There's No Place Like Home

            “There’s no place like home,” said Dorothy plaintively, clicking the heels of her ruby slippers.  And how glad she was to get back:  hugging her family, weeping, and repeating to the last fade-out, “There’s no place like home!”   That quote was much on my mind a few weeks ago, because on June 6^th, Kathryn and I arrived back in the U.S. for the first time since October, 2008.  There have been hugs at our reunions, but no tears, and the dialogue has been somewhat different from Dorothy’s.  Here’s how it has usually gone for us:

Friend:  Hey!  Look at you! (hugs)  Wow, how long has it been?

Us:  Well, about two and two-thirds years since we left.  Yeah, it’s been a while.

Friend:  But you guys look great (pure small talk; not to be taken literally—ed).

Us:  Thanks, you too.

Friend:  So how is it to be home?

Us:  It’s weird as hell, actually.  We’re completely unhinged.  How much time do you have?  Do you want to go get a beer and hear about this? 

Friend:  It’s uh, 8:30.

Us:  So you’re busy.

Friend:  In the morning, yeah.  Maybe a bit early.  But hey, let’s catch up.  You’re back for good now, right?  I gotta run for the ferry or I’d stay and talk.  But it’s great to see you again.  Take care.

           

            Of course, the conversations haven’t played out exactly like that.  When people ask rhetorical questions, they want rhetorical answers, e.g.

Q:  How are you? 

A:  I’m fine, thanks (correct answer).

A:  I’ve three months to live (incorrect answer).

            The correct answer to the question, “How is it to be home?” is “It’s great to be back,” so that’s what Kathryn and I have typically said to our friends.  But in private we have been comparing notes on how it is much more unsettling to be here than either of us had anticipated; how so many things seem, perversely, familiar and alien at the same time; and how, in some instances, we seem disconnected from friends and society and are no longer sure how to behave here.

            But the first thing that struck us both was the quiet.  That’s not surprising, since we were fresh from Hanoi, where a typical, business-as-usual street scene makes an American Superbowl victory celebration cum riot look sedate and orderly by comparison.  Life in Asian cities is so infused and supercharged with noise and chaotic action that after a while one ceases to notice it.  Living there is like drinking triple espressos all day. 

            Consider just the noise aspect of life in Asia, and forget for a moment the visual distractions.  In the first place, it is not noisy on the streets alone; restaurants, bars, and cafés often have concrete walls and tile floors, for ease of cleaning, and there are no curtains or ceiling tiles to absorb sound.  Moreover, people tend to speak loudly and boisterously everywhere, so chatting with your friends when dining out is like trying to converse at a jazz club or at the end of a busy airport runway.  Even in schools, no consideration at all is given to acoustic properties.  I have not yet taught in an Asian classroom with carpeting or any kind of noise-absorbing panels.  Books slap loudly onto wooden desks, hard chairs bang and clatter on tile floors, and it all echoes around in the concrete-and-glass classrooms.  Thus, students are supposed to learn to speak and listen to English in the acoustic equivalent of an auto-repair shop or a public restroom.

            Small wonder, then, that Kathryn and I woke up on June 7^th and blinked at one another with the same thought:  “It’s so quiet!  Where are all the car and motorbike horns? The throngs of neighbors tramping up and down outside, gabbling and laughing?  The trash lady endlessly chanting “Bring out your trash,” and banging on her shovel whenever the spirit moved her?”  All gone!  We probed our ears, both half afraid that we’d gone deaf.  But no, it was simply a sleepy suburban morning, where quiet is the norm.  At first it was wonderful (“We can sleep as late as we want!”), but soon it felt a bit creepy, as if a funeral cortege was on its way and the neighborhood had been told to hush up, and finally it just struck us as dull.  Where are all the people, we wondered.  There are homes all around us—so why weren’t the occupants in view?  Apparently they were just sequestered in their houses or at work; they certainly weren’t out on the streets, which is where we’d grown used to seeing the populace in Hanoi.   So it took a while for our ears to stop ringing and for us to get used to the relative quiet.

            But then we ventured out and started interacting with those around us, and I realized the biggest adjustment would be simply to reacquaint myself with American society as a whole—the American way of life.  I certainly mean no disrespect to the land of my birth when I say that living abroad has caused me to look at it in a new light.  Indeed, being gone so long has allowed me to see why citizens of other countries sometimes regard America with a mixture of wariness, dismay, and disbelief.  I often felt that way myself, while I was away, as I read or heard how my compatriots were keeping themselves busy.  Much of the news from home seemed to be either depressing, insane, or simply too trivial to care about:  continued grim statistics about the economy, the usual assortment of random shootings, and a wrenching national debate about whether or not the President should be allowed to speak to schoolchildren, for example. 

            And this view of my country was fostered not merely by what the media were saying about the US, but by what Americans were saying to and about each other.  We’ve had no TV for the past three years, and bought no newspapers or magazines, so most of our news came from the internet—the websites of news sources we had enjoyed at home.  The thing that made perusal of these sources unpleasant was the ubiquitous comments section at the bottom of each news article.  What amazing hellbroths these sections are, what foul amalgamations of ignorance, vitriol, and crippled grammar!  Reading them from abroad, I concluded American society had descended into pure anarchy. I envisioned shoppers deliberately running their carts into others in the supermarket aisles, cars climbing curbs in pursuit of pedestrians, foul-tempered seniors tearing down lost-puppy posters and kicking over lemonade stands.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I returned and settled in here, to find that many people still make eye contact as we pass on the streets, and that a good number of these strollers actually say “hello” or “good morning” into the bargain.  I witnessed friends and strangers meet during an amble on the beach and exchange not insults or gunfire, but pleasant greetings and a bit of gossip about how long the road repairs would continue, or how so-and-so’s hernia operation went.  It was a total reversal of what the “news” had led me to expect.  So I have had to recalibrate my expectations about social interactions in my own country, and to realize that websites don’t tell the whole story, even when the man on the street is given a platform to sound off in them.

            The economic situation truly is quite dire, however, and I can only imagine what my worldview would be if I had been living here these past few years—pretty gloomy, I suppose.  A job offer for Kathryn was withdrawn soon after our arrival, and I have not been able to find work teaching English at any of Seattle’s language schools, as I had so airily planned to do before we left Hanoi.  But on the bright side, our friends here have been aces, and have made things immeasurably easier by lending us bikes and cars, finding us temporary work, taking us out for meals, and even giving us places to stay, gratis.  As usual, we are humbled by such generosity, and feel unworthy of it, wondering why people are so kind to pestilent blisters like us.  One of life’s unanswerable questions, doubtless.

            We look ahead now to our arrival in China (via Hong Kong) in less than a month.  In all likelihood it will give us another jolt of culture shock as we re-assimilate to that lifestyle after our two-month break.  We do feel more settled now in the Pacific Northwest, but we doubt that we’ll ever live here long-term again.  I think we have already changed too much to allow us to do so, and more changes are in our future, certainly.  Though these are the streets where we lived nearly 20 years, where we raised our children, and where our house still is (albeit rented out to others), the place simply doesn’t feel like our only true Home.  It seems to be the case that “There’s no place that feels like home” anymore.  This may strike some as a sad thought, but it isn’t to us.  We have never been Waltons-type people who crave the traditional family hearth, with everyone sitting in the same places every year round the Thanksgiving dinner table.  If we feel comfortable somewhere, and enjoy our days, and can make some friends, that is close enough to Home for us.  We’ve found that by such criteria, a wider range of locations than we had supposed actually qualifies.  So for the time being we’ll continue this admittedly odd, itinerant existence, with the plan of returning here every few years to take the measure of the change in us since our last visit.  That’s as far ahead as we can plan for now.  I wonder what Dorothy would make of an outlook like that.

Re-entry--A Word from Kathryn

Steve and I didn’t anticipate any major adjustments on returning to the US for a mere two and a half months after just over two and a half years’ absence.  Thus it came as a profound shock to us both when we discovered, after the initial flurry of family hugs had subsided, that we both feel a considerable disconnect with the America of 2011.  Let me hasten to add this is not because the country or its people have changed vastly between October 2008 and June 2011 but, apparently, because Steve and I have.  Many famous men have noted the power of travel to change a person, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck among them; but Steve and I, having only each other as barometers, felt we’d returned in much the same mental and physical shape as when we left, with the addition of a few more grey hairs a few more wrinkles and a lot fewer high-functioning brain cells.  How bizarre, then, to find everything here so foreign!

There is no true analogy to how we feel but it’s a bit like emerging from a really gripping, high adrenaline movie to discover that the real world doesn’t feature constant laser gun battles, car chases and dramatic background music.  And, just as this realization often depresses the moviegoer, so the flatness of the pace of American life we perceived on our return to the West made us both feel a little blue and more than a little disconnected.  Even Steve, an American from birth, didn’t get that sense of ‘coming home’. 

One month after our return, things are a little more familiar.  I no longer rue the fact that I will not see a brilliantly coloured flame tree, or a Brachychiton, in amongst the sea of Douglas Firs.  And I accept the fact that cars stop for me rather than just zipping on by when I loiter by a crosswalk.  But some things are still inexplicable and—dare I say it?—a tad abhorrent.  One thing I can’t get used to is the ‘waste’ I see everywhere.  What I mean by this is not the sight of garbage, of which there is very little in the Pacific Northwest, but the waste of time and energy that I see constantly.  Now, when I pass an acreage of manicured lawn mown to within an inch of its life and a millimetre of its roots, I can’t admire the verdant land because I see just the hours it took to produce this masterpiece, the gallons of fuel the lawnmower consumed and the water that is required to keep it green.  The effort seems just a futile vanity to me when I compare it to our experience in Viet Nam where every available pocket of land is cultivated for food production.  Likewise the scale of the average American house seems unnecessarily large and wasteful.  I know Steve and I have led an aberrant existence in our shoebox residences of the last few years, but the size of some of the houses we’ve visited is at the other end of ridiculous. 

The other feature of American life that we independently noted as being odd and unpleasant is how dead and lifeless the streets are, at least in the Pacific Northwest.  It’s true that Seattle is a bicycling Mecca and we applaud its bicycle friendly streets, but bicycling isn’t often a communal experience.  It can be, of course, witness the STP, Chilly Hilly and similar bicycling events but, on a day to day basis, one doesn’t encounter much community on the streets.  Now that we are car-less, I witness this phenomenon on a daily basis.  Struggling back with groceries along ample sidewalks that would be the envy of Ha Noi pedestrians I rarely encounter a soul.  Occasionally a dog walker strolls by, invariably talking loudly into a cell phone.  Or a runner pounds past me jogging to the beat of his iPod.  But nobody smiles.  Most of the traffic is single occupancy vehicles driven by intense commuters or harried mothers.  I know I was a coward in Ha Noi and rarely rode a Xe Om (motorcycle taxi), but I do miss the drama of the Ha Noi streets and you have to admit it’s a lot less wasteful to carry your wife, two children, two chickens and a pig carcass to market on one motorbike than yourself and laptop to work in a V8 SUV.

One thing, however, has not disappointed and this is the very generous and warm welcome we have received from our many friends since our return.  I honestly didn’t realize we had so many friends and acquaintances in the Pacific Northwest.  True, the Aussies are a lot of fun, and the Vietnamese are warm and hospitable, but our American friends have shown us over and over just how generous the American people are.  I won’t embarrass individuals by enumerating specific acts of generosity.  Suffice to say that we have been the beneficiaries of multiple offers of accommodation and transportation, and have eaten many magnificent meals at friends’ homes.  All we can provide in return is our gratitude, hopelessly inadequate descriptions of our travels, and the assurance that all our friends are welcome to visit us should they find themselves cast upon the shores of a country in which we are currently residing (this will be China for the next 15 months).

Let me end with one final comment on the topic of community.  The thing we enjoyed most about both Melbourne and Ha Noi was the sense of community we felt as we wandered the streets of these cities, despite being both foreigners and strangers.  Melbourne is constantly abuzz with street life in the form of lively street-side cafes, throngs of noisy students of every skin colour, buskers and entertainers, street artists and tourists.  Ha Noi is a city that only rests between the hours of 11pm and 7am and is otherwise alive with heavily laden motorbikes, street vendors, street markets, and constantly laughing and smiling people sitting in front of their home (which usually doubles as their business), or jostling each other on the sidewalks (or in the streets, since the sidewalks are often blocked by the aforementioned businesses).  Bainbridge, Poulsbo and even Seattle seemed lifeless to us, then, when we first arrived.  However, this assessment must be modified now we are on the far side of both the Bainbridge Rotary auction and the quintessentially American holiday of July 4^th.  These two events have shown us America at its best and have made us finally feel a little more ‘at home’.   

 
Why is this?  Why do our fellow Americans seem more alive to us when they are sauntering the aisles of the big market place that is the Rotary auction?  Why does the market place bring out the smiles, jokes and camaraderie that are absent in day to day America?  And what is it about a parade that brings forth laughter, and energizes an audience?  Is there some primordial ‘community’ gene that is activated when we gather in the market place and share smiles at a parade—some communal ‘feel good’ endorphin that is circulated at such gatherings?  We are, after all, a social species.  Is it this ‘communal high’ that we have been missing and that has made us feel lost even though we are ‘back home’?   Have we become addicted to the ‘high’ we receive from being in close proximity to our fellow man?  For anyone who knows Steve this hardly seems possible, but I’ve seen him shift from indifference to a state of animation when removed from the isolation of a big house and thrust into activity and society.  For sure, one extreme form of punishment is compulsory solitude.  Is this the secret, then, to a happier society?  Should we abandon the self-isolation of our iPods, quit hiding in our houses, and organize more community picnics?  This would be such an easy, cheap way to increased happiness; it couldn’t possibly work, could it?