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Being foreign

The others

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider

FOR the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a Frenchman in Berlin, a Zimbabwean in London, a Russian in Paris, a Chinese in New York.

The desire of so many people, given the chance, to live in countries other than their own makes nonsense of a long-established consensus in politics and philosophy that the human animal is best off at home. Philosophers, it is true, have rarely flourished in foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Königsberg; Descartes went to Sweden and died of cold. But that is no justification for generalising philosophers’ conservatism to the whole of humanity.

The error of philosophy has been to assume that man, because he is a social animal, should belong to some particular society. Herder, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher, launched modern conceptions of nationalism by arguing that a man could flourish only among his own people who shared his language and culture. “Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself,” Herder wrote.

Even an exemplary modern liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, found this sort of emotional logic seductive. “Everyone has the right to live in some society in which they needn’t constantly worry about what they look like to others, and so be psychically distorted, conditioned to some degree of mauvaise foi”, Berlin said in 1992, near the end of his life, explaining his support for Zionism.

And yes, no doubt many people do feel most at ease with a home and a homeland. But what about the others, who find home oppressive and foreignness liberating? Theirs is a choice that gets both easier and more difficult to exercise with every passing year. Easier, because the globalisation of industry and education tramples national borders. More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there.

It has long been true in America that nobody can be foreign because everybody is foreign. In the capital cities of Europe that same paradoxical condition has more or less been reached—especially in Brussels, the self-styled capital of Europe, where decades of economic migration have been reinforced by an influx of European Union bureaucrats. There the animosity between Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians makes them foreigners to one another, even in their own country.

To get a strong sense of what it means to be foreign, you have to go to Africa, or the Middle East, or parts of Asia. In South Korea last year 42% of the population had never knowingly spoken to a foreigner. Well, they had better get ready. The country’s foreign residents have doubled in the past seven years, to 1.2m, or more than 2% of the population. And that share could rise: the foreign-born average in the rich world is over 8% of a given population.

Foreigners par excellence

The most generally satisfying experience of foreignness—complete bafflement, but with no sense of rejection—probably comes still from time spent in Japan. To the foreigner Japan appears as a Disneyland-like nation in which everyone has a well-defined role to play, including the foreigner, whose job it is to be foreign. Everything works to facilitate this role-playing, including a towering language barrier. The Japanese believe their language to be so difficult that it counts as something of an impertinence for a foreigner to speak it. Religion and morality appear to be reassuringly far from the Christian, Islamic or Judaic norms. Worries that Japan might Westernise, culturally as well as economically, have been allayed by the growing influence of China. It is going to get more Asian, not less.

Even in Japan, however, foreigners have ceased to function as objects of veneration, study and occasionally consumption. Once upon a time, in the ancient and medieval worlds, to count as properly foreign you had to seek out a life among peoples of a different skin colour or religion. They were probably an impossibly long distance away, they might well kill you when you got there, and if you went too far you might fall off the edge of the world.

At the dawn of the travelling age, writing an imaginary legal code for a Utopian society that he called Magnesia, Plato divided foreigners into two main categories. “Resident aliens” were allowed to settle for up to 20 years to do jobs unworthy of Magnesians, such as retail trade. “Temporary visitors” consisted of ambassadors, merchants, tourists and philosophers. Broaden that last category to include all scholars, and you have a taxonomy of travellers that held good until the invention of the stag party.

To be foreign got much more straightforward from the 17th century onwards, when Europe adopted a political system based on nation states, each with borders, sovereignty and citizenship. Travel-papers in hand, you could turn yourself into an officially recognised foreigner simply by visiting the country next door—which, with the advance of mechanised transport, became an ever more trivial undertaking. By the early 20th century most of the world was similarly compartmentalised.

The golden age of genteel foreignness began. The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.

[snip]

I’m an alien

Nowadays, you might rather say that the more you know of other countries, the more inclusive of all humanity your values will become. You educate yourself, beginning with anthropology.

Every foreigner of inquiring mind becomes a part-time anthropologist, wondering and smiling at the new social rituals of his adoptive country. George Mikes, a Hungarian living in England, wrote a book in this genre called “How To Be An Alien”, published in 1946. It was not really about how to be an alien at all, but about a foreigner’s view of English society, and it was very funny. Mikes rightly saw that most social codes partook of the arbitrary and the absurd. If you happened to stand outside them, as a foreigner always did, then life could be a continuous comedy.

[snip]

Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?

The foreigner answers that question by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense. Something within himself has driven him away from his homeland. He becomes even a touch jealous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adventure. How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return?

[snip]

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

Of pain and pleasure

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother.

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.

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A great reflective article which my experience observing many people shows is very true.  Combating this mental illness of "feeling foreign" takes ACTIVE involvement in the society, in all aspects of it.   Inclusion is something that foreigner becomes particularly sensitive to, but the foreigner needs to occasionally learn to include themselves - often exclusion and being foreign comes from the choices people make early on in their experience cycles...

If you are interacting with foreign-born, the best you can do is include them in activities.  You will get tremendous involvement from the people when they sense genuine friendship and caring.

BTW, if you have not read "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri, I strongly recommend it.