by the hostility stage, of cycling too far into it to get out. Commiserating with my friend, who months ago was still bouncy and shiny with Oaxaca delirium, reminds me that this too, this googly-eyed rapture over the blue skies and the food and the morning runs on the Cerro Fortin, will end. And hopefully, start up again. And I’ll let myself get yanked along with it, wanting to become a better, deeper person in the process. Wanting at least to find a stronger empathy within the up and down and round and round. A single sock, let’s say, floating in zen in the center of the washer cycle with all the honeymoon-hostility-acceptance-home stages swirling around it. That’s where I want my heart to be; the suspended sock, untouched by the rattling fluctuations, just happy to be there and to be a part of it.