The Displaced Nation

A home for international creatives

And the Alices go to … these 7 writers for their revealing posts on food and world travel

9 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on September 24, 2012

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Autumn is finally here, and those of us who lost our appetite during the onslaught of this summer’s heat and humidity find that we can breathe — and eat — again!

Accordingly, the Displaced Nation has turned its attention to food — though in a way that conjures up the magical dreamscape of Alice in Wonderland rather than a blog populated by posts on typical and traditional world cuisines.

On the one hand, we’ve heard from the Top Hatter — I refer to Anthony Windram’s avatar — on the pleasures of indulging in beef tongue at a Kyoto restaurant. On the other, we’ve encountered Duchess Kate (Allison) just as she was pronouncing on the Queen’s favorite chocolate and inviting us to join her in a chocolate cocktail.

Last week when Tony James Slater appeared on the site, he was looking for all the world like Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar, smoking his hookah and talking in short, somewhat rude sentences. His topic was the time he became violently ill (to use more polite language than he did) on mansaf on his visit to Jordan.

And personally I’ve yet to recover from last week’s encounter with the curious and curiouser Mark Wiens, who said he

would be very happy to fly to a destination and not do any of the normal tourist attractions, but just eat.

What’s more, he had the cheek to propose serving durian to The Displaced Nation! Off with his nose!!!

While putting together this menu of “It’s food!” posts, I’ve found it entertaining to read as many foodie posts as possible on other expat, repat, and travel blogs. And today I’d like to acknowledge some of their writers for what they’ve taught me about food and world travel.

A year-and-a-half ago, I had the pleasure of handing out the Displaced Nation’s Alice Awards to 7 writers who clearly understand — and aren’t afraid to reveal — the curious, unreal side of international travel.

Today I will hand out another set of Alices — you might call them the “Foodie Alices” — to writers who share the Displaced Nation’s down-the-rabbit-hole disposition toward world cuisines, i.e., who aren’t afraid to try mushrooms that make you grow, potions that make you shrink, tea parties where they don’t serve tea, and also feel duty bound to report these experiences to the rest of us.

So, without further ado, the Alices go to (in reverse chronological order):

1) AMANDA VAN MULLIGEN

Awarded for: “Do I Not Like Mushy Peas”, in A Letter from the Netherlands (personal blog about life as an Englishwoman in Holland)
Posted on: 19 September 2012
Choice morsel:

[Regular readers will know I am a fan of the Great British fish and chips.] However, there is no way, no how, I will eat fish and chips with mushy peas. They are vile. Foul. By far, mushy peas are … [t]he most disgusting monstrous green mess that has ever passed my lips. They turn my stomach.

Citation: Amanda, we award you this Food Alice or the feat of turning the typical “foods I miss from home” post on its head. That’s what it means to step through the looking glass. You’re a smart cookie and the rest of us would do well follow your example and focus on the “evil” accompaniments to our native cuisines that for health reasons alone, we’re lucky to have escaped from.

2) ANDREW COUCH

Awarded for: “Making Pancakes from a Bottle,” in Grounded Traveler (personal blog covering expat life in Germany), Posted on: 21 September 2012
Choice morsel:

We do not have a griddle. I imagine very few Germans have a griddle, at least not one useful for pancakes. So I get a set of 3 in a pan and the whole bottle [of Mondamin Pfannkuchen Teig-Mix] makes 12 or so, so I was doing several batches. … It works great, but well.. umm.. the Celsius temperatures still seem hard to understand for me. So while I didn’t overcook the cakes, I did almost burn my finger…

Citation: Andrew, you showed derring-do in experimenting with using bottled German pancake mix (and no griddle) to produce one of your favorite breakfast foods from home. Such bravery merits an Alice as does your acknowledged befuddlement over temperatures in Celsius, the vagaries of baking soda performance across the globe, and the extortionate prices of maple syrup. (Hey, we’ve all been there…)

3) KATE BAILWARD

Awarded for: “Sunday Supper,” in Driving Like a Maniac (personal blog about life as an Englishwoman in Sicily), part of her “Eating like a maniac” series.
Posted on: 3 September 2012
Choice morsel:

A Sunday night chuck it together kind of a lazy supper for one, to use up whatever you’ve got left in the fridge. I had a medium aubergine, a small courgette and some ricotta, as well as a jar of passata vellutata. You could say it was a very bastardised version of parmigiana alla melanzana, or you could just take it on its own merits and call it courgette, ricotta and aubergine rolls in tomato sauce. Or something else entirely. Whatever takes your fancy.

Citation: Kate — Katja, if we may — we give you an Alice for your versatility in writing foodie posts. Just after you published this piece, you wrote a post for Travel Belles on the joys of rustling up one’s own caponata, which you described as the “very essence of traditional Sicilian food.” Clearly, your training as an actor has borne fruit (and veggies!) if you can segue from harried EFL teacher chucking together a pseudo-Italian dinner, to full-fledged cookery expert. (What’s wrong with trifle, btw?)

4) JESSICA FESTA

Awarded for: “Eating My First Pet in Ecuador,” in Jessie on a Journey (personal travel blog)
Posted on: 24 August 24 2012
Choice morsel:

The body is sliced down the middle, opened like a thick book, on top of sizzling coals. Tiny hands, still with finger nails, reach into the air as if their last plea for help had gone completely unnoticed. Bright white teeth gleam out of mouths open in a scream and faces twist in agony. Apparently, the miniature murder scene I am witnessing is about to be my dinner.

Despite having been excited to try the popular Ecuadorian meal, something inside me feels a bit uneasy. My mind wanders back to my first pet, a guinea pig I named Joey after a school crush.

Citation: Jessica, we award you this Alice for your refusal to let “mental discomfort” stop you from ordering cuy, a popular South American dish, just because it resembles your Joey. (I for one never let sentiment get in the way of my enjoyment of koi, or goldfish, in Japan.) You’ve more than delivered on your promise to take us “beyond the guidebook.” We’re also very pleased that you found the dish delicious. Another one to add to our “must try” list, alongside Anthony Windram’s beef tongue.
COMING ON WEDNESDAY: A Random Nomad interview with the cuy-eating Jessie!

5) GERALDINE

Awarded for: “7 Badass Bavarian Foods You Must Try,” in The Everywhereist (personal blog about a trailing spouse’s adventures)
Posted on: 8 May 2012
Choice morsel:

Do you want to eat Bavarian food? OF COURSE YOU DO. It is rich and doughy and filling and is the only thing on the planet that can soak up German beer. Every other fare will simply hide in the corner of your stomach, petrified at the sheer awesomeness of the brew that resides in there with it, and it will never get digested.

In short: if you don’t eat Bavarian food while in Germany, you could die.

Citation: Geraldine, you’re full o’ beans, but we love you for that. Most “10 best foods” posts are about Southeast Asia or, more specifically, Thailand, home of cheap, tasty yet healthy food. But you realized that the market was already satiated for such posts and that it was time to give “badass Bavarian” food — of the kind that puts hairs on one’s chest — more of a chance. Not only that but you persuaded us. Pass the schweinshaxe.

6) & 7) MICHAEL HARLING & TONY HARGIS

Awarded for: “Is America too Sweet or Britain too Bland?” in Pond Parleys (joint blog, now defunct)
Posted on: 13 March 2011
Choice morsel:

Mike: I was surprised, on our recent visit, at how sweet America was: the beer, the bread, the pretzels (sugar-coated pretzels—honest to God) and even, oddly enough, the candy. And if it wasn’t infused with sugar, it was too salty and/or covered in cinnamon. After nearly ten years in UK, I found it all a bit too cloying.
Toni: While I do agree that American food has some strange stuff added to it, I wouldn’t call British food particularly bland. Rather than sweet, there is often a surprisingly savoury taste when you least expect it. While Cumberland sausage can have a peppery bite to it, Americans actually build their sweetness into the sausage, with maple syrup mixed right in.

Citation: Mike and Toni, we know you aren’t publishing Pond Parleys any more, but surely this post goes down in the annals and therefore deserves an Alice. I commented on it at the time it was published, wrote a post about it on TDN, and here I am writing about it again. The pair of you had a genius for pinpointing the kinds of things that routinely throw off American expats in Britain and vice versa, without their even knowing it. In the case of this food post, it turns out that we Yanks, just like the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, may be allergic to all that pepper in the sausage! And who would have guessed that the sweets-loving Brits would recoil from our foods for their high sugar content?

* * *

So, readers, do you have a favorite from the above, and do you have any other writers/posts to nominate for our next round of Alices? I’d love to hear your suggestions!

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, another Displaced Q focused on food by the anti-foodie Tony James Slater!

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Acquired tastes, Alice in Wonderland, Ecuador, Europe, Germany, It's Food!, Italy, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Moveable feasts, South America, The Netherlands, UK, USA, Writers we love

RANDOM NOMAD: Mark Wiens, Traveling Entrepreneur and Street Food Addict

5 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on September 19, 2012

Place of birth: Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Passport: USA
Overseas history: France (Albertville): 1990–91); Democratic Republic of Congo (Tandala): 1991–94; Kenya (Nairobi): 1995–2004; Thailand (Bangkok): 2009 – present.
Occupation: Freelance writer, blogger, video blogger, and food lover.
Cyberspace coordinates: Migrationology — Cultural Travel and Street Food Around the World (blog); Eating Thai Food (blog); @migrationology (Twitter handle); Migrationology (Facebook); and Migrationology (YouTube channel).

What made you leave your homeland in the first place?
I grew up traveling and living overseas with my parents, who are Christian missionaries. So after returning to the United States to attend university, I was ready to get back to traveling again.

Is anyone else in your immediate family “displaced”?
My parents are now residing in Tanzania. My father is now in leadership so he ventures into remote parts of Africa frequently and gets to see some pretty cool things!

As a Third Culture Kid, you’ve grown up living in several different countries. Tell me about the moment when you felt the most displaced.
What makes me feel out of place? Showing up at the airport, train station or bus station of a new city and not knowing how to get to the city center. That happened a lot when I first began solo traveling. I didn’t do enough initial research before arriving in a country.

One time I flew into Clark Airport in the Philippines thinking it was in Manila, but in reality it’s located about three hours from the city, and there’s no easy way to get to Manila center. I should have known this before arriving and getting lost!

I now still don’t do a lot of planning, but I always do a bit of research to figure out the best way to get from the airport (or station) to the city center!

Wow, you sound pretty comfortable in the big wide world out there, if you don’t even bother doing research before a trip. When have you felt the most comfortable?
Whenever I’m eating delicious food cooked by a local — that’s when I feel the least displaced. In Sri Lanka, for instance, I got into the habit of stopping to eat food along the side of the road. I would always be greeted by genuinely friendly and hospitable people. So in addition to delicious food, I would be connecting with others. That’s how I feel at home in a foreign place.

You may bring one curiosity you’ve collected from your travels into The Displaced Nation. What’s in your suitcase?
Durian from Southeast Asia — the most amazing fruit in the world! It makes me very happy!

And now you are invited to prepare one meal based on your travels for other members of The Displaced Nation. What’s on the menu? 
Appetizer: Poke, the Hawaiian sashimi: cubed pieces of raw fish marinated in onions, soy sauce, and sea salt.
Main: Sichuan fish hot pot, known as Shuizhuyu. It’s the signature dish in Sichuan cooking.
Dessert: Either Thai-style sticky rice with durian, or just plain durian fruit.
Drink: Stoney, a strong ginger soda from East Africa that burns going down.

I wonder if you could also add a word or expression from one or more of the countries you’ve lived in to The Displaced Nation argot.
From Kenya: Sema boss, a slang term for greeting the person who is in charge. It’s a good way to connect.
From Thailand: Mai pen rai, how Thais say “don’t worry about it” or “no problem.” It’s a polite phrase.
From Mexico: Pansa llena, corazón contento: “Stomach full, heart is happy.” When I lived in the US, I had many friends from Mexico who would use that expression with me as they knew I loved to eat. I also have visited northern Mexico a number of times.

This month we’ve been exploring the idea of organizing one’s travels around the wish to try particular foods. I understand that many of your travels are motivated by food interests?
Yes, nowadays just about all my travels are motivated by food. I do travel to see other countries and meet new people, but my main passion is food and that’s what I enjoy searching for. I would be very happy to fly to a destination and not do any of the normal tourist attractions, but just eat. A few months ago I took just a short 24-hour trip to Malaysia with a strict mission to eat. It was an amazing food binge!

Are you more motivated by the idea of trying new foods or by finding the very best of particular foods?
I’d say I’m equally motivated to try new foods and to find the very best foods that I’ve already eaten previously. I’m always excited to try something I’ve never seen or heard of before, but at the same time if I hear about the best bowl of Thai boat noodles, or the most amazing seafood restaurant, I’m quite tempted too!

If you were to design a world tour based on food, what would be your top five stops/foods to try?
I couldn’t narrow it down to five, so here are six:
1) Thailand — try the gaeng som (sour spicy soup), som tam (green papaya salad), and boo pad pongali (crab yellow curry).
2) Malaysia — try the nasi campur (mixed curry and rice), nasi lemak (rice and toppings), and roti canai (roti bread with curry).
3) China — try the Sichuan hot pot and all kinds of exotic delicacies.
4) India — try the thali (rice with a variety of curries), dhosa (pancake with curries) and home-cooked curries.
5) Mexico — try the tacos, burritos, mole (chocolate curry), carne asada (grilled meat), and ceviche (seafood salad).
6) Ethiopia — try the mahaberawi, a platter that includes injera (white spongy bread) topped with a variety of spicy curries.

Readers — yay or nay for letting Mark Wiens into The Displaced Nation? He’s an adventuresome eater, that’s for sure, but can you stand the smell of what’s in his suitcase? (Note: It’s fine to vote “nay” as long as you couch your reasoning in terms we all — including Mark — find amusing!)

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s episode in the life of our fictional expat heroine, Libby. (What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures.)

img: Mark Wiens in the act of trying, for the first time, to cut open a durian fruit, on his balcony in Bangkok.

Acquired tastes, Africa, Asia, China, Entrepreneurs, Expat interviews, France, Kenya, Moveable feasts, Random Nomads, Southeast Asia, Thailand, Third Culture Kid, USA

Lessons from Two Small Islands — 4) Keep Calm and Focus on Your Core

6 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on August 29, 2012

Keep calm and focus on your core — it sounds as though I’m about to lead a Pilates class!

Is that what life on two small islands taught me — the value of doing daily sit-ups and push-ups?

Hardly. I wasn’t into exercise routines in either England or Japan, the two small islands where I lived for almost as long as I’d (consciously) lived in my birth country, the United States.

It was only after repatriating that I ventured into my first Pilates class — and ended up cursing Joseph Pilates for developing, in essence, a set of military exercises for civilians. Hup two! Hup two!

I asked around at the class but no one seemed to have a clue who the founder of this torture had been. I did some investigation and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that Mr Pilates had led a displaced life not dissimilar from mine.* He was descended from a family of Greeks who’d emigrated to Germany — German kids would taunt him for being “Christ’s killer” because they thought “Pilates” sounded like “Pontius Pilate.” Still, he had something going for him: an athletic physique. His father having been a prize-winning gymnast, Pilates Junior was a gymnast, a diver and a body-builder. He moved to England in 1912 to earn a living as a professional boxer and circus performer. Eventually, he would emigrate to the United States, where he set up his first exercise studio for professional dancers and other performers, offering them a routine that focused on core postural muscles.

What impressed me the most about Mr Pilates’s life, though, was that at his most displaced moment, his instinct was to think about his core. That moment occurred few years after he arrived in England. World War I broke out, and because of being German, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Wight. In great physical condition himself, he wanted to help the other prisoners, who included some wounded German soldiers, stay in shape, too. He thoughht it would lift their spirits. The exercises he developed for them, for strengthening the core, were the precursors of what we now call the Pilates routine. (See, I wasn’t so far from the mark: military exercises for civilians!)

No core, no cry

I thought about my core a lot, too, when leading my life of displacement first in England and then in another shimaguni (island country), Japan.

To begin with, I was convinced that it was my very lack of a cultural core that enabled me to live in other cultures for as long as I did. What does it mean to be an American from Delaware, of all places? I didn’t have any clear cultural identity — yet it didn’t really bother me. It meant I could go with the flow.

I still remember my first job in Tokyo, which involved working as an editor in the research department of a British stockbrokers that had been taken over by a major Swiss bank.

Being a displaced person myself after several years of living in the UK, I looked forward to working in what I thought would be a mini-UN: Brits, Swiss and Japanese.

It did not take long to disabuse me of that fantasy. The Brits and the Swiss were always clashing, and the Japanese kept themselves to themselves (they probably wished they’d never allowed foreign bankers into their country!).

There were three or four of us Yanks in the department, and we tended to be the ones who tried to be pleasant to everyone else and didn’t bear grudges. A couple of us (not including me) were great speakers of Japanese so were often called on to facilitate when “war” broke out.

“Why can’t we all get along?” was our motto. “Go with the flow.”

But that was then…

By the time I got back to the United States, however, I envied the residents of the two island nations where I’d lived for knowing what they were about — for having such a strong sense of core, or self. Which, when you think about it, is no easy feat in the face of globalization!

Not only did I envy them, but I was grateful for the bits of each nation’s core that I’d picked up on my travels. These are the principles I keep going back to in times of stress, particularly when I’m struggling to readjust to life in my native U.S. — which is what this series is about.

Indeed, if it weren’t for those core pieces I’ve borrowed from other countries, I think I’d now feel like the tin man wishing for a heart, the scarecrow wondering what it would be like to have a brain, the lion yearning for courage… (Boy, did L. Frank Baum ever understand his native country!)

England would not be England without…

A couple of months ago, a group of Britophiles and Brits were debating the essence of Britishness on our site. They were responding to a list created by the gardening journalist Alan Titchmarsh (could there be any more British name than that?) beginning with “England would not be England without…”

Some were disputing the items on the list as being hopelessly out of date and romanticized — Miss Marple, daisies in the lawn, and cucumber sandwiches without crusts. Come on, what century is he living in?

Meanwhile, the author of the post, Kate Allison, maintained that Britain had become more like a mini-US in recent years.

But I didn’t agree with any of that. After spending so many years in the UK, I am ALWAYS overjoyed when encountering someone else who “gets” the part of me that’s anglicized. It means they share my need to discuss politics over a beer, my love of creamy desserts, my preference for baths not showers, my excitement at seeing fresh rhubarb and gooseberries at the green market, or my passion for public transport and national healthcare.

Now if I, a quasi-Brit, feel this way, how much more so must the true natives feel?

Japan would not be Japan without…

Likewise in Japan — or perhaps even more so, as that nation adopted a policy of isolating itself from the outside world, which lasted over two centuries. Plenty of time to develop a core of Japanese-ness.

Again, I am not a true Japanese — but I was the only foreigner in a Japanese office for four years, when I was more or less adopted by the group and taught their code of ethics. I used to joke with my colleagues and say, “I’m a bad Japanese,” as they often had to nudge me about some protocol I’d forgotten.

Still, they trained me well. To this day, I can rattle off a long list of what it means to be Japanese. Surely, Japan would not be Japan without sakura (cherry blossoms) set lunches, soba, slurping soba, sushi, sashimi, shiatsu, shinkansen, and sumo? And that’s just the “s”es. Japanese traits run the gamut from A (amae) to Z (“Zen”).

Even tonight, when I was walking down 9th Street in the East Village and heard the sound of obon music in front of one of the Japanese restaurants, I longed to hear the beat of taiko and join in a traditional dance… Now that’s at the very core of Japanese culture — and I happily went there, still would!

America would not be America without…

What is the American core? Despite Joseph Pilates’s efforts, I don’t see much of one. Here is my attempt to brainstorm a list.

America would not be America without:

wide highways chockerblock with traffic (at least here on the East Coast, where it’s one person, one car)
gas-guzzling cars
poor people using the Emergency Room for their health care
shooting sprees every so often by young men who are too easily able to buy guns
racial incidents/slurs (even against the president — we still seem to be fighting the civil war)
rudeness and the blame game (there’s so much rage here!)
supersized food portions
junk food of all kinds
children with obesity/diabetes
mindless popular culture as represented by Kate Perry, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears…
gridlocked politics and a Supreme Court with a political agenda
men in power who think they know what’s best for women
men in power who act like cowboys
religious nuts who home-school their kids so that they won’t learn evolution

Of course I know there are good things about being American — such as the freedom and openness we represent to oppressed people, our generosity in helping strangers, our inventiveness, our can-do attitude (not for us “ten reasons why not” as it was for many of the people in both of my small-island homes), Hollywood, jazz, and of course the old stand-bys of baseball and apple pie — can we also throw in some Sonoma Valley wine?!

But several of these positive aspects were breaking down when I left this country to live abroad, and now the situation seems so much worse! Indeed, our much-vaunted openness to outsiders seems to be in question now that so many states are threatening to send hard-working immigrants back to their countries. (Strange, given that such immigrants are among the few left who carry some core-building potential…)

Why don’t we have a proper core, on which we continue to build an identity? Is it because we are too big or too new? Size probably has a lot to do with it — and the fact that we are divided into states.

Several cities/states/regions have stronger cores — I’m thinking of New York, Vermont, Texas, Silicon Valley, the Deep South — than the nation as a whole.

But our national core seems to be as hallow as the European Union’s is proving to be.

Newness, too, could be the reason our core is underdeveloped. Both England and Japan have lived through hard times, which have given their people a sense of who they are. Thus far our hard times — e.g., 9/11 — bring us together only for a brief respite, after which we are more divided than ever.

Readers, please tell me that I’m wrong — that America has a sound core, but I just haven’t seen it?

Next time I do Pilates, I’m going to breathe in thought the nose, out through the mouth, so that I can keep calm, and focus not only on strengthening my own core, but on what we citizens can do to strengthen that of our native land…
* I herewith nominate Joseph Pilates for the Displaced Nation’s Displaced Hall of Fame!

STAY TUNED for Thursday’s post, another in our “Expat Moments” series, by Anthony Windram.

Acquired tastes, Celebrity expats, Japan, Joseph Pilates, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Repatriation, UK, What a Displaced World

RANDOM NOMAD: Liv Gaunt, Accidental Serial Expat and Feeder of Sharks

6 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on August 15, 2012

Place of birth: Luxembourg
Passport: UK
Overseas history: England (Sevenoaks, Kent): 1981–98); Turkey (Fethiye, Ölüdeniz, Fethiye again): 1998–99, 2001–02, 2004; Kenya (Watamu): 1999–2000; Egypt (Dahab): 2000-01, Bahamas (Nassau and Family Islands): 2002–03; Barbados (Bridgetown): 2004–05; England (London): 2006–10; Australia (Cairns, Brisbane, Esperance): 2011 – present. (Gosh, I feel like a serial expat listing so many places!)
Occupation: Journalist and scuba instructor
Cyberspace coordinates: The World is Waiting — Expat humour, travel tips, handy hints, photos and inspiration for travellers (site); @worldswaiting (Twitter handle); The World is Waiting (Facebook); WorldsWaiting (Pinterest); and Liv G (foursquare).

What made you leave your homeland in the first place?
Though I am fond of Britain, I left because I was seeking work as a scuba diving instructor and underwater photographer. The jobs available overseas offered a better diving experience and a better lifestyle. Photographing sharks, filming turtles, and teaching people to dive in an island paradise conditions are not things you can do in Britain.

Is anyone else in your immediate family “displaced”?
My parents were expats in Luxembourg, which is where I was born. For a few years my father was based in Barbados for work, so I guess it runs in the family — but nobody other than me is displaced at this moment.

Your chosen profession of diving and underwater photography has led you to settling, at least for a time, in quite a few different countries. Tell me about the moment when you felt the most displaced.
I believe it is the people who make the place. I feel most displaced when I am surrounded by people who do not treat others with what I consider to be the most basic level of respect — basically, as they would wish to be treated. Discovering cultural differences can be fascinating; but living with discrimination day in day out is frustrating and awful. Living in Egypt I found it really frustrating that men would not take me seriously simply because I am female. They completely disregarded the fact that I had more experience and was more qualified than they were. Of course I understand there are significant differences between Arab and Western culture. But being in a male-dominated industry (scuba diving) in a paternal society (Egypt) was simply not for me.

Was there one specific moment during your time in Egypt that catalyzed this feeling for you?
No, I think it was more the growing realization that I would never be taken seriously.

Describe the moment when you felt your least displaced — i.e., when you felt more or less at home in one of your adopted countries.
The first time I lived somewhere other than with my parents, was in Turkey in my late teens. I took on the responsibility of earning enough to pay rent, bills and to feed myself — and it was all in Turkish. It was a classic example of me diving in at the deep end, so to speak. As a result, I quickly gained a working knowledge of the Turkish language as well as an understanding of the country, culture and its people. Initially I thought that my Turkish friends would be horrified by my near constant butchering of their language. But they only ever encouraged me — and even nicknamed me “the Turkish-English girl.” Nowadays, whenever I visit Turkey I feel very at home there. I don’t have the normal visitor’s questioning of things. I still have quite a few Turkish habits like always removing my shoes indoors, being quick to hit the horn whilst driving, and showing hospitality to visitors.

You may bring one curiosity you’ve collected from each of your adopted countries into The Displaced Nation. What’s in your suitcase?
From Turkey: An evil eye. Evil eyes are so-called, rather misleadingly, as they are believed to ward off evil. They are usually made from glass or ceramics and are often seen hanging over entrances to offices and people’s homes.
From Kenya: Some beaded sandals made from leather and old car tyres. They are the most comfortable sandals I ever had.
From Egypt: Egyptian hibiscus tea. They serve it warm with a classy piece of foil over the top of the glass!
From the Bahamas: Pink sand from Harbour Island. All Bahamian sand is silky soft and impressive frankly but on Harbour Island it is even more beautiful for being a dusky pink.
From Barbados: An amazing reggae soundtrack.
From Australia: Can I bring a quokka? They are small marsupials, a bit like a large-bottomed mini-kangaroo. I find them endlessly amusing.

And now you are invited to prepare one meal based on your travels for other members of The Displaced Nation. What’s on your menu? 
Starters: A huge plate of Turkish meze including filled filo pastries, various dips, Turkish bread, olives, cheese and some köfte.
Main: Bahamian conch fritters — the conch will be fresh from the sea and delicately fried — served with lime coconut dip and salad.
Dessert: An Australian pavlova, covered in fresh fruit.
Drinks: To include Caribbean piña coladas and mojitos, and Turkish cherry juice.

It would be a strange meal perhaps, but very tasty!

I wonder if you could also add a word or expression from one of the countries you’ve lived in to The Displaced Nation argot.
Ubuntu, which is an African ethical philosophy. Nelson Mandela explained it thus:

A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

Your life thus far has been quite an odyssey. You’ve traveled to 42 countries and lived in six. Do you think of yourself as a travel pro?
I don’t consider myself a professional traveler. To me, that term implies that I am paid to travel, which is certainly not the case. I am inspired to continue traveling to new places because I enjoy learning about people’s lives and cultures, and seeing the world through their eyes. I find the different foods interesting as well. Travel also allows you to see where you have come from in a whole new light.

What’s still on your bucket list?
Oh, it’s endlessly growing! Top of the list currently are the Philippines and the Galápagos.

But you are a professional scuba diver. Did you watch the diving events in the London Olympics?
I wasn’t able to watch most of the Olympics because of the time difference between Australia and Britain and a recent spate of overtime at my job. However, to answer your question, no, I have little interest in competition diving. I am not a competitive person generally and rather believe that at the end of the day the only person you ever truly compete with is yourself.

What made you so certain you wanted to be a scuba diver?
I enjoy interacting with the creatures of the deep. Watching as a shark cruises out of the blue towards you, having a curious manta ray investigate you, or sharing a moment with a cheeky turtle is far more fun to me than being faster or more coordinated than someone else. I also enjoy the challenge of capturing the underwater critters on camera.

As it happens, this week marks the 25th anniversary of Shark Week, the Discovery Channel’s longest-running programming event. The purpose is to draw the attention to the shark species, one third of which is at risk for extinction. (We must all stop eating shark fin soup — up to 73 million sharks are killed each year for their fins!) I understand that you love to video and photograph sharks. Is that the riskiest thing you’ve done under water?
Most people would say the riskiest thing I have done underwater is feed sharks. It’s not about thrill-seeking, though, but about providing divers with an up-close encounter, which I think is the best way to educate people about and ultimately protect the sharks.

But while you are a shark lover, you have an aversion for sea urchins. Why is that?
If you ask me that question, I have to assume you have never accidentally brushed past one and received an ankle full of their bloody painful spines?!

But have you ever eaten uni in a Japanese restaurant?
No. I love sushi but haven’t managed any sea urchin yet. Have you, is it good?!

Readers — yay or nay for letting Liv Gaunt into The Displaced Nation? Is she above water or is there something fishy about her application? (Note: It’s fine to vote “nay” as long as you couch your reasoning in terms we all — including Liv — find amusing!)

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s compendium of books on travel to Tuscany.

img: Liv Gaunt videoing a shark feed in the Bahamas.

Pot Luck Acquired tastes, Australia, Bahamas, Egypt, Expat interviews, Luxembourg, Moveable feasts, Pot Luck, Random Nomads, Turkey, UK

RANDOM NOMAD: Brian MacDuckston, American Expat in Tokyo & Expert Ramen Slurper

4 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on August 1, 2012

Place of birth: San Francisco, California USA
Passport: USA
Overseas history: Japan (Saitama, Hiroshima, Tokyo): 2006 – present.
Occupation: Food consultant and freelance English teacher (available for high school classes, after-school programs, private lessons, children’s events…)
Cyberspace coordinates: Ramen Adventures (blog); @macduckston (Twitter handle); and Ramen Adventures (Facebook).

What made you leave your homeland in the first place?
Around 2004 I took a colloquial Mandarin Chinese class, hoping to learn a bit to help with the massive amounts of Kung Fu movies I was into at the time — I soon learned that Cantonese, not Mandarin, is used in these flicks. One of my classmates was going to China for a year to teach English. I did some Internet searching and decided I really wanted to check this out. I was stressed with my computer job, and a year abroad seemed like a good idea. Opportunities abound in China, Korea, and Japan. Japan just seemed like a good choice to me.

You’ve now lived in Japan for more than five years. Tell me about the moment when you felt the most displaced.
My first day of work in Saitama, I somehow managed to get on an empty train that had reached its last stop. A minute later and I was in the depot storage yard with an attendant yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand. I was late to my very first English lesson. I wanted to quit right away. Things got better, obviously.

Is there any particular moment or moments that stand out as your least displaced?
Whenever I’m on the road here in Japan. I ride a motorcycle — very few foreigners do that. Something about being able to navigate across mountain ranges on poorly marked roads fills me with a great sense of accomplishment.

Hmmm…are you sure it’s safe? And now you may bring one curiosity you’ve collected from your adopted country into The Displaced Nation. What’s in your suitcase?
A curiosity? I am actually quite a minimalist, collecting only photos. My Nikon camera is technically a Japanese thing. I guess I would choose that. Or perhaps I should consider bringing a few of my Japanese cooking knives. Beautifully crafted and razor sharp, they are amazing things.

Ah, cooking! I’m glad you mentioned that. You are invited to prepare one meal based on your travels for other members of The Displaced Nation. What’s on your menu? 
Ramen of course! Let’s go ahead and serve it after the drinks. After many drinks. Ramen is one of the best hangover prevention foods. All that fat and all those carbs do wonders for the next morning.

And now you may add a word or expression from the country you live in to The Displaced Nation argot. What will you loan us?
Umai is a great food word in Japanese. Most people first learn oishii to mean delicious, but umai is a bit stronger, a bit more cool. It’s mostly a guy word, though. I hope that’s okay with the female occupants of the Displaced Nation?

Perfectly okay! This summer, thanks to the London Olympics, all of us Displaced Nation residents, whether male or female, have become obsessed with displays of machismo and strength. In fact, this may be a good time to bring up your hobby of eating ramen in as many Tokyo venues as possible. How did you get launched in such a curious culinary sport — and become so accomplished that you and your blog were featured in the Travel section of the New York Times?
After living in Hiroshima for a bit, I knew that I needed to live in the big city. So I finished my contract, signed up for unemployment insurance, and moved to Tokyo. Suddenly I found myself with a massive amount of time on my hands — and not a lot of money in my pockets. I decided to wait in the ridiculously long ramen shop line that I had seen many times across the street from a massive bookstore in Ikebukuro, one of Tokyo’s multiple city centers.

I was shocked how good it was. Completely worth the hour wait outside in the cold. A bit of research later, and I had a list of the 30 best shops in Tokyo…a nice place to start.

Thirty shops sounds rather daunting, particularly if each one involves standing in line for hours! What keeps you going, and do you still like ramen after the upteempth bowl of it?
What keeps me going? A job that doesn’t pay much! In fact, it’s the kind of random fun that comes with this obsession that keeps me going. When I can somehow influence someone to have the best bowl of ramen they have ever had, I feel like it is worth it.

Would you say that you’ve now graduated from amateur to pro?
Becoming a pro in such a niche corner of the food world is tough, but I suppose the few guidebook articles or magazine pieces I have worked on would put me up there.

Readers — yay or nay for letting Brian MacDuckston into The Displaced Nation once he’s finished slurping up his latest bowl of noodles? Tell us your reasons. (Note: It’s fine to vote “nay” as long as you couch your reasoning in terms we all — including Brian — find amusing!)

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s Displaced Q, about nationalism and the Olympics.

img: Brian at a ramen-ya in Tokyo, pursuing his favorite “sport.”

Acquired tastes, California, Expat interviews, Japan, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Olympian feats, Random Nomads, Tokyo, USA

Trying — but failing — to keep up with Wendy Nelson Tokunaga, Olympic e-book author and karaoke star

9 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on July 25, 2012

**Announcing a giveaway of one of Wendy Nelson Tokunaga’s Kindle e-books. open to DISPLACED DISPATCH SUBSCRIBERS & ANYONE WHO COMMENTS. And guess what? You get to take your pick! Woo hoo!!**

During this summer’s London Olympics there will be endless displays of speed grace, strength, masochism, endurance, pain, and perseverance.

Just the the thought of it makes me feel exhausted and a little bit nauseous.

But I don’t necessarily have to look toward the Orbit (I refer to the “eyeful tower” that looms over London’s Olympic Stadium) to feel that way. Instead I can direct my weary gaze towards the Golden Gate Bridge, near to where the once-displaced Wendy Nelson Tokunaga resides.

Tokunaga was a special guest at The Displaced Nation before as one of our 12 Nomads of Christmas. We have invited her back today to showcase what it means to be an “Olympian author.” She has just completed the marathon-like feat of publishing three e-books — two novels and one work of nonfiction — in a period of 12 months.

Has she tired you out yet?

I ask because that’s not the whole story. A talented writer, Tokunaga is what the Japanese call a talento: she can sing jazz as well as j-pop and enka (a type of sentimental ballad). Put it this way: you do not want to compete with her in a karaoke contest!

If you don’t believe me, listen to her singing this enka she composed for one of her novels — you would never know that Tokunaga is a native-born Californian who’d spent time in Japan!

Just one of the many reasons why you’ll never keep up with her…or if you dare to try, you’ll be huffing and puffing, just as I am. (Why oh why did I agree to sing a few bars of “My Way” with her?)

* * *

[Catching my breath…] Thank you, Wendy, for agreeing to this interview with The Displaced Nation. While I rest for a bit, can you tell me a little more about yourself — where you were born and how you ended up living in Japan?
I was born in San Francisco and have lived in the Bay Area all my life except for when I lived in Tokyo during the early 1980s. I had been studying Japanese language and culture at San Francisco State University when I won a prize in a songwriting contest sponsored by Japan Victor Records. It allowed me to perform my song at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo. After that I moved to Japan to pursue music, teach English and do narration work.

While I’m still catching my breath — let’s hope I don’t have a heart attack here — why don’t you tell us about all your books? I understand you’ve published eight of them in the past 12 years, of which three of them came out in the past 12 months?
I self-published my first novel, No Kidding, in 2000 with iUniverse. Then I wrote two books for elementary-school students with Kid Haven Press: Famous People: Christine Aguilera (2003) and Wonders of the World: Niagra Falls (2004). Next came two novels that featured Japan, both of which were published by St. Martin’s Griffin: Midori by Moonlight and Love in Translation. And then I self-published three Kindle e-books within the past 12 months: Marriage in Translation: Foreign Wife, Japanese Husband, in 2011; Falling Uphill and His Wife and Daughters, both in 2012.

I suppose you’re working on another book right now?
Yes, a mystery/thriller.

Crossing publishing platforms…

Turning to your three recent books: what made you decide to join the Kindle e-book world?
Falling Uphill was a “trunk novel” I wrote in 2004 that never got published. With the popularity of e-books I decided to revise it a bit and put it out instead of having it gather dust on my hard drive. My agent at the time came close to selling His Wife and Daughters to a major publisher in 2011, but in the end things didn’t work out. I still wanted to bring the book out, so making it available as an e-book seemed like a great idea. I’d gotten a few bites from publishers regarding Marriage in Translation, which was based on a series of blog interviews I’d done of Western women married to Japanese men. But dealing with a publisher would mean the book would take at least a year to come out and would probably need to be longer. I just wanted to get it out as soon as I could to take advantage of the momentum of the blog. Coincidentally, when I was in the finishing stages, the disastrous earthquake and tsunami occurred in Japan. I brought out the book shortly after and for a time gave 50 percent of the proceeds to Japan relief.

Do you think you can reach a different audience through self-publishing?
What’s exciting about e-books is that I can reach an audience! For various reasons, these books wouldn’t have seen the light of day, so I’m happy to continually find readers for them. And, yes, I think I’m reaching a wider geographical audience. And another bonus is that in the e-book world, unlike in the traditional publishing world, the pub date is irrelevant — people can continue to discover my books and I can promote them as summer reads, fall reads or whatever. And e-books don’t ever go “out of print.” I couldn’t be happier with this platform, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t still appreciate traditional publishing and don’t rule out traditional publishing in the future.

Crossing genres…

You got your MFA in creative writing. You also teach and consult on creative writing. What was it like trying your hand at a nonfiction book Marriage in Translation?
These days, non-fiction written in the manner of creative non-fiction and/or narrative non-fiction has lots in common with novels. I think it can be easier for fiction writers to tackle non-fiction, but there might be more challenges for the strictly non-fiction writer to undertake writing fiction.

Why is it so challenging for nonfiction writers to switch over to fiction?
Some — not all — non-fiction writers find it difficult to “make things up” and use their imagination after being so ingrained at using “just the facts.” And, for journalists, I think it can be a challenge to structure a novel that doesn’t reveal everything at once and fight the tendency to go about verifying each point.

Crossing cultures…

Turning to Japan and its influence on your writing. For a while there, Japan was your lodestar. Both Midori by Moonlight and Love in Translation had strong Japanese themes, as does Marriage in Translation. But in your two latest novels your protagonists are all Americans. I’ve read His Wife and Daughters — and enjoyed it very much. There was a scene set in Japan — involving one of the daughters, Phoebe — but otherwise it’s about an American politician who has an affair that causes him to lose his job. I haven’t read Falling Uphill — does it have any Japanese references?
Falling Uphill doesn’t have any Japanese references, at least that I can recall! And in His Wife and Daughters, I thought that for the particular purpose of depicting a certain time in Phoebe’s life that setting it in Tokyo made sense because of the bar hostess culture there. Otherwise, Japan really wouldn’t have played any part in that novel.

Are you moving away from Japan, or will it always be something you write about?
There have been times when I’ve felt that I’ve said all I can say about Japan and need to move on, though it will always be a part of me. I’ve enjoyed writing about Japan and Japanese culture and I even had a Japan-themed short story published in the recent Tomo anthology published by Stone Bridge Press, but I do enjoy writing about topics other than Japan. Yet I am careful to “never say never” about most things.

That said, I think Japanese might enjoy His Wife and Daughters. They have plenty of sex scandals, the most recent one involving the political kingpin Ichiro Ozawa. But in that case, the wife has spoken out — and is trying to poison his career. What was the inspiration behind the book — do you like politics?
I don’t see His Wife and Daughters as a particularly political book. I was more attracted to the theme of exploring why some women stand by their men in these situations and withstand the humiliation, as well as the fascinating dynamics of a dysfunctional family affected by serial adultery and public scandal.

Crossing art forms…

And now I’ve just got to ask you about your musical career. Are you still pursuing music alongside all this writing?
I’ve been singing and playing music for longer than I’ve been writing. And music is what originally got me to Japan so it’s very important to me. But I don’t have as much time to devote to music right now. My husband and I occasionally play together at home for fun (he plays keyboards), but we haven’t done any gigs for several years. And I wish I had time to keep up with J-pop and enka and go to karaoke! I do manage to catch some music shows via the TV-Japan satellite service, but that’s about it.

Didn’t you and your husband collaborate on a theme song for your book Love in Translation?
Yes we did. That was our last major musical project.

Do you listen to music when you’re writing?
Not usually, but I often have Pandora playing quietly downstairs from my office (the cat likes it!) on a variety of eclectic stations: piano jazz, trip hop, ambient, etc.

Last but not least, I’d like to quiz you about your reading and writing habits:
Last truly great book you read: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Favorite literary genre: Books that are well written, fast paced and full of surprises.
Reading habits on a plane: I read on my iPad.
The one book you’d require the president to read: He’s so well read that I think he’s way ahead of me.
Favorite books as a child: I especially liked the Edward Eager Magic Series (Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Seven Day Magic, etc.) as well as The Borrowers series by Mary Norton and The Summer Birds by Penelope Farmer.
Favorite heroine: I always liked books about girls who had special magical powers or mysterious backgrounds.
The writer, dead or alive, you’d most like to meet: I’m constantly networking with fellow writers and have gotten the opportunity to meet with many that I admire, but I suppose it would be quite fascinating to talk with Joan Didion, a writer who definitely excels at both fiction and non-fiction.
Your reading habits: I’m a pretty fast reader. I sometimes take notes and I am mainly reading electronically now. I do find myself constantly analyzing the books I read for craft and structure so it’s sometimes hard to get lost in a good book like I used to be able to back in those Edward Eager days.
Your favorite of your own books: Always the latest one: His Wife and Daughters.
The book of yours you’d most like to see as a film: Any of them!!!
The book you plan to read next: The Expats, by Chris Pavone.

Say, would you do a review for The Displaced Nation on what you think of Chris Pavone’s book?
I’m happy to do a review, but I can’t promise any time soon. I’m in the midst of some very big projects right now. So if there’s not a firm deadline, then I can say yes. 🙂

(See what I mean about how you just can’t keep up with her?) Okay, one final question before I let you go. Since you’ve been so prolific of late, I wonder if you have any advice to impart to other writers who struggle to wrap up their books?
I wish I knew the secret! I’m struggling with my current book and don’t know when the heck I’ll finish it. Writing takes discipline and there’s no magic formula, I’m afraid. And some books come quicker than others.

* * *

Readers, any more questions for Wendy? Please put them in the comments. To reiterate, we are doing a giveaway of one of Wendy’s Kindle e-books to Displaced Dispatch subscribers and to ANYONE WHO COMMENTS! As I can assure you from my own experience, you WANT TO WIN one of these books — they are THE PERFECT SUMMER READS!!!

STAY TUNED for some more fiction tomorrow, with another episode in the life of our fictional expat heroine, Libby. (What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures.)

img: Wendy Nelson Tokunaga throwing her considerable energy into yet another round of karaoke…

California, Crosscultural marriage, Expat interviews, Expat novelists, Fiction Writers, Japan, Olympian feats, Repatriation, USA, What a Displaced World, Writers we love

LESSONS FROM TWO SMALL ISLANDS — 3) Keep calm and eat curry

Leave a comment Posted by ML Awanohara on July 18, 2012

Mid-July in Manhattan, and I’m thinking that New York deserves its reputation as The City That Never Sleeps. Not because we’re all out partying — far from it. We’re lying there tossing and turning because we can’t regulate our air-conditioning units.

“High” puts you in Siberia; “Low” sends you down into the Tropics. There are no in-betweens, except for the brief period just after you’ve gotten out of bed to adjust the setting. But by then you’re awake again…

It has always surprised me that New Yorkers are willing to put up with such primitive cooling methods. It’s not like them to suffer silently. My theory is that they simply don’t know any better. As the world begins and ends in New York (isn’t Times Square supposed to be the center of the universe?), this must be the best of all possible air conditioning systems.

Regardless. The point is that I am finding summer a terrible trial now that I’ve repatriated — one that at times requires Olympic strength and endurance.

As summer wears on, I wear out. Not only do I never sleep but I never eat — or eat only minimally. My appetite dwindles at the thought of passing yet another uncomfortable night at the mercy of Simon-Aire products.

All of that changed, however, a few nights ago. Actually, the night had started normally enough: I had gone to bed and was freezing cold so couldn’t sleep. But just as I was lying there thinking about getting up to turn the air con down or else searching the closet for another blanket, I had a sudden, heartwarming thought: “I could kill for a curry!”

How did I go from cursing Dr. Cool, whose workers had installed a supposedly upgraded Simon-Aire unit in the bedroom at considerable cost, to a happy craving for curry? I can only surmise that my subconscious mind was trying to restore my spirits by reminding me of my curry-eating days in the two small islands where I’d lived as an expat, England and Japan. I felt calm again, and my appetite returned…

America — a nation that has deprived itself of a serious curry experience

When I first moved to New York, I was beyond thrilled to discover that the Indian actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey lived here, too. To my utter surprise (and delight) — I had always assumed she lived in London — she has been residing in an apartment on the Upper East Side for the past several decades. (She also has a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley.)

Surprised in a good way, yes — but also somewhat mystified. Why would Jaffrey choose to live in America for so long, given the sorry state of Indian cuisine in this part of the world?

I guess it has to do with husbands — she came to the city with her first husband, the Indian actor, Saeed Jaffrey, and then after their divorce, married an American.

Or perhaps she just likes a challenge? In Jaffrey’s very first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, written not long after her arrival on American soil, she says she is writing the book because

there is no place in New York or anywhere in America where top-quality Indian food could be found, except, of course, in private Indian homes.

That was nearly forty years ago, and I have to say, her efforts to improve the situation, beginning with that book, have yet to pay off. Manhattan now has a couple of Indian restaurant neighborhoods, and then there’s Jackson Heights in Queens — but in general curry hasn’t caught on in a big way with Americans. If we want to eat spicy food, we usually turn to Mexican or Thai, not Indian.

As Jaffrey herself put it in an interview with an American reporter last year:

America as a whole has not embraced Indian food like they have with Chinese, or with sushi. It’s beginning to change, but only in big cities. Something is needed, something real. I have waited for this revolution, but it hasn’t happened yet.

This is in stark contrast to England and Japan — both of which embraced the curry cause on first exposure and now behave as though they’d invented certain dishes. Indeed, chicken tikka is considered to be a national dish in the UK, while “curry rice” (pronounced karē raisu) rapidly achieved the status of a national dish in Japan.

Nostalgia: Going out for a curry in England

England, my England — where Madhur Jaffrey is a household name, and curry houses abound!

Britain got the hots for curry during the 19th century, when there was an enthusiasm for all things Indian. And I got the hots for the Brits’ late-20th-century version of curry when living in an English town as an expat. My friends and I would spice up our evenings by going out for curries. We always ordered a biriani, chicken tikka masala, and a couple of vegetable dishes (one was usually sag paneer, which remains a favorite to this day).

Our starters would be onion bhaji and papadums, and drinks would be pints of lager. If we had the space for dessert, it was usually chocolate ice cream — none of us ever acquired the taste for Indian desserts (dessert of course being an area where the British excel!).

But even more special were the times when friends invited me to their homes for meals they’d concocted using Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes. One memory that stands out for me is an occasion when my former husband, a Brit, and I joined four other couples for a friend’s 40th birthday party. The hostess, the birthday-boy’s wife, presented a dazzling array of Madhur Jaffrey dishes that looked like something out of a food magazine. I’ve been to much ritzier birthday parties before and since, but none have struck me as being as elegant as this one — partly because of the splendid display and partly because by then I knew how much chopping and dicing of garlic, ginger and onion, how much grinding of spices must have been involved. What a labor of love!

Yes, by then I’d begun experimenting with Indian cookery myself thanks to the influence of a very good friend, who’d given me the classic Madhur Jaffrey work, Indian Cookery (which had been a BBC series), along with all the spices I would need for making the recipes: nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamon, mustard seeds, coriander, cumin turmeric, cloves… To this day, I always keep an array of Indian spices in my pantry so that I can make my own garam masala at the drop of a hat. Now if only I could find some friends who would drop their hats! (Hey, I even have the old coffee grinder ready for grinding the spices, just as Jaffrey instructs.)

Nostalgia: Curry rice & curry lunches in Japan

Eventually, I moved away from England to another small island, Japan — where I was relieved to discover I would not need to give up my new-found passion for Indian food (though I would be foregoing my beloved basmati rice unless I smuggled it in at customs).

Thankfully, the Brits had gotten there about a hundred years before me and had introduced curry to the Japanese, with great success.

Because of “r” being pronounced like an “l” in the Japanese language, we foreigners couldn’t resist making many tasteless jokes about eating curried lice, but that didn’t stop us from having our fill of the tasty national dish, curry rice.

As in the UK, I found it a nice contrast to the traditional fare, which, though healthy, can be rather bland.

At this point, I’d like to loop back to Madhur Jaffrey and note that she disapproves of the word “curry” being used to describe India’s great cuisine — says it’s as degrading as the term “chop suey” was to Chinese cuisine. But I wonder if she might make an exception to the Japanese usage? Apparently, Indians themselves when speaking in English use “curry” to to distinguish stew-like dishes. And Japanese curry rice is the richest of stews, made from a “roux” that can be bought in a box if you do it yourself.

My first box of curry roux was a gift from a Japanese friend. It was accompanied by her recipe for enriching the stew with fresh shrimp and scallops. Oishii!

Still, the curry I crave most often from Japan isn’t curry rice at all, which I find on the heavy side. No, my deepest nostalgia is reserved for the set lunches in Tokyo’s Indian restaurants, which I used to partake in with office colleagues.

The (mostly Indian) chefs have tweaked the ingredients to appeal to the Japanese palate: little dishes of curry that are artistically arranged on a platter, accompanied by naan. freshly baked (fresh is very important to the Japanese) and a side of Japanese pickles: pickled onions, or rakkyōzuke (a tiny, whole, sweet onion); and pickled vegetables, or fukujinzuke.

(The addition of Japanese pickles, by the way, is genius! Try it — you’ll love it!)

All of this is capped by coffee or masala tea, both of which are so well executed they can fill in as desserts.

My takeaways (I wish!)

I fear there may not be many takeaways for my fellow Americans from Lesson #3. After all, the world’s leading authority on Indian cuisine has tried to convert us and failed.

Nevertheless I’ll suggest a few scenarios, with pointers on how you might attempt to introduce a curry-eating tradition into your circle:

1 — Summer is getting to you, so you suggest to a group of friends that you all go out for a curry. When they stare at you blankly, do a little head bobble, smile charmingly and say: “Why ever not?”

2 — Summer is getting to you, and you decide to build a shrine to Madhur Jaffrey in your home by buying as many of her books as you can — including her children’s book on the Indian elephant, Robi Dobi, and her memoir of her childhood, Climbing Mango Trees. You arrange them around a screen that is playing Shakespeare Wallah, a film she appeared in in the 1960s (directed by James Ivory and starring Felicity Kendal). Invite some friends over and when they ask you about the shrine, start talking about the joys of Indian cookery and see if you can make some converts. Perhaps offer to lend out a book or two. (I might start with her newest work, which emphasizes “quick and easy” methods — bless the 78-year-old Jaffrey, she’s indefatigable!) And you can always dip into the books yourself if the heat is making you sleepless. Jaffrey writes beautifully.

3 — Summer is getting to you, but you decide that when the heat breaks, you will start up a Curry Club with a few of your friends, encouraging everyone to contribute one Madhur Jaffrey dish or a Japanese curry made from roux. Even if most of them drop out and you end up cooking a dish for yourself, perhaps this exercise will satisfy your craving until winter. (I find I get these cravings roughly every six months, usually in summer and winter.)

* * *

Well, I’m off to see if I can resume my sweetly fragrant dreams of my expat culinary adventures — just hope it does the trick of distracting me from my ancient “aircon” (popular Japanese contraction) units!

In the meantime, let me know what you think of this lesson. Are you a curry lover? And if so, could you live in a nation that doesn’t share your craving? How would you put some spice into your life under such sorry circumstances? Do tell!

STAY TUNED for Thursday’s post, another in our “Expat Moments” series, by Anthony Windram.

Image: MorgueFile

Acquired tastes, India, It's Food!, Japan, London, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Moveable feasts, New York, Olympian feats, Repatriation, UK, USA, Writers we love

For former expat Matt Krause, a second act as a heathen pilgrim

7 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on July 16, 2012

For some of us, starting a new life overseas is challenge enough. But for others, it represents an opportunity to take things to the next level. It’s fair to say that Matt Krause falls into the latter category. Returning to California after following a Turkish woman back to her native land, he used the material for his first book. And now he’s preparing to set out on a 1,300-mile solo walk across Turkey — a country he still regards as his second home. I caught up with Matt recently to ask about this latest, much more athletic challenge.

Hi again, Matt. Welcome back to The Displaced Nation. It seems like only yesterday that we were reviewing your expat memoir, A Tight Wide-open Space, and now we find you preparing for an epic travel adventure. Can you say a little more about it?
On Saturday, September 1, 2012, I will start an eight-month solo walk across Turkey, from the Aegean to Iran — 1,305 miles (2,100 km) in all. I will carry a backpack, a tent, and a sleeping bag.

Why are you doing this?
To put my life where my mouth is.

In 2003 I met a girl on an airplane to Hong Kong. We ended up going out, then moving together to her hometown of Istanbul and getting married there. We lived in Turkey for six years, but in 2009 things unraveled and I came back home to the US.

When I came back to the US, people kept asking me about the differences I had seen in Turkey. Political differences, religious differences, cultural differences, gender differences, just about every kind of difference you could think of.

But I really wanted to tell them about how people are so much the same. Living in Turkey had reminded me that most of what we are as human beings, and how we act in any given situation, is pretty much the same. Human nature being what it is, though, we can’t take our eyes off our differences, and I think that this focus makes us more afraid of each other than we need to be.

I don’t want to talk about this in theory. If these similarities are so profound, I should be able to walk, alone and unprotected, across the country I still think of as my second home.

Going to the dogs

What have you done to prepare for this odyssey?
I walked 1,200 miles (almost 2,000 km), 700 of them with a fully loaded backpack. That’s four hours a day, five days a week, for five months.

I walked the same four 12-mile routes about 25 times each — those were 1,200 very repetitive and boring miles.

However, I love dogs, and the dogs added some flavor to the walks. The first few times I walked those routes, the dogs all acted ferocious, but week by week they warmed up to me. The Labs were the first, of course — I only had to walk past them once or twice before they’d run out to me wagging their behinds like I was an old friend.

The last to go was one particular Doberman Pinscher. He spent about four months acting like he was going to rip my head off each time I passed by, and then one day when I walked by he was busy talking to another dog. He looked over at me like, “Are you serious, are you going to make me interrupt this perfectly good conversation in order to come chase you?” He broke down quickly after that, and now when I walk past his house he just playfully runs alongside me, glancing back at the house every few seconds to make sure nobody’s watching. He’s got a reputation to think about, after all.

How will you finance the trip?
I have savings, which I’ve supplemented by working in the peach and plum orchards near my hometown of Reedley, California. I was grafting, which is basically cutting off the top of an old tree and sticking a new kind of wood into it. The new wood takes over, and within a couple years the tree is producing a new variety of fruit.

I will also be raising some money on Kickstarter in a few weeks.

Will you be grafting any electronic devices onto yourself while you walk?
I’ll have a pocket camera and a cell phone connection so that I can post daily updates (people photos, landscape photos, short written updates, etc) on my Web site, Heathen Pilgrim. Most of the time, of course, I’ll be out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like I’ll be able to run into the nearest Starbucks and connect over wifi, so I had to figure some things out. I’ve been doing a lot of equipment testing.

An oxymoronic concept?

“Heathen Pilgrim” — that’s a curious name for a project.
I picked that name for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that a heathen is a person who does not share one’s religion. Christians see non-believers as pagan; Muslims see them as infidels; and as far as Jews are concerned, gentiles can never be members of God’s chosen people.

One thing we all have in common is that someone, somewhere considers us heathen. And if you want to travel outside of your own circle, you must be willing to be considered a heathen by someone else. If the people around you are not considering you heathen yet, you have not traveled far enough from home.

I also have a tongue-in-cheek reason. A secondary definition of “heathen” is “a rude or uncivilized person.” I’m a fairly polite and well-mannered person. So calling myself a heathen pilgrim is a bit of an attempt at self-deprecating humor.

Well, particularly when you juxtapose it with a word like “pilgrim,” since pilgrims are supposed to be on a journey to a holy place. Your itinerary is pretty ambitious. Do you identify at all with the athletes who are now preparing for the Olympics?
No, not at all. Those guys train all their lives. I’m just a guy who likes to eat donuts and walk — although I did have to turn a lot of things upside down in my life in order to do this.

On the subject of ways of looking at this project, there’s a relevant saying I like, that we are not entitled to the fruits of our labors, only to the labors themselves.

In this case, I have no control over the meanings people might assign to my walk. I only have a say in whether or not I do it.

A few last-minute jitters

What’s left by way of preparation for this unholy journey of yours?
Not much. At some point you’ve just got to take the leap of faith (no pun intended!), and that time has arrived for me. Right now I’m preparing for the Kickstarter campaign in a few weeks, and there are still a few things I still need to get, like a sleeping pad and a small whiteboard. But I’m as prepared as I’ll ever be without actually doing it. It’s time to go.

But what about psychological preparation? Are you nervous? Despite your affection for Turkey, do you worry about feeling out of your element, displaced in ways you’ve never been before?
You bet I’m nervous. I’ve never walked across a country before. I’ll be displaced and out of my element 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the entire trip.

What makes me most nervous is that I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping at night. I don’t want to stay in hotels, because then I’d just be doing the tourist thing. So I’ll be taking people up on their offers to pitch my tent in their front yard, or let me sleep on their living room floors, or even sleep on their roofs (many of the roofs in that part of the world are flat, and people use them like a front porch).

For a while, I was really worried about approaching all these strangers and asking for help. In fact, until a few months ago I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying about how that was going to pan out. But then I talked to a young woman who had backpacked through that part of the world many times. She said don’t worry about them, they’ll be fine with it. The worry is in you. Get over it quickly by knocking on a stranger’s door the very first night.

How to follow Matt’s progress

If people want to follow your progress, what should they do?
I’ve put out an open invitation to anyone who wants to come walk part of the route with me. So if you can, get yourself a backpack and a sleeping bag, and join me on the road somewhere.

However, if you can’t join me in person, follow the trip vicariously. There’s the aforementioned Heathen Pilgrim site, a weekly email newsletter, a Facebook page, and my Twitter account (@mattkrause). Use whichever of those you prefer — they’ll be showing pretty much the same content.

I assume you’ll also be getting some books out of this?
I’ll also be writing four books at the end of the trip: two books tentatively titled “Turkey on 12 Miles a Day” and “Walking Turkey”; and two photo essays, tentatively titled “Walk Turkey: The Landscape” and “Walk Turkey: The People.”

Those books will be available later on Amazon, but you can sign up for them early, and get some other trip-related goodies, by backing the trip on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter campaign isn’t live yet, but if you keep an eye on my cyber-coordinates, in early August you’ll hear about it when it starts.

Thanks, Matt. You may not think of yourself as an Olympic athlete, but I’m impressed by your determination and all the meticulous preparations. Readers, make sure you follow Matt’s journey in one of the ways he suggests and spread the word about his Kickstarter campaign. You can also support him by downloading his memoir on his expat life in Turkey — as Kate Allison said in her review, “For all that this is a love story, Matt pulls no punches in the telling of it.” He’s honest, as well as humble. Two great qualities for a pilgrim, even if he is a bit of a heathen! 🙂

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s Displaced Q on the Olympic Games and the sometimes awkward issues they raise for us displaced types about national loyalties, by Tony James Slater.

Asia, California, Europe, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Olympian feats, Turkey, USA, What a Displaced World, Writers we love

RANDOM NOMAD: Antrese Wood, American Expat in Argentina and Artist on an Epic Expedition

12 Comments Posted by ML Awanohara on July 11, 2012

Place of birth: Pomona Valley Hospital. I grew up in Claremont, California — in fact, my mother still lives in the house she brought me home to.
Passport: USA
Overseas history: Honduras (San Pedro Sula): 1986; Argentina (San Antonio de Arredondo + Villa Carlos Paz), 2010-11 + 2011 – present.
Occupation: Artist (painter).
Cyberspace coordinates: Antrese.com (art site + blog); @antresewood (Twitter handle); Antrese Wood Artist Page (Facebook); and Antrese Wood (Pinterest) — see “A Portrait of Argentina” board.

What made you leave your homeland in the first place?
A friend of mine in high school asked me to go with her to an American Field Service (AFS) meeting. I went because she didn’t want to go alone. I had no idea what it was, but after the meeting I thought, “Awesome! I’m in!!” I ended up going to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for six months. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish when I left. I memorized the three questions I thought I would get asked most: What is your name, where are you from & how old are you? Unfortunately, I got them mixed up. When someone asked “What is your name?,” with a huge smile I would answer: “I’m 15 years old!” By the time I left, my Spanish was pretty good.

I didn’t travel much until after college, and I didn’t practice my Spanish, so I lost most of it. After college, I got bit by the travel bug again. I would go anywhere if I had the chance. I worked in the video game department at Disney for years, and got to travel a lot with them — all over the US, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Paris, even to the South of France. On my own, I went to South Korea. I also lived in Alaska for a short while (not a foreign country but compared to the Los Angeles culture, it might as well be). At one point I decided I wanted to do a semester with NOLS (the National Outdoor Leadership School). I choose their semester in Patagonia, and thinking this was my last chance to see South America, I spent a few months exploring Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador.

Indirectly, that is how I met my husband. A friend was worried about my traveling alone, so she introduced me to her friend from Argentina (“even though she doesn’t live there, she can at least give you a few phone numbers just in case…”). Years later, my new Argentine friend introduced me to my future husband.

Which brings me to why I left Los Angeles to live in Argentina: I fell in love.

Wow — that’s some wanderlust! So is anyone else in your immediate family “displaced”?
No one else in my family is displaced. My mother and I both travel as much as possible, but my brothers and sisters are happy where they are.

Can you describe the moment in your Argentinian life when you felt the most displaced?
My husband and I first lived in a tiny town called San Antonio de Arredondo. It’s in el campo — literally, the countryside. But when you move from Los Angeles to a town of barely 5,000…you call it the boondocks. Some friends rented us their quincho (guest house) while they were out of the country. It was in a new neighborhood with few other houses and lots of empty lots. Green and beautiful, but no natural gas, no phone lines…and worst of all, no Internet!

I was used to 24-hour access to everything. The Internet, grocery stores, restaurants…everything. Another thing: San Antonio and Carlos Paz (where we currently live), both honor the siesta. Everything closes between 1:30 and 5:00 p.m.

It was quaint and beautiful at first, but I got tired of riding my bike to the next town to check my email. I’m completely dependent on the Internet. It was in those moments when I admittedly thought “Oh my god, what have I done!?” When we moved to Carlos Paz, the first question I had about the apartment was: “Does it have high-speed Internet?”

And does it?
YES IT DOES!!!….yay!

Now that you have Internet access and are feeling more at home, is there any particular moment that stands out as your least displaced?
As I contemplate this question, a series of images and moments flashes through my head: our house filled with friends for an impromptu dinner; the huge smile on my husband’s face when he cooks for a crowd (he loves it!); looking at the clock and being surprised that it’s already 4:00 a.m…. A big cultural difference is that you can call friends for a dinner, and within an hour or two, your house is filled with all your friends and all their kids. There is always room for just one more.

If I had to pick one event where I didn’t feel displaced, it would definitely be our wedding. It was the best of both worlds. Friends and family from the US, along with about 200 of our “closest” friends from Argentina, came to celebrate. We had a huge asado (barbecue), lots of wine, dancing until 6:30 a.m.

Sounds amazing. And now you may bring one curiosity you’ve collected from your adopted country into The Displaced Nation. What’s in your suitcase?
Really? only one!?

I’m tempted to pack some fernet, but I’ll bring my mate instead.

Drinking mate is a national pastime in Argentina. The mate is a hollowed out gourd that you fill with tea leaves called yerba. You add hot water and drink the tea from a bombilla (a kind of straw with a filter at the bottom). Typically, it’s shared with other people — one person serves the mate to the circle. Drinking mate plays an important social role; it’s the preferred excuse to get together and hang out. “Let’s have a mate” really means “Let’s hang out and chat for a while.” Most gas stations have a hot water dispenser at exactly the right temperature, and almost any restaurant will fill your thermos regardless of whether you eat there. They understand the importance.

There are various subtleties to preparing mate (sugar, no sugar, with mint, water temperature, etc.), and the opinions on how to properly prepare mate are strong and sometimes fiercely debated. When a person drinks mate alone for the first time, its like a right of passage into adulthood. When my husband came home and found me drinking mate by myself, he said: “AHA!! now you are an Argentine!!”

Let’s move on to food. You are invited to prepare one meal based on your travels for other members of The Displaced Nation. What’s on your menu? 
Now we’re talking! This one is pretty easy:

Appetizer: Empanadas — dough filled with just about anything and then baked or fried. They’re a staple here. A common filling is ground beef, olives, hard boiled egg, paprika, cumin and salt. My favorite is the árabes, which is ground beef “cooked” with lemon and aromatic spices.

Main: Definitely an asado: various cuts of Argentine beef, and lamb. The meat here is so good, people are surprised how much flavor it has. Typically the only condiment used is salt. (Argentina would be a difficult place for vegetarians!)

Dessert: We could have ice cream — call and have it delivered (yes, they do!!); but I think I’d prefer to introduce you to alfajores from Las delicias de Mamushka. An alfajor is like a cookie sandwich: two cookies made from cornmeal, filled with dulce de leche. I never liked them until I tried Mamushka’s. Now I’m addicted.

Wine & after-dinner drinks: A nice Malbec wine. I like Trapiche. A few hours later, after dessert and coffee, an ice-cold Fernet con Coka.

And now you may add a word or expression from the country you live in to The Displaced Nation argot. What will you loan us?
There are so many — again, hard to choose.

Che and “más vale!” are among my favorites.

Che is used all the time here, especially in the province of Córdoba. Depending on the context, it means “hey…” or “umm…” Sometimes, it seems to be used in the same way we Californians use the word “like.” Che Guevara is from this area. He is actually called Che because when he went to Cuba, he used the word so frequently, people just started calling him “Che.”

Más vale is equivalent to “Hell, yeah!!” — and also has a bit of “Let’s do this!!”

This summer we’ve been doing some posts with an Olympics theme. Are you planning to watch the Summer Olympics in London? If so, who will you be rooting for: Americans, Argentines, both, or neither?
I’ll be rooting for them both. In the event that the U.S. squares off against Argentina in a soccer match, I will be wearing a helmet and full body armor — and cheering for the US!

Are Agentines excited about the Games?
In general, Argentines are fanatical about sports. Especially soccer. Messi is a God. During the World Cup, It seemed like every man, woman and child in this country was wearing a blue-and-white striped #10 jersey. We went to a friend’s house to watch a game. Normally busy streets were completely deserted. The city had literally shut down. There was an eerie silence occasionally broken by simultaneous cheers erupting from the houses and (closed) shops. During national playoffs, you see grown men sobbing uncontrollably after their local team has lost. The first time I saw this, I was flipping channels on TV. As the camera switched from one sobbing man to another, I thought there had been a national disaster. So, yes, I think it’s safe to say that there will be plenty of excitement about the Games!

The Olympics gives me a segue way into your 8-month project to paint Argentina. That strikes me as being an Olympian feat. Can you say a little bit more about it?
Now that you mention it, it is an Olympian feat! The project is called “A Portrait of Argentina.” I will spend eight months visiting the country’s 23 provinces, traversing something like 15,600 miles, painting portraits of the people I meet. I’ll listen to their stories and then paint en plein-aire, the scenes from their daily life. I’m hoping to deliver a cultural portrait of my adopted home.

When did you first conceive of the project?
The idea came out of a period of misery after I left Los Angeles to live in Argentina. The first year I lived here, I saw everything from a touristic point of view. It was quaint, beautiful and…a little quirky. But the second year was more difficult. It was no longer cute and quirky; the honeymoon was over. I made unfair comparisons and was judging everything. My normally optimistic and upbeat attitude shifted to “This sucks.”

I had two obvious choices: go back to California — or change my outlook, appreciate all that is good, and stay. My husband (fiancé at the time) left it up to me (no pressure, eh?). We could pack everything up and head back to Los Angeles, or I could give Argentina another try.

I realized that much of my misery was self imposed. It came from the fact that I had not integrated and was spending the majority of my time alone, working out of the house. You can’t love anything until you take the time to develop a relationship with, and really get to know, it. Here I was, on an adventure of living in another country, and I wasn’t even willing to give it the time of day. What a wasted opportunity!

As I integrated myself more and became determined to learn as much as I could about Argentina, I started taking classes at the university and began developing this idea about painting my way across the country. Painting has always been my way of making sense out of the world. It forces me to pause and really look at my subject.

Is the project having the effect that you’d hoped — is it improving your attitude?
Just by researching the project, looking for “known” and “unknown” people and places, I have a new-found appreciation for this country. I’m realizing how easy it would be to say I know Argentina because I’ve lived here for two years. The fact is, I know a lot about one region in one province of a very large country, and a little bit about a dozen other places. A native New Yorker and a native Alaskan may live in the same country, but they are culturally worlds apart. The same can be said for a Porteño (a person from Buenos Aires) and a person from La Quiaca near the Bolivian border. Same country, worlds apart.

I’m also overjoyed that so many people here seem excited about my project. Obviously, I’m super excited about it (it’s my baby, after all), but when I share my vision with Argentines and their response is equally enthusiastic, it’s just amazing.

I’ve barely started, and already my outlook has changed. I’m owning the project in a way I didn’t at the start.

What do you hope the project will ultimately accomplish?
“A Portrait of Argentina” is both a personal and a professional journey. I expect to be surprised, challenged, and profoundly affected by it. I’ll be seeking out people from diverse backgrounds, looking to honor those who have dedicated their lives to their passion and whose work positively impacts others: scientists, athletes, artists, musicians, teachers, even the abuelita (little old lady) on the street corner. It’s a collaborative project, and I hope to involve as many people as possible. Luckily, the people I’m meeting are quick to offer help and introduce me to others who might want to participate.

Do you ever feel daunted by the scale of the project?
Argentina is a huge country so I’ve set myself a very ambitious goal to cover this much ground in just eight months. When I break it down into small chunks, it feels manageable. When I think about its entirety, it’s overwhelming.

Finance was another daunting prospect. When I first thought about the funds it would take to get me to and from so many places, it seemed completely insane and impossible. I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign with a $25k goal. Kickstarter is all or nothing, so if I didn’t hit the goal, my five-week campaign would end with $0.

There were days when I did let the campaign get to me and was sure it would fail. To keep going, I would sometimes just think, okay, how can I raise just $100?

In addition to a herculean effort by family and friends, I was fortunate to have some key influencers get excited about the project and promote it. In the end, with just 17 hours to spare, I made my goal!

I’m sure I will have some of these same feelings on the road, but I’ve developed a number of tactics to deal with it. I don’t give up easily. Besides, there are too many people supporting me and cheering me on. I know it will be hard, but am I ready for it? Más vale!!

Readers — yay or nay for letting Antrese Wood into The Displaced Nation once she’s finished her travels for her project? Tell us your reasons. (Note: It’s fine to vote “nay” as long as you couch your reasoning in terms we all — including Antrese — find amusing!)

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s episode in Libby’s Life, our fictional expat series set in small town New England. (What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures and/or check out “Who’s Who in Libby’s Life.”)

img: Antrese Wood displaying her intrepid travel skills on the Machu Picchu trail in Peru. Her comment: “I thought the Follow the Arrow sign was hilarious because 1) the trail is so well marked I cant imagine anyone getting lost; and 2) this was the one and only sign on the trail and it was near the end of the four-day hike. The other hilarious thing about the photo, at least to me, is that if you look closely, you can see my knee is bleeding. I had just spent 80 days carrying a backpack two-three times as heavy in seriously remote back country, no trails, no markers, nothing. We had to sign a waiver acknowledging the understanding that if something should happen, it could take a helicopter up to a week to arrive. I made it through without a scratch. Here, on this comparative cake-walk, on a perfectly even trail, I fell for no apparent reason and totally skinned up my knee.”

Argentina, Artists, Crosscultural marriage, Expat artists, Expat interviews, Moveable feasts, North America, Olympian feats, Random Nomads, South America, USA

5 reasons why American aviatrix Amelia Earhart could be an expat heroine

Leave a comment Posted by ML Awanohara on July 3, 2012

The American aviatrix Amelia Earhart has been propelling her way into the news headlines this week. Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of her Lockheed Electra disappearing over the Pacific Ocean.

And today marked the beginning of an expedition, led by an American nonprofit group, to locate the wreckage from her plane. The group plans to scan the depths of the Pacific Ocean near a remote island where they believe Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, died as castaways.

With America’s most famous aviatrix back on our horizons, it seems a timely moment to nominate her for our Displaced Hall of Fame, where we put all of our expat heroes and heroines.

What, was she an expat, too? I can hear you asking. In fact, she was an expat briefly — during World War I, when she went to visit her sister in Toronto and ended up staying on as a nurse’s aide in a military hospital.

But I’ll admit that Earhart seems more of a domestic heroine — as American as apple pie, you might say. Born in Atchison, Kansas, in America’s heartland, Amelia grew up tall and willowy like the corn in the fields. As the Reigning Queen of the Air, she became the nation’s sweetheart and to this day retains a special place in the hearts of young American women.

What’s more, recruiting her to serve as a heroine for global nomads, many of whom have hybrid nationalities, might not fly with my fellow Americans. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has endorsed the expedition to hunt for Earhart’s plane, saying that Earhart embodies the “spirit of America coming of age and increasingly confident, ready to lead in a quite uncertain and dangerous world…”

But in reviewing the main facts of Earhart’s life, I have found plenty of aspects that show how “displaced” she actually was — “displaced” in the sense of being “removed from the usual or proper place” (see definition on our About page) — and hence belongs in our orbit. Here are five of my top reasons:

1) She was born with wings.

Veteran expats and long-term travelers cannot afford to have fear, or dislike of, flying. Should we incline at all in this direction, it may help to lie back in your airplane seat (or pretend you have a seat where it’s possible to lie back) and think of Earhart, who took to the skies without hesitation, as though the airplane wings were her own. Legend has it that she first caught the aviation bug while an expat in Canada. She went to see an exhibition of stunt flying at a fair in Toronto and later wrote about the sensation she’d felt as a pilot began diving at her and her friend:

I remember the mingled fear and pleasure which surged over me as I watched that small plane at the top of its earthward swoop. I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.

From then on, it was all she could do to keep her feet on the earth. Of her first airplane flight she said: “As soon as we left the ground, I knew I had to fly.” In 1921 she took her first flying lesson, and soon saved enough money to buy a second-hand plane.

Of course it helped that in the early days, flying was a romantic sport for the lucky few, not a form of transport where everyone from pilot to passenger feels as though they’re herding or being treated like cattle. Earhart named her first plane “Canary” because of its bright yellow color. Perhaps she felt like a canary when setting her first women’s record: rising to an altitude of 14,000 feet.

By the time she became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo (Charles Lindbergh was first to do so), she had her own little red airplane — a cherry-colored Lockheed Vega, reputed to be the world’s fastest aircraft and therefore favored by pioneering aviators. Hmmm… Did it make her feel like a cardinal?

2) Always restless with the status quo, she let it drive her adventures.

What’s the litmus test for being a travel or expat type? A person who is always upping the ante. We’re a gang of permanent malcontents!

No sooner had Earhart become the first woman to cross the Atlantic (as a passenger) — a flight that made headlines because three women had died within the same year in trying to achieve it — but she sought to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (1932) and the first person to fly solo across the Pacific, from Honolulu to Oakland (1935), among other achievements.

At that point, there was nothing for it but to make a bid to become the first person to fly around the world (1937).

One wonders what Earhart might have done next, had she not gone down in her plane on the very last leg of the journey. Perhaps she would she have concluded that she’d peaked out too early? (No doubt many of you serial expats and repats can relate…)

3) She had no qualms whatsoever about the risks involved in an adventuresome life.

In the lore surrounding Earhart, great emphasis is placed on her early feminism. Much of it is said to be due to her mother, who had very little interest in bringing up Amelia and her younger sister as “nice little girls” — she even allowed them to wear bloomers!

Clad in this comfortable attire (Amelia would later design a clothing line for women who wanted comfort), the Earhart sisters climbed trees, hunted rats with a rifle, and “belly-slammed” their sleds downhill.

The young Amelia also kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male fields, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management, and mechanical engineering.

Although she did marry eventually — to the publisher George Putnam — she always referred to the marriage as a “partnership” with “dual control,” and did not change her last name.

When she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Earhart said it proved that men and women were equal in “jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness and willpower.”

(No doubt she would be knocked out to learn that women’s boxing will be included in the London 2012 Olympics for the very first time.)

But to me, what’s even more impressive about Earhart’s life is that she knew about the risks involved in her chosen occupation — but decided not to let them hold her back. That same kind of risk-taking is at the heart of the overseas travel enterprise, which goes against the grain of most people’s common sense. (“You want to go THERE? And FOR HOW LONG?” Expats and global nomads know the drill of fielding constant questions and doubts from the people back home.)

When Earhart set out on her second attempt to circumnavigate the world (the first had ended in a crash when a tire blew out on take-off), she wrote to her husband: “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards.” And then she went ahead and packed a jar of freckle cream. (I say that because a jar of freckle cream was found on the Pacific Island that’s now being searched.)

4) She was never more in her element than when out of her element (quite literally).

There is something that draws all of us to the displaced life. Since it’s a life of challenges, I have to assume that for most of us, it’s that feeling of being a pioneer, of going the way no one else in our circles has gone before…

In Earhart’s case, the displacement was quite literal: she loved being in the empty sky and facing the unknown. In that sense she was like a character out of Greek myth — a female Icarus. As she once said of an early flight:

The stars seemed near enough to touch and never before have I seen so many. I always believed the lure of flying is the lure of beauty…

Jane Mendelsohn was inspired to write her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, after reading that a piece of what may have been Earhart’s plane had been recovered on an atoll in the Pacific. Imagining the life that Earhart and Noonan might have led as castaways, Mendelsohn shows Earhart coming into her own in the desert-island setting, and finding peace of mind.

Random House editor Kristin Fritz commends Mendelsohn for creating a whole new iteration of Earhart as

a woman who had perhaps “taken this journey in order to escape the madness of the world,” a woman who “didn’t give a damn if she was alone” and finally a woman who would “live the rest of her long and brilliant life on this wild and desolate island.”

Now that’s displaced! And if Fritz is right and Medelsohn captured the essence of Earhart in her novel, then we should not feel too bad that she perished on an island out in the middle of nowhere. That’s how she would have wanted it…

5) Last but not least, she appears to have known the value of chocolate.

Here we come to the true test of an expat or international traveler: do they like chocolate? Are they addicted to that sudden charge of energy, the little lift, one gets from the sugar and the caffeine? Most seasoned expats and international travelers know that we could never have prevailed during the inevitable moments of loneliness and displacement the life entails without a chocolate supply of some sort.

When Earhart embarked on her 2,408-mile solo flight across the Pacific in 1935, she packed a thermos of hot chocolate in case she felt chilled. As she later observed:

Indeed, that was the most interesting cup of chocolate I have ever had sitting up eight thousand feet over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, quite alone.

* * *

Now that we’re touching down, I feel the need to quote from Mendelsohn’s recent op-ed for the New York Times:

We still wonder what happened to Amelia Earhart — perhaps soon we may even find out — but do we know what to do with her? Do we know how to make not just her mysterious disappearance but also her miraculous life relevant and inspiring to our global society? And could she matter across the globe, that ball around which she tried to fly that feels so much smaller today but is in fact exactly the same size as it was then?

For me there’s an easy answer to all three of Mendelsohn’s questions: YESSSSSSS!!! It’s time Amelia Earhart went global, and not just literally…don’t you agree?

STAY TUNED for Wednesday’s post, another in our Expat Moments series by Anthony Windram — and yes, it does have to do with the 4th of July!

Pot Luck Asia, Canada, Displaced Hall of Fame, Europe, Gothic tales, Moveable feasts, North America, Olympian feats, Pot Luck, Repatriation, USA, Writers we love

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No core, no cry

But that was then…

England would not be England without…

Japan would not be Japan without…

America would not be America without…

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Crossing publishing platforms…

Crossing genres…

Crossing cultures…

Crossing art forms…

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America — a nation that has deprived itself of a serious curry experience

Nostalgia: Going out for a curry in England

Nostalgia: Curry rice & curry lunches in Japan

My takeaways (I wish!)

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Going to the dogs

An oxymoronic concept?

A few last-minute jitters

How to follow Matt’s progress

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1) She was born with wings.

2) Always restless with the status quo, she let it drive her adventures.

3) She had no qualms whatsoever about the risks involved in an adventuresome life.

4) She was never more in her element than when out of her element (quite literally).

5) Last but not least, she appears to have known the value of chocolate.

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