"Does this annoying American rant sound familiar?
“Call this a govment! Why, just look at it and see what it’s like. … They call that govment! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country. … Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come a-near it agin. … I says, I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me — I’ll never vote agin as long as I live.”
If you happened to guess Ellen DeGeneres, you’d be wrong. It is Pap Finn — who, for his obnoxious nativism, would probably be a Donald Trump supporter today — jawing to Huck in our national masterpiece “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” voicing a complaint that you’ve perhaps heard since the recent presidential election results were announced. Some people have acted on the threat, finding refuge in various countries overseas. This, oddly, at a time when millions of people are contriving ways to come to America.
What seems a contradiction is resolved in my core belief that expatriation, like old-fashioned laborious travel, is flight and pursuit in equal measure. It is both the desire to leave home and the passion to find something new, to pick up stakes and discover who you are in a different landscape and culture.
Pap’s rant was the inner voice I channeled more than 50 years ago when I began writing my novel “The Mosquito Coast” in the 1970s — years of long lines at gas stations, the Arab oil embargo, punitive interest rates, sagging morale and Japanese takeovers of high-profile American companies. My main character, Allie Fox, ranted like Pap about America’s decline and, suiting the action to the word, departed for Honduras with his wife and four children, in the hope of prospering in someone else’s country. But, of course, he remained his stubborn American self and went much too far, and his expatriation ended badly.
I told a similar tale in my novel “The Lower River," some 30 years later and in many short stories; the theme has been much on my mind. I spent 27 years, between 1963 and 1990, as an expatriate (six years in Africa, three in Singapore, 18 in Britain). I was not joyriding; I was first inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, one of the wisest and most eloquent ever delivered — sentiments unspoken today — “Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.”
But under my cloak of idealism, I was procrastinating about my future, and I felt I’d find answers by being alone and far away. I became a teacher in Africa and found myself transformed — so enlivened by the experience, I kept traveling and working abroad, until I quit teaching in 1971 and, with three novels published, moved with my small family to Britain, devoting myself wholly to writing. I don’t think I changed anyone’s life much as a teacher, but I know that expatriation was the making of me: liberated me, humbled me, revealed to me who I was and what I wanted my life to be, as a writer. I often thought of Rudyard Kipling’s lines, “God bless the just Republics / That give a man a home.”
Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes, passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, “Well, you Yanks ….”
There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading “Trespassing.”
My travels have taken me to many of the places where Americans have sought refuge in spite of local conditions. Portugal with its parking problems, Costa Rica with its venomous snakes, Italy and France tangled in red tape, cartel-beleaguered Mexico, overcrowded Bali and many others, which, of course, also have their salubrious compensations — food, flunkies and sunshine. The Republic of Malta attracts many seeking fine weather and island life, retirees and expats, among them a disillusioned Ryan Murdock, whose excellent recent book “A Sunny Place for Shady People” depicts Malta as corrupt and violent, the food revolting, the islanders xenophobic and a risky place for any Maltese to criticize the government.
As a writer, I naturally think of other writers who (for material, for refuge) chose to live abroad. Mark Twain was happy in Germany. Henry James migrated to England and never looked back. James Baldwin thrived as an expat in Turkey and lived in France. Edith Wharton also lived in France. Josephine Baker, who was a writer as well as a force of nature, was the ultimate expat, though “exile” is nearer the mark. O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), fleeing the law, escaped to Honduras. Paul Bowles retreated to Morocco, but when I was writing “The Pillars of Hercules,” I saw him, age 83, crouched on a mat in his chilly apartment in Tangiers, and I thought: I don’t want to end up like this. My friend John Irving is a contented Torontonian; my fellow traveler the Iowan Bill Bryson is presently a country squire in Britain.
Traveling through England for his book “English Hours,” James made a wise observation about Americans: “We seem loosely hung together at home as compared with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place.”
This “tight fit” extends beyond England to many of the world’s expat havens, where traditional cultures confound foreigners with the strictures of their religions, the finicky nuances of manners, their sinister yet legal punishments, their inexplicable pieties, their sneering absurdities of class, their rigidities of caste.
Yes, we have them in the United States, too, in a modified form, but their severity in other countries provokes their poorer citizens to flock to America, for its more “loosely hung” society. I also think the “tight fit” is one of the reasons that many exasperated expats, weary of the bubble they’re forced into, eventually return, clearer-sighted about the world and home.
Paul Theroux, the author of “The Mosquito Coast” and the short story collection “The Vanishing Point,” lives in Haleiwa, Hawaii." [1]
1. The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn: Guest Essay. Theroux, Paul. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jan 5, 2025.
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