4 Comments

  1. Sabrina
    April 20, 2011 @ 3:07 pm

    Great post! Glad you included it in your link challenge as I hadn’t read this one before 🙂 The Between is a good word for the state us expats are in almost constantly. I truly believe that is the reason why most expats get along so well with other expats (even if they are from completely different countries). We all have the Between feeling in common.

    • Andrew
      April 21, 2011 @ 12:11 pm

      I remember reading an idea somewhere years ago that expats have more in common with each other than with either the host or the home country. I think this is probably true. I actually quite like being “between”. There is a satisfaction involved.

  2. Andrew
    August 6, 2010 @ 5:03 pm

    It’s never too late. I really enjoyed your interview with Camden, and this comment. I like the word ‘arbitrary’ that you use. Some cultural norms seem to be built on deliberate decisions on how they believe a society works best and other things are just silly. Good stuff.

  3. MaryAnne
    August 6, 2010 @ 1:23 pm

    I’m slowly catching up on my online reading now that I’m back from grindingly-slow-and-mostly-blocked Myanmar so I apologize if my comment here comes embarrassingly long after you published it. I really enjoyed this one- the sense of being in between is spot on. I think I mentioned a bit about that in my interview with Camden over at Brink of Something Else but I like the way you approached the subject. I think that sense of being outside the socio-cultural-expectations loop is utterly liberating. To be neither here nor there, in those aspects, frees you to be yourself rather than to be limited by what your culture and society demand of you. In Turkey (where I lived for 6 years before I came to China) there were a million rules for Turkish women…but I could flout most of them without repercussion because I was foreign. It all seemed so arbitrary, I had to laugh. It’s good to be out of the system and into one of your own design.