Living Abroad to Push Our Boundaries

The phrase “living abroad” is in vogue; it has been for some time. It’s a phrase with an aura of adventure, capturing a wanderlust once romanticized in the novels of Hemingway and Kerouac, and today embellished in social media and student-exchange programs. Planting a life somewhere outside your native country can sound enticing. We all hear the exciting tales and see the filtered photos shuffled in blasé form, as if every waking moment abroad is so rife with happenings that adrenaline becomes normalized.

Living abroad doesn’t deserve to be recounted as an ongoing exaggeration. I don’t spend each week in a new country and I don’t go sightseeing everyday. I live in Southeast Asia, but there aren’t elephants in my backyard and I don’t sleep in a Buddhist temple. (Though I do live in a multiple-centuries-old Chinese village—more on that later). People, including myself, still have jobs and have to pay for flights and food with real money. Living abroad is often mistaken for being abroad. It isn’t a full-time holiday. People still file taxes and wake up with alarm clocks. Living abroad isn’t a seamless, carefree fairy tale.

It’s actually something far deeper than that.

In the past year, I’ve spent time in Spain, Italy, Macau, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong. I saw new things, tasted diverse cuisines, and met eccentric characters from around the globe. But short trips don’t sketch an accurate portrait of life away from home.

Living in Hong Kong, I do not spend time with any Americans. I lead a traditional Chinese lifestyle rather than that of a tourist. I speak Cantonese everyday. Everyone I know is either born-and-raised Chinese or an expatriate from outside the US. Sharing novel experiences with others of a different culture is as worthwhile as the experience itself.

People bear the fruits of where they came from. The flavors and accents and hues of their previous geographies combine into what we call perspective. We navigate life carrying pieces of past conversations, the habits and games we grew up with, the languages we know and do not know, the totems we worship and so forth. Travelers and homebodies alike are nuanced with peculiarities that color their character.

Perspective is malleable, and culture is the hammer.

But culture isn’t so obvious when you try and look for it. What is it? Is it a country’s biggest holiday? Is it the tourist attractions? The “must-see” museums or nightlife?

Culture happens everyday, everywhere. It is what people do at home and in town; it is the mundane and the residential; it is social circles and jobs and educations; it includes Keeping up with the Jones’s and the Average Joe. When I hear “living abroad,” I think of how foreign my day-to-day life must sound to people in America. My perception of “normal” has shifted.

I haven’t had to drive a car since arriving in Hong Kong, as the public transport is exemplary. I can hike through a tropical jungle that is full of mosquitoes so big they couldn’t balance on a fingernail, and then walk the city skyline moments later to commute home. (Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers in the world). My daily conversations are in Cantonese, a language with nine different pronunciations per each of the six possible tones of a single word.

Every single day I eat what Americans call Chinese food; here it is simply called “food.” I’ve had my share of Cup Noodles growing up in California, especially during my university years. Here in Hong Kong, I’ve eaten these very same high-sodium noodles countless times. They taste identical. And yet, noodles in Hong Kong are better than noodles in America, notwithstanding the same, bloated feeling afterwards. There is no logic as to why they are better, they just are.

It’s like ordering Pizza Hut in California versus picking up a slice in Naples. The pizza could be identical in its composition, though, in Naples, it comes into contact with a different wedge of reality. A handheld, warm and cheesy triangle can be cooked to taste exactly the same in any country, though something remains different. In Naples comes all the ecstasy and endearment and misgiving with that first bite. In California for a Californian, well, you could maybe burn your tongue.

The same oddity occurs for the Italian having their first burger in America rather than at an Italian McDonald’s. The activity itself is the same, but something deeper ensues.

Living abroad, everyday activities are no longer activities: they become experiences. These experiences shift our perception of reality, expanding the boundaries of our “normal.” Eventually, experience and normal become synonymous. It is our day-to-day tasks and habits that sculpt our perspective. These trifles constitute the reality of living abroad.

Our “normal” expands as we adapt to a culture.

Sightseeing tours, partying with travelers, amassing frequent flyer miles and photo-worthy escapades—traveling opens us to special experiences. These special experiences are but a small pigment of the animated, multi-colored painting that has been my time living abroad. My excursions will continue to resonate with me, but when I close my eyes and think, “what is it like to live abroad?,” these aren’t what first come to mind. I do not think of the different countries I’ve visited or the hallmark memories. I do not think of the picturesque.

Highlights make up the stories we tell people, though they give a paltry representation of reality.

When I hear, “what is it like to live abroad?,” I think of what I eat for dinner. I think about the language I speak and the polluted air I breathe. I think of the unremitting hum of the metropolis and the nudging elbows of overpopulation. I think of how Chinese people think I’m strange for ordering eggs at breakfast instead of noodles and meat. I think of opening my eyes each morning and not being in America. Everything about my life is different. Boundaries have expanded. My perspective is new.

It is the subtle and the unglamorous that makes “living abroad” something worth recounting. The small details of living abroad are exactly what gives “living abroad” a romantic allure. The quiet, most ordinary moments lay furtive each day, though, when I reflect on my life outside America, these moments sing the loudest.

Sparkling photo albums and social media may claim otherwise, but living abroad isn’t about constant traveling or adventures. It isn’t about leading a nomadic lifestyle.

It’s about the noodles and the pizza.