Born in: Indonesia Passport(s): Indonesian and British Permanent Resident Countries lived in: Australia (Sydney): 1999-2001; Scotland (Aberdeen): 2007-2009; Western Australia (Perth): 2009-2013 Cyberspace coordinates:Finally Woken (blog)
What made you leave your homeland in the first place?
I left in 2000 to study for a master’s degree in Sydney. I left again in 2007 because my then fiance (now husband) got a job in the UK. Philosophically, I have never really felt at “home” in my own home country of Indonesia. Lots of its values don’t match with mine. From the time I was a child, I felt like an alien and longed to go away.
Is anyone else in your immediate family a “displaced” person?
No. My brother doesn’t like to travel and still lives at home with my parents. But three of my father’s sisters are married to Germans: two still in Germany and one in Indonesia. And I have four cousins living in the Netherlands and Germany.
Describe the moment when you felt the most displaced over the course of your various travels.
It was in Sydney. I was working as a casual staff at an ice cream shop while doing my postgraduate study. It was winter, around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. I had just closed the shop and was waiting for the bus. It was rainy and cold, and then all of a sudden, there was a hailstorm. I almost cried, I felt so sorry for myself. I was thinking about how if I’d stayed put in Indonesia, I could have been working for a big company and earning a nice salary by then, living with maids and a chauffeur. I wouldn’t have to mop floors or clean windows to pay the rent. In the Indonesian island where I come from, everyone knows me and my family, but here in Sydney, no one cares who I am or whose daughter I am…
Describe the moment when you felt least displaced.
Weirdly, I almost always feel more at home in anywhere but my own country.
You may bring one curiosity you’ve collected from your travels into the Displaced Nation. What’s in your suitcase?
A flash disk containing thousands of photos.
You’re invited to prepare one meal based on your travels for other Displaced Nation members. What’s on your menu?
Chicken tikka masala — it’s originally from Glasgow, most people don’t know that — and cranachan for dessert.
You may add one word or expression you’ve picked up from the countries you’ve lived in to The Displaced Nation argot. What word(s) do you loan us?
“Bollocks.” My hubby, who is Scottish, says it sounds cute when I say it. I try to use a Scottish intonation. He would let me say it whenever I wanted — until I said it in front of his 95-year-old grandmother, and then he explained it was actually a very very rude word.
img: Anita McKay (left) with a good Indonesian friend who was visiting her in Scotland, in front of Balmoral Castle, the only royal residence outside England.
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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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News has just reached the Displaced Nation — via a dog-eared copy of the Village Voice dated March 7 — about a new commercial for Miracle Whip that is in fact a rip-off of Marmite’s “love it or hate it” ad campaign. (Marmite of course being the savory spread made from waste yeast from the brewing industry, on which millions of Brits are weaned at an early age.)
Like Marmite before it, Miracle Whip is asking: do you love the not-quite-mayonnaise or hate it?
Kraft, the citizens of the Displaced Nation would like you to know: we are aware of your craftiness and we think it’s pretty cheesy of you to produce such a blatant imitation of Unilever’s brilliant Marmite campaign.
We also think it’s too bad that your marketing people didn’t consult with any Brits who are living in the United States, or they’d have set you straight on where Marmite belongs in the pantheon of branded foods: i.e., far above Miracle Whip.
Take, for instance, Kate Allison, a member of the Displaced Nation team. She chose to call her personal blog Marmite & Fluff. Marmite stands for Kate’s British heritage, while Fluff represents the past fifteen years she has spent living in the United States.
Notably, Kate decided to elevate Durkee-Mower’s Marshmallow Fluff — not Kraft’s Miracle Whip — to the level of her beloved Marmite because she believes the Fluffernutter sandwich has the same iconic status for American children as Marmite on toast does for their counterparts in Britain.
Another example is Lucy Sisman, a British resident of Manhattan who edits WWWORD.com, a site for anyone who uses, abuses, loves and hates the English Language.
Lucy includes the Marmite jar in her recent post listing objects from her kitchen cupboard that belong to the leave-us-as-we-are-hall-of-fame for their genius packaging. (Traditionally, Marmite was supplied in an earthenware pot, on which its glass, and now plastic, jars are modeled.)
Hmmm….when was the last time any of us heard an American wax nostalgic about a Miracle Whip jar?
Of Kraft’s many food products, only the Oreo comes anywhere near to arousing the kinds of passions that Marmite does, if expat blogs are anything to go by. But one doesn’t sense that Oreo lovers sit up and take umbrage whenever Kraft introduces a new variety, such as mini Oreos, chocolate creme Oreos, golden Oreos… Not so with the Marmite minions. Kate, for instance, had this to say of some new-fangled Marmite combos:
I thought Marmite and Fluff sandwiches were bad. Now I’ve discovered you can buy Marmite chocolate. And champagne Marmite, anyone? Or Marmite with Marston’s Pedigree?
Besides Oreos, Americans abroad also say they miss Kraft’s macaroni-and-cheese mix — though a surprising number go on to say that their nostalgia dissipates with each successive bite.
Robyn Lee, a foodie who lived in Taiwan as a kid, described her first experience with Kraft’s mac-cheese in a post for Serious Eats last October:
The first time I tried the iconic American foodstuff was in middle school when I was living in Taipei, out of some desperate longing to eat something American. It was an exciting experience, until I ate it.
Compare this to what Kate says about her favorite yeast sludge: “Isn’t the point of Marmite that it overrides all other flavours?”
Love it, hate it, or find it insipid? Kraft should have included a third option when tweaking the Marmite ads for Miracle Whip.
Question: Does Marmite stand alone, or are there other branded foods that inspire intense nationalistic feelings, which in no way diminish upon becoming displaced? (On the contrary, absence can make the palate grow even fonder…)
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Gin and tonic – as synonymous with expat life in the tropics as a nice cup of tea is with life in Britain, or as mint julep with the Kentucky Derby.
While specialty gins have raised a once-medicinal drink to the status of gourmet cocktail, tonic water has always been the inferior half of this partnership.
Not any more.
Fever-Tree, based in Shepton Mallet, England, produces Indian tonic water from only high-quality, natural ingredients, by
blending fabulous botanical oils with spring water and the highest quality quinine from the fever tree
The company’s philosophy – that it’s pointless to drown an exquisite gin with mediocre tonic – is gaining ground with consumers, particularly those in Spain where there is already a rapidly growing market for premium gins.
Spain’s use of Fever-Tree’s tonic water doesn’t stop at the highball glass, however. According to the Financial Times, chef Ferran Adrià of the El Bulli restaurant near Roses even made a soup from it.
For expats in Spain who are upholding the tradition of early evening G&Ts, things can only get better.
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Despite employers’ offers of repatriation and pleas from worried relatives in Britain, a small number of stalwart Britons are ignoring warnings of radioactive winds, and instead are drinking Guinness in the Mermaid pub.
One of them, Michael Summons, has elected to stay “because he loves the country,” while Martyn Terpilowski, a 34-year-old investment broker, says he feels it’s his duty not to leave.
His mother, however, disagrees. He should not put money before his health, she says.
The two-year-old blogging relationship between UK-based American Mike Harling and US-based Brit Toni Summers Hargis has entered a sweet phase. Mike wrote on Pond Parleys the other day:
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 agreed, throwing in a recipe for marshmallow fruit salad, while also defending British food against its reputation for being too bland.
Most commentators agreed that American food is too sweet but less because of sugar as of additives like high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. One US-based Brit opined:
The epitome of American sugary ‘candy’ … has to be the easter ‘peeps’ that my dear mother-in-law is guaranteed to give us and which will stay in the cupboard in all their food-colouring sugariness until I throw them out next year to make space for the more recent offering.
Another British expat to the U.S., however, noted that she can’t tolerate canned baked beans in either country because of their over-sweetness. She went on to say she’d developed a liking for America’s apple pretzels as well as cinnamon flavoring. “I may have to make apple crumble tomorrow,” she wrote.
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AND 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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About The Displaced Nation
The founders of The Displaced Nation share a passion for what we call the "displaced life" of global residency and travel—particularly when it leads to creative pursuits, be it writing, art, food, business or even humo(u)r.
The Displaced Nation 