The other day my friend and I were sitting around debating which of our "Delhi friends" will make the cut to our "American" lives.
There's a great skill that being abroad teaches you, which is learning to let go of the immediate connection between the present and the future.
I'm the eldest daughter of Asian immigrants, and I never really learned to live in the moment. There's a particular kind of self-control that, in my experience, seems unique to the older children of "knowledge immigrant" families; a perception that the future is dicey and happiness is a luxury, not a necessity. (Amy Chua makes a similar point in "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a book that actually sheds interesting light on the many relationships in the Asian immigrant family besides the maternal one)
We're not a rebellious lot, at least not in any visible way. Very few older Asian kids deal drugs, run away from home or play music too loudly (unlike our younger siblings, who often do all three at once), but that doesn't mean that we don't come up with our own ways to rebel against our parents. Or more accurately, against ourselves.
But this may be beside the point. Most people I know, by their mid-20s, enter new relationships cautiously anyway. There's probably a host of psychological evidence to explain why, but it's also practical. Most of us are drawn to making friends with people who come from our hometown, share our political views or went to our college. The implicit assumption is that because you share a past, you can also share the present and (implied, anyway) a future. If you're coming from the same place, you're probably headed in the same direction. Which makes sense. Friends are emotional social security.
But none of that makes immediate sense in the life of someone living abroad. By necessity, long-term travelers get drawn into very close relationships with people who probably won't be around for more than a year. Everyone knows about the mysterious "travel buddy" - the person who shares a hostel room and a few memorable evenings on that backpacking trip through Europe, never to be seen again. That's great, but imagine every friendship being like that, for years on end. It's a different situation altogether.
So what do you ask of friends when you can't ask them to stick around? In a sense, relationships become selfish. These days, before I go anywhere, I ask myself if I actually want to spend an hour with the person in question. Maybe this is normal for most people, but it's novel to me. I always accepted social invitations partly out of a sense of obligation, because otherwise the future would be a lonely place. (Not to suggest that my friends were bad or uninteresting people, just that our get-togethers were a routine rather than a daily choice) This is, I'm beginning to realize, a strange way to approach the world.
It also means that rejections don't really matter as much - there's no emotional baggage involved, no risk, no big deal if someone just doesn't feel like having dinner tonight. Or tomorrow. Or ever again.
I think the "expat life" can become a too-comfortable cocoon, a place to disappear and reappear perhaps more often than is strictly healthy. There are definitely people who use "being an expat" as a way of hiding from the security of static living. But maybe that's not a bad thing, either.
There's a great skill that being abroad teaches you, which is learning to let go of the immediate connection between the present and the future.
I'm the eldest daughter of Asian immigrants, and I never really learned to live in the moment. There's a particular kind of self-control that, in my experience, seems unique to the older children of "knowledge immigrant" families; a perception that the future is dicey and happiness is a luxury, not a necessity. (Amy Chua makes a similar point in "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a book that actually sheds interesting light on the many relationships in the Asian immigrant family besides the maternal one)
We're not a rebellious lot, at least not in any visible way. Very few older Asian kids deal drugs, run away from home or play music too loudly (unlike our younger siblings, who often do all three at once), but that doesn't mean that we don't come up with our own ways to rebel against our parents. Or more accurately, against ourselves.
But this may be beside the point. Most people I know, by their mid-20s, enter new relationships cautiously anyway. There's probably a host of psychological evidence to explain why, but it's also practical. Most of us are drawn to making friends with people who come from our hometown, share our political views or went to our college. The implicit assumption is that because you share a past, you can also share the present and (implied, anyway) a future. If you're coming from the same place, you're probably headed in the same direction. Which makes sense. Friends are emotional social security.
But none of that makes immediate sense in the life of someone living abroad. By necessity, long-term travelers get drawn into very close relationships with people who probably won't be around for more than a year. Everyone knows about the mysterious "travel buddy" - the person who shares a hostel room and a few memorable evenings on that backpacking trip through Europe, never to be seen again. That's great, but imagine every friendship being like that, for years on end. It's a different situation altogether.
So what do you ask of friends when you can't ask them to stick around? In a sense, relationships become selfish. These days, before I go anywhere, I ask myself if I actually want to spend an hour with the person in question. Maybe this is normal for most people, but it's novel to me. I always accepted social invitations partly out of a sense of obligation, because otherwise the future would be a lonely place. (Not to suggest that my friends were bad or uninteresting people, just that our get-togethers were a routine rather than a daily choice) This is, I'm beginning to realize, a strange way to approach the world.
It also means that rejections don't really matter as much - there's no emotional baggage involved, no risk, no big deal if someone just doesn't feel like having dinner tonight. Or tomorrow. Or ever again.
I think the "expat life" can become a too-comfortable cocoon, a place to disappear and reappear perhaps more often than is strictly healthy. There are definitely people who use "being an expat" as a way of hiding from the security of static living. But maybe that's not a bad thing, either.
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