Tag: ex-pat life

The Secret to Expat Sadness

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Conversation by Elena Gatti

I came home and gave in. Not to smoking or chocolate. Something darker that had been tramped down for weeks and weeks, tossed into the corner, until the weight of it had me on my knees.

Sadness.

We don’t talk about sadness in the utopia that is expat life where challenging jobs and magazine worthy vacations in lands far, far away, bounce us from one week to the next.

The buzz of our electronic devices keeping us in touch with friends and family back home – and reminding us how successful everyone else is – amounts to a constant wave-like roar in our ears, drowning out the aches and pains pinging in the background.

Yet the sadness can catch up with you and wash over you with the intensity of a riptide. I had a squall of epic proportions. There was nothing I could do, other than ride it out.

“I let it win,” I told a friend during a long overdue catch up. “For 45 minutes, I let it go. I didn’t think it would end.”

“Forty five minutes is a long time,” she said pausing.

Sheets to my nose, favorite songs on the radio: this squall of sadness was the kindness I showed to myself as the storm of emotions raged.

Then I did something else counter intuitive. I wrote to four friends. They were scattered around the world; one a few miles away, the other thousands, the last two ten thousand. I tapped out a message as tears trickled down my nose.

Even though life is very full and has meaning – I feel sad. And if I said these words to anyone, face to face, they wouldn’t understand why, by looking at my outer life.

“See look at Facebook or Instagram or you yesterday! Everything is amazing.”

Nor do I think I could I explain it in a way that wouldn’t end in “it will all work out” or “don’t worry.” Wanted to share so that it isn’t a secret any more. Also, in case you ever feel like this and need someone to talk to. We will find our way together.

Not everyone responded, they’re busy with their own struggles.

Three responses came back right away.

…i think that is profound that you can experience that and share it.

Yes, yes I do have periods like that and you are right, it’s hard to explain and for others to understand. …

And me too.  Of course, me too.  

They affirmed I was not alone. And in doing so, joined me, halving my pain by letting me honest.

When our children cry, as they do, I huddle them close. I try to remember to reach past the cotton candy evanescence of “it’s okay” for something they can hold on to.

“I”m here,” I say.

Reading Chris Malcomb’s “Learning to Breathe”, an essay about how being an asthmatic was his first introduction into meditation, had me wondering how I could help the kids, even now, begun to wrestle with the beast of disappointment.

I’m teaching our 5 year old to reach for the ridge in his mouth, the one behind his teeth, below the soft tissue of his palate. First he puts his finger on mine (I know, but there are plenty of germs in there his germs can join). Then he goes to find his with the tip of his tongue.

This is the first step of the 4-7-8 breathing method, a technique that can get you to sleep in 60 seconds.

I use it now to ground myself any time I need: stuck in traffic, in the midst of a difficult conversation, search for patience with aforementioned 5 and 2 year old.

“I’m here,” I say to myself. Sadness and all.

How do you get through life’s squalls? Who could you send a note today to encourage and receive a boost in your sails?

 

From Dunes to Dior

 

Chennai in India
Chennai in India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

July 2012 will mark seven years that I have lived in Qatar. Seven consecutive years is my record with only three other cities in the world. Doha joins a short list which includes Gainesville, Florida and Raleigh, North Carolina.

My formative years in American suburbia had erased most traces of my parents’ sub-continental pronunciation in my own speech. My “h” was “h”; not the “heche” of my parents.  I was American in sight and sound. However, on the inside, I was still Indian. By looking at me, you couldn’t sense there was a war being waged on the inside. To the outside world, identity was measured by clothing and speech—having an established Western orientation in both cases,  I was regarded as one of the crowd by my white, Southern classmates. On these counts I failed both tests and was eyed with suspicion by the other housewives at my mother’s parties. But blue jeans and flat vowels never hinted at  the inner world of my family or what happened when the front door closed on our home.
Inside life was governed by the same principles that had ruled my mother’s teenage years in Chennai, India. No movies after seven p.m. In fact, no women outside the house after dark, not for football games, parties, or sleepovers.

Like so many of the “American Born Confused Desi generation,” referred amongst ourselves as the ABCD generation, I was a socially emaciated, well-behaved Indian daughter who railed at endless parental restrictions. The split identity meant non-relatives never saw all of me. They only knew “white” me. Meanwhile my immediate family thought they might lose me to the outside world, so they mounted an “it’s better in India” campaign to override my resistance and

North America
North America (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

suspicious of inferiority with reasons for our cultural superiority.

“A better maths education,” was one of my father’s favorite refrains as I remained confounded by geometry.

“No child shows an over-dependence on calculators,” he would say throwing up his hands on yet another weekend when I failed to solve one of his problem sets…

Respect for elders – children taking care of their aging parents – more of it in India.

“Marriage as a commitment.”

My mother wouldn’t  say more but implied where a boy and girl learn to love rather than fall into it is taken more seriously in India.

I didn’t ask the obvious question, although it hammered in my brain; If everything is better there, what are we doing here? I didn’t dare. Partly out of fear of my father, but also partly out of fear there would be no answer.

What if the secret behind our semi-nomadic life had no greater answer than my father’s wanderlust? What if a series of pharmacology grants was the single red line on the map leading us from a veterinary program in South India to a series of North American institutions?

I continued to play these two parts simultaneously; intensely outgoing and enthusiastic – “American” – and constantly communicating with my parents – “Indian.” I didn’t find the bridge that spanned the outside/inside gap until later, after college and graduate school, when my own desires for professional fulfillment and monetary rewards led me to move several times. This realization emerged slowly as pieces of a scattered puzzle – from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C. – as I met more of my generation, children of immigrant parents from all over the world, juggling these competing demands. Then, for the second time in my life, globalization entered stage left, having already taken me as a small child with my adventurous father and sheltered mother from Chennai, India onto and all over the North American continent.

This time I traveled alone, east, not west, ending up four hours from my birthplace. I landed in the Arabian Gulf, thousands of miles from my upbringing in North America, and in an ironic twist, closer to the extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins, than any of my immediate family. Situated in Qatar, I found myself in a region often described as a human rights quagmire for migrant South Asian workers. The questions from my young adult years resurfaced within the minutiae of life in the Gulf. Their return disturbed my temporarily coalesced identity. Familiar, opposing pressures reappeared – the tension between an outside/public life and the inside/private one, the contradiction between physical appearance and personal affiliation – and my newly gathered reflection erupted like a cracked mirror, splintered pieces flying in all directions.

The splinters of being South Asian American in an Arab country and the echoes of my teenage angst are the stories I tell in From Dunes to Dior which will be soon be released as an e-book on Amazon.com. You’ll see some of the contrasts in Qatar in the book trailer.

In the meantime, enjoy one of my other four ebooks – on everything from modern motherhood to how to get started as a writer. The best part is they are ALL free to download until May 16, 2012. Drop me a line (or a review) and let me know what you thought about any or all of them. Happy reading!

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We Don't Have to do it Your Way

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Ramadan Glow 3 by Benjamin Sperandio

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and as our nearly one year old boys toddled around her house, we got to chewing the salads and also the fat of life as close friends (and it must be said, women) do. Everything from business ideas to family drama was on the table alongside the fried chicken and coleslaw. Then we got to what everyone’s talking about in the Muslim world these days: Ramadan.

I mentioned the person in the UAE who was recently fined for insulting the season on Facebook.

“Why are people so surprised things close in a Muslim country?” my friend asked.

We went a couple of rounds on this one, but more on this in a bit.

The seasons of fasting is around the corner of the weekend. In order to be home — and avoid breaking fast at 10pm when the sun goes down in Europe some say — Qatari families are coming home earlier from their sun soaked days in Nice, Barcelona, or the far ends of the earth. Because the start of school and universities are delayed until after Eid al Fitr, expats are heading to the airport (or indeed airport hopping) during what they consider a “dead” month.

This split on Ramadan is emblematic of the many cities that inhabit this capital we all share — at times like this– uncomfortably.

Let’s look at some of the reasons we differ on Ramadan.

A Plural Islamic Society

The losing of restaurants, shortened working hours, and synchronized schedule that affects the malls, government, and other key services is new to most expats who are generally from environments where religion is not only practiced in private but mostly on the weekends. To bring religion into everyday life can not only be new, it seems at odds with the “your life can go on exactly as it did before — see the McDonald’s?” strategy that many organizations use when recruiting new people to Qatar. This is blatant (well meaning) false advertising.

Strangely the Victoria Secret, Volvo, or Versace may have a calming effect on the person worried about settling in away from home. But access to the familiar whether in Mumbai, Miami, or Madrid doesn’t guarantee that life in a new  city or country is going to be blip free. At the most basic, the locations of your favorite anything will be in new places, therefore not the same.

Ramadan moves back ten days each year and as long it’s near the start of the school year, it will be a dizzying first encounter for many new arrivals. Not eating in public, avoiding drinking in your car; these are confusing signals juxtaposed with wanting to host the World Cup or the Tour de France. The constant juggle between modernity and tradition, between culturally appropriate and individual freedom is something everyone in Qatar is experiencing and there are no easy answers.

For the now, luxury brands and not eating in the workplace are not mutually exclusive.

A Believer’s Community

When you move to a country for a job, what you end up doing is working. Even those Muslims who are not from the Gulf or here without their families find Ramadan a lonely time because it is a season where the community supports itself in gathering closer to God. The gatherings within people’s homes, akin to looking in while people are circled around an Easter brunch, are closed off to those who don’t know anyone, don’t have invitations, or in general, are lonely. This is the opposite of the season, as many groups have iftars, or group dinners, sponsored for charity as much as entertainment, to gather together.

You can still fall through the cracks, however, and this means rather than drawing closer to God through those around you, you feel more alone than ever. This is no different than any other holiday season: Christmas or Diwali, when the overall effect is isolation rather than inclusion, it may feel more compounded because public life is truncated during the day and most people who are fasting will generally not be as available as they might otherwise be.

But back to the main subject during my lunch, which circulated around a central question: Why do visitors, guests, non-citizens feel so comfortable about criticizing their host country? Whether Ramadan, or Qatari National Day (which infamously sparked a firestorm online), my friend was curious exactly why people felt and expressed themselves vociferously.

“Would you hear an Arab talking about the 4th of July?” she asked me. “No, we’d say, okay, this is their country, let them do it their way.”

She had a point, and a crystallizing one — even if someone thought Christmas was excessive, Diwali pagan, and the Solstice unnecessary, these views would eventually disappear into white noise in most contexts because they do not have the entrenched charge that cultural critique takes on in Qatar.

A Minefield

There’s the us/against them factor, which we’ve discussed in the past; but also, if you are new and you are experiencing Ramadan for the first time, your grumble is the first to you and perhaps natural, no harm intended, more processing. But you’ll forget or be completely unaware that it’s the tenth or twentieth for the person, often Qatari, sometimes Arab or Muslim from somewhere else, to hear this by now, unoriginal reaction.

Child rearing, fashion, movies, culture — they are all blank canvases for us to express our opinions. If you live in Doha, however, the stakes seem very high and generally come down along racial or religious lines. When we are talking about Ramadan, or traffic, or friendships, we aren’t merely talking about the issue at hand but the psychic force of all the other ones as well come to bear. It’s like being in a distinguishing relationship, where arguments escalate, and you both care, or remember caring, or want to care — and you need a new way out of an old, destructive pattern.

This Ramadan, why not reach out to someone and do the thing the season was designed to do: spend thoughtful, intentional time at a meal, or in prayer, or some other activity that will make you feel more connected rather than alienated? Let’s bring out the best in each other, expat and Qatar, South Asian and western, rather than the worst that is circling around us in the all the too present stereotypes.

After all — you know you’ll have some time — what else are you going to do while waiting for everything to open?