Times foreign correspondent Charles Bremner has a very personal column on Bringing up French Anglo-Saxons this week. Though his experience is pretty standard for an expat, he adds an insightful testimony to the pros an cons of living abroad.
"The rootless sense of expat kids should not be exaggerated," writes Bremner. "Emigrants everywhere experience much the same. But there is a difference because they and their children usually aim to blend into the new country. The expatriate world has a temporary feel because you expect to move on or return to base."
And if you do it for a little too long, "You become an all-round outsider." You no longer belong anywhere. Disconcerting, but also liberating: where you live becomes irrelevant; your true home is where your heart is -- and that's all that really matters.
"The rootless sense of expat kids should not be exaggerated," writes Bremner. "Emigrants everywhere experience much the same. But there is a difference because they and their children usually aim to blend into the new country. The expatriate world has a temporary feel because you expect to move on or return to base."
And if you do it for a little too long, "You become an all-round outsider." You no longer belong anywhere. Disconcerting, but also liberating: where you live becomes irrelevant; your true home is where your heart is -- and that's all that really matters.
2 comments:
As I have spent more years living in other countries than my own, it is so true that "home is where your heart is."
Years ago I would have agreed that after a certain time "you no longer belong anywhere." However, now I find that after so many years spent living in different countries, I now belong everywhere!
Very true, Lynn. And that's the exhilarating, liberating aspect of being an expat -- once you've tamed it.
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