Expat Life is a Hell of a Drug
An immigrant dad gets clean
So I went to the store to buy a cucumber for the kids’ lunches. One single cucumber was $6 NZD, about $3.50 US. I turned around and walked out.
New Zealand’s late-winter produce scene is grim. The carrots still kick ass, though. Fat, sweet, and on special this week. $6 NZD for two 1.5 kg bags.
New Zealand carrots are way better than American carrots.
I’m standing in the parking lot, comparing national carrots.
Stop. Just stop.
They’re carrots, man.
All I want is my kids not to get, like, scurvy. And for their parents not to go broke.
So we roasted carrots for dinner and loaded the dishwasher and the kids fought about taking baths and then took their baths and we all read together and the kids fought about brushing their teeth and then brushed their teeth and then we put them to bed and slumped on the couch and tried to watch a show.
I’m tired y’all. I’m gonna call it a night.
I’m not an expat anymore.
Being an expat takes so much goddamn energy. There’s so much discovery all the time. There’s a lot of jumping up and down and pointing at shiny things. When you’re an expat it’s always Monday morning after Creation, the dew sparkling on the bright green leaves. You walk around the garden, naming things. Look at those carrots! They’re so…carroty…
You take a lot of pictures of food. The coffees on cafe tables, the beer lit by a foreign sun. You insist upon the significance of sunsets, or here in New Zealand the weekly rainbows. You study the new rules of hugging, the new rules of shoes. Every time you screw up the local language it’s a revelation of the mysteries of the human heart.
Even the bad days are a grand drama. Visit a foreign ER and you’re in a movie. Take an awkward trip home and you’re in another movie. Return to your chosen country and eat a nice bowl of noodles on the street and the universe is sending you a sign. Not a sign to stay, no. Nothing so dull. A sign of deeper meaning, a fairy dust of grand significance, a revelation whose full force lies forever just out of reach. I was struck by such a vision one pandemic morning in Carterton, walking to the dairy with the roses all in bloom. This was it, dude. This was where I was meant to be. Not New Zealand, mate. Earth.
I was high, is what I’m saying. Expat life is a hell of a drug.
It’s the same for nomads and slow travelers and backpackers and van-lifers and RVers and all the OE kids in London clubs. I’ve not technically lived all those lives, but fussing over methods is absolutely part of a drug ritual. You compare dosing regimes, side effects, stash boxes. What continent, what language, what time frame hits best? We want the highs of new connection with an easy come-down of lyric estrangement. Cut it too weak and you’re lost. Cut it too strong and you just might get stuck there, and nobody wants to get stuck. Are you getting the visuals? Are you getting the wanderlust, the freedom, the saudade?
Expatness is a drug because you can’t explain your trip to people who aren’t on trips of their own. Those who haven’t tripped yet may listen awhile in envy and hope, hoping to gather a few tips. But to your loved ones with sober, settled lives you’re forever recounting some long and pointless dream.
Expatness is not like being drunk. Drinking makes you feel like a local anywhere. Expats drink even when the locals don’t. In Abu Dhabi they hid the expat liquor store in a parking garage. There was one tiny green door, and inside that door a line of full-size grocery carts.
Expatness is more like weed, or now I guess CBD or THC or whatever. You are simultaneously fascinated by the revealed truth of the world and with the distance between the world and your own mind. The people in this country, when they say green, do they mean the same thing I mean when I say green??? But you don’t ask them. Asking breaks the spell. Expatness seeks the knowing of not-knowing.
Zero stones thrown here. There is legit wisdom down that road—the flimsiness of borders, the thinness of your human soul. It’s healthy for all of us to get out of our own heads from time to time. That this particular mind expansion—expatness, nomadism, all this easy privileged wandering—can be so brutally restricted by passport, class, and race is an awful injustice, in precisely the same way that the uneven distribution of food and medicine and education and loving homes is an awful injustice. All humans should get all the goodies! Everyone should drink nice scotch, everyone should get regular screenings at the fancy private clinic, and everyone should blow their minds living a season or two in some far off country where they can afford everything they need and yet have no illusions they’ll stay.
It’s a good time, man. I’ve been out here blowing my mind for decades.
But now it’s Tuesday Morning Coming Down in a rural New Zealand parking lot, too broke to buy my kids a cucumber.
It’s the kids who have dragged me out of the bubble.
When they were 4 and 6 they said cute things like New Zealand is boring and When do we move to the next country? Now they’re 7 and 9. Now they say I think we should buy a house here and Which high school will I go to and I will never leave my friends.
We’ll see, I say. We’ll see.
Ocean Vuong, from the novel he wrote to his mother who brought him to America1: What is a country but a life sentence?
America is our life sentence, Jenny and I. Wherever we go, wherever we stay.
America will not be our kids’ life sentence. Or not their only one.
This is basic immigrant math. Jenny and I flew down here as expats on the hoof. I never meant for the party to end. The sober permanence of the i-word scares the bejesus out of both of us, and our loved ones across the Pacific too.
But I’m not the expat I was anymore. My tolerance is shot, my brain is fried. I just want a good night of boring sleep in the ordinary place where I happen to live. And a job. And a residency-track visa.
I’m an immigrant.
When I’m at loose ends I call my old friend Jonathan D. Ryan. He’s an immigration lawyer in Texas who writes The Firewall, a fierce on-the-ground dispatch from the detention centers where his clients are held. When I called him last week it was ten o’clock at night in Texas and he was just driving home. He’d spent the day holding emergency consultations with groups of unaccompanied Guatemalan minors. The Trump administration was hustling to deport them over the holiday weekend without due process, back to the mess they’d fled from. As he drove, Jonny told me about the kids he met—the soft ones, the hard ones, the quiet old souls in folding chairs under the fluorescent lights. You don’t have to sign anything, he told them. No matter what the agents say.
Jonny’s an immigrant, too. His Irish parents raised him in Dallas.
He pulled into his driveway. His wife and one-year-old son were waiting inside. I’m in trouble, he laughed. I wasn’t supposed to be working so late.
Kiss ‘em both for me, I said, and we promised to talk again soon. Then I went into the kitchen, boiled the jug for tea, and started peeling carrots. //
How we wound up in NZ & why we stay, a story in three acts:
Thanks for reading! If you liked this one meant something to you—if you’re somehere on this same journey, or know someone who is—I’d love to hear about it.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). I didn’t love it, but taught it once in a writing class because it does crazy things with time. If you missed it—count yourself lucky if you did—Vuong was recently the target of a weirdly angry mob on Substack. They hated On Earth and his newest novel, too. One guy I saw was mad at this line in particular. (I can’t find the note now. Substack’s search function is as dreamy and non-linear as Vuong’s prose.) This guy was pissed because he thought ‘what is a country but a life sentence’ didn’t make any sense. I mean, it’s poetry, bro. Strictly enforced literalism is the reason we have these damn borders in the first place. Thank god we got poets who can jump ‘em standing still.
The carrots are better, Dan.
Discovery is the drug of expat life — thrilling, addictive, and best enjoyed when shared with others on the same journey.
Loneliness begins when, after the high of discovery fades, the expat finds themselves the only outsider, without fully understanding the quiet shift happening around them.
That’s when one stops feeling like an expat and starts becoming an immigrant.