My friend Christian invited me to sail with him from New Zealand to Fiji next winter. By the time his boat is ready, his girlfriend will have joined him in the South Pacific, having saved enough money from working in a Wyoming oil field laboratory to sustain herself abroad. When I am an old man sitting across from a young journalist who wants to know what I did with the 25th year of my life, I would not mind being able to tell her truthfully, “I sailed from New Zealand to Fiji with my friends Christian and Reginka. We brought aboard a small pack of retired port mongrels for company, to keep busy whoever might end up the loser of the love triangle that had already begun to develop among us. The loser, it turned out, was me. I was left with the dogs, the blankness of the sky and sea, and the sounds of ocean birds and waves, while my mates holed up in the cabin for days and only showed an occasional limb — usually an elbow or knee — crashing through a curtained window, a misguided projectile of hyperpassionate lust. I often neglected to steer out of boredom and allowed our ship to drift upon reefs and shoals so they would come rushing to the deck and grace me with their insults and indignation. I, sullen from my unrequited love of Reginka, refused one day to reboard after a short stop at an island port and cursed that barnacled boat as it nauticaled off into the reflection of an afternoon sun. I caught the next barge to India, and thus my adventure began…”
The permanent inhabitants of my apartment found themselves occasionally outnumbered this week by expatriates. Some friends who live in Spain — an American and an Italian — visited in the midst of a tour of the United States, and during the several times my British friend Beth dropped by, my roommate and I were a minority of people who live in the country of their citizenship. All of the others were illegal, and the overwhelming question they were facing or had already faced or would face was, What now? We moved to another nation. We left behind our homes and focused all our energies into a remote receptacle, vaguely fashioned plans in hand, and did what we could to force our square, rigid bodies into circular slots — another culture, another language, laws and customs we were familiar with only from websites or study-abroad jaunts, monolithic bureaucracies through which we had to travel with a matchlight’s worth of guidance offered us by our respective embassies, and the screaming emptiness of the world that only displaced people know ringing insistently in our ears. Sanity, money, and bare social survival have been our only goals since we planted ourselves in foreign soil, and now that we have spent a year or two or four on our adopted continents, have jobs that pay cash and prospects of legal working papers, legit apartment leases and a sense of the rhythm of an alien life, we must find something to do with our excess efforts, having established ourselves beyond the threats of poverty, jail, solitude, and death. When we left our countries we were looking for life, not hiding from it. We want responsibility and purpose. We want careers and expertise, definite pursuits, and we want them here, and not there, where our parents looked for and could not find all of this and more.
There is a point any person of worth will reach when living abroad at which s/he becomes sick of the vacation. There are, of course, expatriates who never tire of the permanent state of cafés, travel, and half-assed agendas. I lived with one in Buenos Aires. He was a 35-year-old wealthy German Turk whose nearly singular intent seemed to be the creation of acquaintances with “interesting women,” and to ascertain upon my return to the apartment from the bar, park, grocery store, bathroom, etc., whether I had met any women of this type along my way. He was supposedly studying medicine and had just finished a program at a local public hospital, to which, he told me daily, he meant to return to in order to pick up some certificate of completion or another. This man was actually running from his country. He did not want to be a doctor, or anything remotely related to the field. He never bothered to improve his shoddy Spanish (his was good enough to get him occasionally laid, and was therefore good enough for him). He had no urge to explore the city or the country, and in fact did not particularly like Argentina, but knew beyond a specter of a doubt that he wanted to avoid going back to Germany, where his father would make him get a real life. He either did not receive the memo that outlines internationalism as something founded upon the interaction of people whose endeavors amount to more than cross-cultural chit chat, or he simply scanned through and sent it back to the kitchen with his slightly soiled latte napkin.
Moving to and staying in another country is like throwing yourself onto an incline of ice and trying to gouge your spiked cleats into secure footholds before you slip off the glacial precipice. Enrolling in university is one of the most common methods of doing this among the middle-class Americans and Europeans I know, but as college degrees amount to less and less in the eyes of employers who are cutting back their hiring regiments in the face of a depressing world economy anyway, only top-tier applicants can really count on securing jobs that will comfortably subsist them in desirable expat locales. These people are not migrant farm workers escaping Third-World plights in order to send money back home to their families, and they don’t even really want to work in bars or restaurants for too long. My generation feels entitled to jobs that they do not consider below them. Americans my age have never seen hard times or even severe economic or political turmoil. We do not think we should be forced to work our way up from the bottom of the ladder, and as companies increasingly adopt horizontally integrated business models, we often find ourselves without ladders to climb at all. As the period of initial expatriate vacation draws to a close for many of my friends, the dearth of options (that of returning home not being one of them) threatens to encroach into their lives as a sort of paralysis. A visa is denied. An international company shuts its office. An internal audit forbids management from further paying illegals. A trajectory into a fixed foreign existence that looked from one’s original nation to sail smoothly upward begins to flatten out sooner than expected, and one finds himself in a static state, far away from wherever once was home.
Christian moved to New Zealand because he wanted to live in a place where he had never been and where he knew no one. He chose the Kiwi Empire because of its progressive political policies and abundant natural resources. I ridiculed him for electing a country that is so utterly removed from any position of international prominence that it is essentially the nation-state equivalent of a hippie commune.
“But they are pioneers of wave power, Nate,” he tells me. “Wave power.”
I must say, however, that Christian’s destination choice was much more thought out than those of almost all of the other expatriates I know. While many of my friends are aspiring journalists, artists, academics, or fashionistas, Christian is a machinist and a welder. His luggage on the flight to Auckland included a suitcase full of metal-working tools, strapped shut with duct tape. He had the foresight to research which fields the ongoing exodus of New Zealanders to Australia and beyond had left wide open, and found his trade skills would make him an asset to their labor force. Customs in New Zealand hands out work visas like grocery coupons, and he has had little trouble making money. He even found an old man to sell him a sailboat, and when he hits the expat what-now plateau, he will simply set sail for distant horizons and seek out new adventures. This may be about as productive in terms of internationalism as endless discussions of cultural peccadilloes among lazy foreigners in sidewalk cafés, but when it comes time to face the historians’ inquiries about how he spent his 20s, he will be anything but short of answers.
The S.S. Reginka
