The Displaced Nation

A home for international creatives

Tag Archives: New York

Mobile in America

5 Comments Posted by on April 11, 2011

Today we welcome Mandy Rogers to The Displaced Nation as a guest blogger. She wrote this post in response to Kate Allison’s “The Domestic Expat.”

I don’t always understand what people are saying. I’m temperamentally unsuited to the noise and lack of personal space. I don’t think I’ll ever completely fit in. What am I?

A Mississippian in Manhattan!

My husband, Kary, and I moved to New York City two-and-a-half years ago, when we were in our early thirties. Until then, we had spent our entire lives in Mississippi. We loved it and had a great community of friends, whom we still miss.

Making the move

What possessed us to pick up stakes and try out life somewhere else?

Kary and I met in the marching band at Mississippi State. I played the flute and he the trumpet. We both landed jobs at the university immediately upon graduation. But there was something in each of us, a kind of restlessness. We knew we couldn’t be content with staying in Starkville forever. Was it a passion for travel or a fear of growing too complacent? Perhaps a bit of both…

There was also a practical reason for making the move. I’d gone back to school in my late twenties to do a masters in landscape architecture. I discovered I really enjoyed doing projects involving public spaces, such as parks, gardens, and streetscapes. Public green space isn’t a priority in Mississippi, where most people have their own land.

During my graduate studies, I’d taken a road trip with Kary and my sister to New York City, visiting Central Park, Paley Park, and Bryant Park. The amount of green space was a surprise to me. It’s something my mother, another garden lover, noticed during her first visit to the city, too.

In the end, it all happened rather quickly. Kary was offered the first job in New York he applied for. He actually got it via Twitter!

We packed up our belongings in a rental car — our cocker spaniel, Callie, in her seat belt harness and our three cats in their carriers — and traveled over three days to our new home in the Big Apple, staying in pet-friendly hotels along the way. (We’d flown out to find an apartment just beforehand, signing a lease for one in Brooklyn, which several of our friends had recommended as a great place to live.)

When we first moved, I didn’t have a job so spent the time exploring gardens and parks in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. Even now that I’m working for a landscape architecture firm in Manhattan, I escape to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden whenever I can to see what’s in bloom. My dad gave me a membership there just before he died. We had a complicated relationship so it’s a nice reminder of him and our common love of gardens.

The adjustment process

People still ask me: where are you from? They usually guess North Carolina or Georgia; no one has guessed Mississippi yet.

I’m still picking up new vocabulary and pronunciations. “House-ton” instead of “Hue-ston” Street; standing “on line” at the grocery store (in the South we say “in line”).

And I continue to be amazed that the number of people living in Brooklyn equals the entire population of Mississippi (2.5 million). No wonder one of our most difficult adjustments has been to the noise and (by our standards) overcrowding.

Still, there are lots of things we love in this part of the world, beginning with the climate. Thunder and tornadoes are much less frequent here. And believe it or not, even after this rough winter, we still can’t get enough of snow.

We’ve adjusted very quickly to living without a car. You can see and experience so much more on foot than behind the wheel. That said, I usually did most of my singing in the car, and I miss that! (I don’t sing around my apartment too much, as the neighbors could hear me.)

And, although the South is renowned for its hospitality, I am often surprised by how much nicer, friendlier, and helpful New Yorkers are than they are given credit for being.

Moving right along…

Despite these many “likes,” I don’t think we’ll ever be true New Yorkers. To this day, I always relish running into other Southerners. The past two years, Kary and I have attended the annual picnic held in Central Park for folks from Mississippi. There’s always a blues band and plenty of fried catfish, sweet tea, and other Southern delicacies.

Not all Mississippians have exactly the same values, but each of us knows what it was like growing up in that neck of the woods, and it gives us a powerful bond.

During the year, Kary and I congregate with fellow Mississippi State alumni at a local bar to watch our alma mater compete in football or basketball. We’ve made some new acquaintances that way, such as a native New Yorker who went to MSU in the 1970s to run track.

Like most expats, Kary and I debate about the right moment to move on and where to go next. Will we try the West Coast, or consider moving back south? Every time I visit Mississippi these days — I’ve been back three times since we left — I realize how much I’ve missed its hospitality, beautiful forests, and tranquility. Plus it’s been nice catching up with family and friends over hearty Southern meals.

Still, the hot, humid summer would take some getting used to again. And now that we’ve been bitten by the travel bug, we’re contemplating our wish list again. We visited San Francisco last year and liked what we saw.

Being mobile in America — it’s a trip, in more ways than one. Tell me, why do so many Americans seek adventure overseas when it’s perfectly possible to be an expat here?

Question: Can being an “expat” within your own borders be just as enriching as becoming one by crossing borders?

Mandy doesn’t have a blog but you can follow her on Twitter: @mandyluvsplants

img: Mandy (right) and a friend she ran into at a Central Park picnic for Mississippians in New York. Mandy’s comment: “My friend still lives in Mississippi but was here with her daughter, who was attending the picnic as part of her duties as Mississippi’s Miss Hospitality. My mom says I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I know — I guess she’s right!”

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The domestic expat

2 Comments Posted by on April 4, 2011

A photograph on a Minnesota news website showing a street in Brooklyn, NY, has the caption:

A long line of Minnesota expats wait to enter the “Minnesota State Fair Affair.”

Meanwhile, on a classified ads website, someone from Wales is looking for other Welsh expats to meet in a pub – in Winchester, England.

While convention and Wikipedia define an expatriate as:

any person living in a different country from where he or she is a citizen

it seems that this definition is being gradually challenged, as shown by these two examples. You no longer need to cross borders to be an expat. You can be a domestic expat. A fish out of water in your own country.

Leaving aside the touchy debate of whether Wales and England are separate countries – for the purposes of passport control and this article, they both come under the umbrella of the United Kingdom – this challenge, upon consideration, is perfectly reasonable.

An intrinsic part of expat life is culture shock, which is, says the University of Northern Iowa College of Business Administration,

the trauma you experience when you move into a culture different from your home culture.

It has several stages:

Excitement/fascination – ignoring small problems; a sense of being on extended vacation;

Crisis period – when difficulties arise, the new country turns out to have feet of clay, and you realize you can’t go home;

Adjustment – a change from negative attitude to positive; rediscovery of sense of humor;

Acceptance/adaptation – a sense of belonging in, and adapting to the new culture;

Re-entry shock – upon return to the original country, when the whole process starts again.

In her 2002 article, What To Expect When You Relocate, Achievement Coach Nancy Morris says:

Surprisingly to many, culture shock can show up even when relocating from one region to another within our own country – we assume ‘culture shock’ only occurs when moving to a completely different country.

If you’ve ever moved from London to Newcastle, or from New York to Alabama, or from Toulouse to Paris, you’ll know she’s right. All the symptoms above can be yours, and you don’t need the inconvenience of an international flight to get them. A domestic flight will do it – or, in the case of our Welsh example, a short trip along the M4.

Nancy Morris goes on to say that

moving to a new cultural environment can turn from culture shock to “self-shock”.

During most of life’s transitions – changing jobs, divorce, bereavement – we have a tendency to question ourselves, and who we are. Surrounded by familiar family, friends, environment, we are usually able to make sense of this question and find an answer, even as we struggle to accept the change in our lives. When the change is cultural, however, acceptance is more difficult. As Morris puts it:

At home we have a mirror which helps to validate and re-affirm us. Within a new environment, the mirror no longer exists. So, at a time when you are seeking the answer to the “who am I” question, your surroundings are asking “who are you?”

Surrounding yourself with culturally familiar people – those with the same accent as you, those who feel as displaced as you; in other words, expat communities – is just one way of putting that mirror back in its place.

And it doesn’t matter you’re an Englishman in New York, or a Welshman in Winchester.

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Displaced by choice, architect comes to aid of compatriots displaced by fate

Leave a comment Posted by on March 31, 2011

The word “displaced” connotes being forcibly removed from one’s home or homeland. Fleeing from war or natural disaster, displaced people have little in common with the expats we encounter at the Displaced Nation, most of whom have voluntarily chosen a life of displacement and adventure.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban belongs in the tradition of Japanese fashion designers and other creative people who have chosen to live outside their native land, gravitating to artistic enclaves in Paris or Manhattan.

But if Ban is displaced by choice, he does not hesitate to help his countrymen who’ve been displaced by fate. When an earthquake struck Kobe in 1995, Ban was there, building emergency housing for survivors with beer-crate foundations and walls made of recycled cardboard paper tubes. (The paper tube is a Ban speciality. He got the idea of using paper tubes after observing the solidity of rolls of fax paper and experimenting with the idea for several years.)

And now Ban is in Japan again, lending a helping hand to those made homeless by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. He is building simple partitions to place between families who have been evacuated to gymnasiums and other large-roof facilities. He hopes that by enjoying more privacy, they will experience greater peace of mind.

Ban prides himself on the ability to work quickly and well when the exigency of circumstances demands it. Asked in a March 24 New York Times interview to comment on why in the wake of disaster, innovative ideas designers present for shelters never get built, he said:

We don’t need innovative ideas. We just need to build normal things that can be made easily and quickly. A house is a house.

And if you’re lucky enough to land in one of Ban’s shelters, it’s a house that brings you one step closer to having a home again.

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CONTEMPORARY DISPLACED WRITING: Fury — Salman Rushdie

Leave a comment Posted by on March 30, 2011

Continuing with our look at writing concerned with expat experiences, when I first moved to the US, spending my time in New York and Philadelphia, I found myself often thinking about the following extract from Salman Rushdie‘s novel, Fury.

There’s just something about this piece that sits absolutely right with me. It conveys so well the Gulliver-esque excitement and fear that I felt when first having to navigate New York; and how, when listening to the locals talking, their inflections and pronunciations sounded to my ears so utterly confusing, and thrilling, and also…oddly bovine.

When he left the apartment nowadays he felt like an ancient sleeper, rising. Outside, in America, everything was too bright, too loud, too strange. The city had come out in a rash of painfully punning cows. At Lincoln Center Solanka ran into Moozart and Moodama Butterfly. Outside the Beacon Theatre a trio of horned and uddered divas had taken up residence: Whitney Mooston, Mooriah Carey and Bette Midler (the Bovine Miss M). Bewildered by this infestation of paronomasticating livestock, Professor Solanka suddenly felt like a visitor from Lilliput-Blefuscu or the moon, or to be straightforward, London. He was alienated, too, by the postage stamps, by the monthly, rather than quarterly, payment of gas, electricity and telephone bills, by the unknown brands of candy in the stores (Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ring Pops), by the words “candy” and “stores”, by the armed policemen on the streets, by the anonymous faces in magazines, faces that all Americans somehow recognized at once, by the indecipherable words of popular songs which American ears could make out without strain, by the end-loaded pronunciation of names like Farrar, Harrell, Candell, by the broadly spoken e’s that turned expression into axpression, I’ll get to the check into I’ll gat that chack; by, in short, the sheer immensity of his ignorance of the engulfing melee of ordinary American life….

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Bye for now, world!

7 Comments Posted by on March 17, 2011

Detail of Chinese Ship by Fra Mauro, public domainAND A WARM HELLO to all international travelers, be they backpackers, globetrotters, expats, rexpats, repats, or armchair dreamers. We have created a country for those of you who have traveled for so long and crossed so many cultures that you don’t seem to belong anywhere else.

The best way to gain entry is to subscribe to our posts!

Perhaps you are a little anxious as we aren’t in the guidebooks. Let us reassure you. While not a storybook paradise, the Displaced Nation is beguilingly otherwordly and exotic, full of twisting vines, golden cobwebs, and silky-haired monkeys. It is the kind of place that entices you to stay because of all the wonders and sources of inspiration you find within.

But before we get carried away with the pleasantness of it all, a few ground rules. While we haven’t got a constitution or a bill of rights, we expect our citizens to behave with the sort of decorum that has earned them a place in other people’s cultures for so long.

Also, please don’t be affronted if you find some of our instincts counterintuitive. For instance, we are great believers in navigating the new world with old maps. Our generation may have big dreams, but let’s face it, many of our forbears were great adventurers, too. Are we any less clueless than they were? A dose of humility is in order.

Cheers,

The Displaced Nation Team

image: Detail of map made around 1450 by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro, courtesy Wikimedia

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