RealClearWorld links to a Financial Times column by a rascal named Janan Ganesh. He writes about the few places in the world where one can be an expatriate and leave behind various ... um ... shortcomings in one's past life. If you know expats, or have been one yourself however briefly, you'll enjoy what he's written.
The chance to forget oneself, to disappear in plain sight, is a freedom too. The mystery is where to find it in future.
The sun is setting, for now, on a certain kind of nomad’s idyll. In Hong Kong, reabsorption into China is the issue. In Singapore, it is the pandemic and a new commitment to the nation’s “core”. Even the United Arab Emirates, facing disease and domestic unemployment, has shooed out legion expats.
The year the DrsC spent teaching on Guam, a very multicultural U.S. territory, we encountered plenty of the expat breed. I remember us both remarking how many of them would have trouble fitting in back in the States.
The local Chamorros' and other Asians' partial understanding of stateside norms was loose enough to permit expats a degree of "eccentric" behavior. We're talking behavior that, in the mid-1980s, would not have passed muster in Des Moines or Denver.
Ganesh needn't worry, new expat havens will open up on the fringes of the Third World. I suspect some are already operating in Mexico and Costa Rica, Belize and the French Caribbean.
