Confusing Coffee Orders and Public Toilettes.
Why coming back to your home country is so disorienting.
When you decide to leave your home country, you don’t think about the return. You’re consumed with details of the going: finding a house, school, movers, visas — a long list of tasks that center on the demands of the present, marginalizing both reflection and forethought.
What’s that I see off on the horizon — is it the future rushing up to knock my hat off?
You are not looking ahead to the day, a day you cannot — as overwhelmed as you are with the move — imagine will ever come; but come it does: that day when you return to the country you dumped and now want to start dating again, or at least go out for coffee… if you only knew a flat white from a golden latte.1
It’s hard to go home.
That’s it. Plain and simple.
But it’s also really lovely.
Yes, there’s definitely that, too.
It’s profoundly complicated.
Also true — the truest by far.
Things at home have changed. Life has moved on without you. People change, but so, disorientingly, does culture, especially if your home country is the US. We are a people who go. Stagnation is death to us. Those of us whose people immigrated to North America are predisposed to movement — our immigrant ancestors got on boats, loaded up in wagons and went. That habit, for better or worse, is one of the key drivers of our culture. Leave the US for a year or two, and when you return, the changes are head-snapping. The disconnect is even greater if you are coming from a more staid or change-averse culture — think the entire EU but totemically static Switzerland, where I currently reside.
Laugh if you want (and you should), but a few years ago, on a visit home, I stood, utterly bewildered, staring up at the chalk scribbles on a blackboard menu at a coffee place in San Francisco; excuse me, but what is a flat white? (This was before it started appearing on café menus across Europe.) I was ashamed by my lack of what was common knowledge to everyone else, including the cranky techies behind me waiting to order. I ordered one and decided it was a fancy name for what the oldsters once called a latte no foam. Why come up with a new name for an old thing? America: reinvention is our brand.
However, one cool thing that doesn’t seem to change in the US is public bathrooms. They are always free and always gross. Thank god there’s at least one area where my cultural expertise won’t quickly become obsolete. Yay, disgusting (but free!)2 McDonald’s highway bathrooms forever!
Residing somewhere between complicated café menus and nasty public toilets is the sweet spot of repatriation. The trick to finding it is time. It takes time to find your way again; until you do, it’s awful being lost at home. The real Lost in Translation happens in your native language and home turf.
Recently, I’ve had a few friends repatriate back to their home countries, and their WhatsApp calls are full of the alienation and isolation of not belonging where you belong — if you’ve done it before, you know the icky feeling goes away after a year or so, but it’s no picnic while you figure out all the social cues and how to fit in again. Maybe that’s why global nomads like Nancy Whiteman at Expat in Portugal made sure to have an exit plan that would make returning home easier.
When you crash land in your home country, it’s like watching your favorite classic holiday film, but the sound is out of sync. It looks the same, and you understand all the nuances of language (for once!), but something is off. The familiar can easily be made strange by even the slightest change — we expect it to be one way, and when it diverges even a fraction, we are disoriented.
I'm sorry to all Spanish speakers for whom this example will only confuse and possibly alienate.
Now, let’s take that feeling of disassociation and extrapolate it to everything. That’s not hyperbole; that’s what repatriation after a long absence is like. Being peculiar in the only place you are supposed to belong is upsetting. It's like Jimmy Stewart suddenly busting out in perfect Spanish. It’s what happens in a parallel universe: not impossible, just not possible.
And one wonders from whence my obsession with home and belonging stems (that’s sarcasm). Like a person on a restrictive diet, I crave all the foods I can’t have; at the same time, I know they’re bad for me. And that, dear reader, is my dark secret: I am highly allergic to la vie quotidienne. I want it, but if I eat too much of it, it makes me sick. Help me, Clarance, get me back [home]… then let’s turn right around and go again.
What monster first conceived of putting turmeric in coffee?
Finding the exact change to pay-to-pee at many European rest stops is hell when you’ve been holding it for the past 150 kilometers.
I’m an American six years into living in the UK. Though I haven’t repatriated yet (and wondering if I ever will, who knows!) but every time I go back I have that feeling, too. You’ve really captured it! It’s familiar but weirdly distant and yes, just “off” in the littlest of ways. I have moments of relief and surprise that people can fully understand me (my accent). And the foods I’ve missed, ahhh! But then, weird new jokes and nuances of speech…so strange.
OMG: “The real Lost in Translation happens in your native language and home turf.”
Thank you.