Being an expat can feel very much like being middle aged
Posted: February 14, 2011 Filed under: expats, Reflections | Tags: expat, Hanoi, middle aged, old 4 Comments »There’s barely an hour of the 18 I spend awake when I am not online in some way.
That said despite being plugged in to the internet in all its varieties – email, news, blogs, Facebook, Twitter – I still manage to miss out on a great deal that has otherwise seeped into whole countries’ consciousness.
At some point people who you have only vaguely heard of become international superstars. It wasn’t so long ago that having realised how often I was hearing the name Lady GaGa I felt compelled to look her up on YouTube and actually hear a song. For the first time.
When my online iTunes store stopped working it didn’t really bother me. There was no new music I was excited to download.
Of course it’s easy to blame my inability to keep up with modern culture on geography when, two months shy of my 40th birthday, it’s just as likely to be age. It’s remarkable how often I confuse the two.
I make excuses not to visit the more fashionable bars in Hanoi based on my expat whines of the same old faces and conversations. But I wonder if the unvoiced excuses are more valid – crowds, lack of comfort and generally feeling ill-at-ease with the company. Not to mention my inability to be as accepting as I once was.
How do they see me?
Am I old now?
Who is that idiot?
What’s he doing now?
Just how many drinks will it take for me to enjoy this?
How much will that hurt in the morning?
Recently in a taxi from Noi Bai I found myself chatting with the driver in my very limited Vietnamese. Just joking around and me using the stock phrases that I know will make him laugh and break the ice. It turned the airport-run chore into a fun 45 minutes.
I used to chat like this everyday when I took a xe om to work. I used to love it.
Being a married man, to a local, living in our own house, in an expat area, I’m aware I now have layers and layers of insulation.
Insulation is what the middle aged and the expat go in search of. Insulation against crime, real and imagined, against embarrassment, against a perceived waste of our time, against the unforeseen in all its forms.
I’m a nine to five worker these days in an office where the common language is English. In the evenings we mostly stay in. My wife sorts out “Vietnamese things”.
Insulated and out of touch.
How much is old and how much is expat?
Vietnam to the power of 2
Posted: April 25, 2010 Filed under: change, Reflections | Tags: change, contrasts, new, old 3 Comments »
A friend recently wrote an article entitled “How to write about Vietnam”.
It was a great piece that had a go at all those relentless clichés that visiting hacks use to describe this country. I’m fairly sure that it’s not on-line and I’d link it if I could, but I do recall the use of the word “juxtaposition”.
I recall it, not least, because I have used it myself. Even in photography there’s always the temptation and opportunity to take a picture of a wizened old lady selling tea outside of a modern fashion boutique in Hanoi.
But the fact that it has become a cliché doesn’t alter the fact that such contrasts are everywhere.
But it goes beyond that. There seems to be contrasting and often warring bodies and ideals all around.
North versus South. Hanoi versus Ho Chi Minh City. City very countryside. Tradition versus modernization. Young versus old. Freedom versus control.
And yes, at times, good versus evil or as Blue Dragon founder Michael sees it, hope and sorrow.
I know I’ve touched on this before and yet it still continues to occupy my thoughts and once this ying and yang mindset settles in you start seeing it everywhere.
Maybe the same can be said of every country but here the contrasts seem so much more vivid.
