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.