Decomposing self: misplacing your most valuable expatriate possession

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in ANASTASIA ASHMAN,culture,history,identity,self-image,society,women

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By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

Happily at home in Istanbul in 2007, I flipped through Unsuitable for Ladies. Edited by Jane Robinson, this anthology of female travel writing crisscrosses the globe and stretches back into ancient history. Complete candy for me.

Around the same time I was ruminating in an essay for a global nomad magazine why I’ve come to employ a defensive strategy for my expatriatism.

Sense of self is my most valuable expatriate possession.

During my first long-term stint overseas in the ’90s my boundaries were over-run by circumstance and culture. Language and cultural barriers prevented me from expressing my identity. I’d tell Malaysians I was a writer. They’d reply, “Horses?”

I was mistaken for a different Western woman in Asia. A crew of Indonesian laborers working at my house wondered when I was going to drink a beer and take off my shirt.

Like leather shoes and handbags molding overnight, expat life on the equator made me feel my sense of self was decomposing at time-lapse speed.

A thunderbolt from Robinson: “Southeast Asia has more than its share of reluctant women travelers.”

She compiled Wayward Women, a survey of 350 female travel writers through 16 centuries so her conclusion about Southeast Asian travelers is drawn from a massive canon. In that moment, my hardest-won lessons of expatriatism felt vindicated.

What happens to your unique travel or expat experience if you consider yourself part of a continuum?

Neoculture entertainment writer/producer Anastasia Ashman+++++
Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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Check out some of expat+HAREM’s favorite hybrid life reads here.

  • Anonymous

    Anastasia:  If you’re looking for a new project on expatriate women, I’d like to suggest you tackle the extraordinary life of the late Carla Grissman.  You’re probably familiar with her book “Dinner of Herbs”.   From fleeing the Nazis in 1939 to life in Tangier with the Paul Bowles set and onward to Turkey and finally being face to face with the Taliban at the Kabul Museum, hers was a remarkable life.  I’m sure her many global friends would be willing to contribute if someone has the energy to act as the center.   You seem to have a lot of the energy and enthusiasm that would be required.  The image I’m posting with this is a Walker Evans photo of Carla taken in the early Fifties. 

    • http://about.me/anastasia.ashman Anastasia

      Thanks Karl. I really enjoyed Dinner of Herbs and recommend it often. I’m not taking on new projects. In fact, I have just launched my new web-based venture GlobalNiche.net, and along with my memoir work-in-progress,  my energies are completely spoken for. But thanks for the suggestion, and the compliment.

      • Anonymous

        Then, something to put on the back burner, maybe? Or pass along to those in your circle?

  • Anonymous

    While in India to investigate possibilities to put a line of my designs in production, I was told by a male traveler that I should tell people I was married, that a single woman (I was 33 at the time) was suspect and would be bothered more than a “taken” lady. I fiercely believed in my independence —fed the importance of just that by my mother, who traveled as an advertising rep in post WWII Europe. The idea to give that up was appalling to me. The moment I entered the U.S. as an immigrant (forced to do so after marrying a U.S. citizen) the female immigration officer asked me if I intended to ever take my husband’s name. I said no, I would go by my maiden name. Little did I know that this decision would make it very difficult to prove that any official writing I’d receive from the Netherlands (which would show my husband’s family name followed by my maiden name) is directed at me. The first notary public I addressed to acknowledge my “being alive” called me a possible fraud, and refused to sign the paperwork even though I had my passport in hand. I recall feeling a loss of identity at that moment. As a reluctant immigrant who held on to her nationality I had landed in an in between state, from which I would only be freed ten years later when my husband and I decided we could no longer claim to be in Seattle temporarily and bought a condominium. Home ownership brought together my maiden name and married name in a contract that was more solid than our marriage license.

  • Deborah

    After 20 years abroad I reconnected with female friends I haven’t seen for nearly 30. Unlike me, they had chosen to reproduced or recreate their own childhood experience, same language similar city, similar family model (almost all of us are professionals, our mothers were not); many even sent their children to the same schools they had attended. We discussed all the lessons of life we had learned over those 30 years. Some difficulties, which I had attributed to foreignness, were in fact common among us, better ascribed to personal growth and phase of life issues. The problems which were in fact due to my otherness were caused, I believe, by the difficulty if not impossibility of a foreigner to create a spontaneous network of emotional and practical support, and service. That is a network that reciprocally supports you and that you support giving you a sense of belonging: sisters, mothers, cousins, friends and colleagues. The friends who had intentionally chosen to live where people were “just like me” were supported, occasionally criticized but fundamentally belonged to the community they called home. This lack of sense of belonging is the core of the expats emotional and sometimes practical hardships.
    The social model or maybe natural instinct is for the man to look for support in his wife and for a woman to look for support from other women. When I ended up in the emergency room a few years ago and they told me I would be in the hospital for at least a few days my first reaction was “I need to find someone to take care of my daughter” By this I both meant practically and emotionally take care of my daughter. The young doctor laughed and said “that’s the first thing all women say, all men say ‘could you please call my wife’.”

  • Deborah

    After 20 years abroad I reconnected with female friends I haven’t seen for nearly 30. Unlike me, they had chosen to reproduced or recreate their own childhood experience, same language similar city, similar family model (almost all of us are professionals, our mothers were not); many even sent their children to the same schools they had attended. We discussed all the lessons of life we had learned over those 30 years. Some difficulties, which I had attributed to foreignness, were in fact common among us, better ascribed to personal growth and phase of life issues. The problems which were in fact due to my otherness were caused, I believe, by the difficulty if not impossibility of a foreigner to create a spontaneous network of emotional and practical support, and service. That is a network that reciprocally supports you and that you support giving you a sense of belonging: sisters, mothers, cousins, friends and colleagues. The friends who had intentionally chosen to live where people were “just like me” were supported, occasionally criticized but fundamentally belonged to the community they called home. This lack of sense of belonging is the core of the expats emotional and sometimes practical hardships.
    The social model or maybe natural instinct is for the man to look for support in his wife and for a woman to look for support from other women. When I ended up in the emergency room a few years ago and they told me I would be in the hospital for at least a few days my first reaction was “I need to find someone to take care of my daughter” By this I both meant practically and emotionally take care of my daughter. The young doctor laughed and said “that’s the first thing all women say, all men say ‘could you please call my wife’.”

  • Anastasia M. Ashman

    True, Dom. In the absence of cultural pegs — buoys, if you like — we start to drift.

    When we were first circulating the call-for-submissions for Expat Harem, we heard from several people who took issue with the term “harem” — and one longtime female settler in Turkey who argued that women aren’t expats. They can’t be, they can’t afford to take their territory with them, she thought. Women have to be culturally malleable, she said, in a way men do not have to be. Historically women join their husbands’ families, they find a way to fit in and they lose a bit of themselves in the process.

    It’s intriguing to think that women expats perhaps struggle more with their identity for this reason — that they are expected to find a way to adapt where-ever they may be.

  • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

    True, Dom. In the absence of cultural pegs — buoys, if you like — we start to drift.

    When we were first circulating the call-for-submissions for Expat Harem, we heard from several people who took issue with the term “harem” — and one longtime female settler in Turkey who argued that women aren’t expats. They can’t be, they can’t afford to take their territory with them, she thought. Women have to be culturally malleable, she said, in a way men do not have to be. Historically women join their husbands’ families, they find a way to fit in and they lose a bit of themselves in the process.

    It’s intriguing to think that women expats perhaps struggle more with their identity for this reason — that they are expected to find a way to adapt where-ever they may be.

  • http://mdbenoit.com M. D. Benoit

    I think as women expats we are judged more harshly and scrutinized more closely than men. If we don’t abide by the cultural mores set out for women in other countries we stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore keeping our own identity and sense of self is much more difficult.

    Being alone as an expat with no one of your own culture around you is, IMO, much more difficult. You have nothing to remind you of all the little things that made you identify yourself with who you are as a people.

    The internet, fortunately, has helped crossed those boundaries and connects you in a way that was not even possible ten years ago.

  • http://mdbenoit.com M. D. Benoit

    I think as women expats we are judged more harshly and scrutinized more closely than men. If we don’t abide by the cultural mores set out for women in other countries we stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore keeping our own identity and sense of self is much more difficult.

    Being alone as an expat with no one of your own culture around you is, IMO, much more difficult. You have nothing to remind you of all the little things that made you identify yourself with who you are as a people.

    The internet, fortunately, has helped crossed those boundaries and connects you in a way that was not even possible ten years ago.

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