Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
You move abroad, and suddenly you're making more money and dating sexier women than you ever could in the states. So why aren't you happy?
Sep 30, 1997 | The Tokyo skyline is like a giant graveyard; the countless gray buildings are tombstones blinking neon-sign, Chinese-character epitaphs. Cylindrical chimneys belch puffy spirals of smoke. The highway rises a hundred feet above street level, uncoiling beside packed commuter trains and other, even busier freeways. The airport bus arrives at a large terminal. I step down from the bus into the swirl of humanity. I am lost.
I came to Japan because my luck ran out, because after graduating from college and moving to Manhattan where I spent a year aspiring to be a magazine writer, playing Rummy 500 with a few similarly employment-challenged cronies and losing a good deal of my parents' money betting on college football, I had no choice. During an angry telephone conversation my father told me he would no longer support me, and then my mother picked up the phone and mentioned the possibility of a job teaching English in Japan. Considering the circumstances, I was interested. Though I was born in Japan of a Japanese mother and an American-Jewish father, I grew up in the United States and had only briefly visited the land of my birth. The place remained for me exotic and foreign -- a wealthy island empire at the edge of the world where an indigent young man could start over. I decided I would try my luck at living abroad.
You don't know when you board that jumbo jet how long you will be gone. You know only that you have to go. You are perhaps running from something rather than to anything. You are motivated not just by a desire to change the scenery, but by an urge to transform yourself, by a belief that although you don't like yourself much in New York, you will love yourself in Shanghai, Prague or Mexico City. There you will become the dashing, secure, desirable person you have never managed to become here. You go for broke. You cut your losses. You make a run for the border.
There are different ways to bolt. There are those who meticulously plan their expatriate sojourns, enlisting grants, foundations and fellowships that ease them into cushy lives abroad; there are those who graduate from college, hear that beer costs 18 cents a mug in Bucharest and hop the next standby flight to Romania; and there are those for whom it comes down to a simple choice: overseas or jail.
Get Salon in your mailbox!