The Bursting of My Expat Bubble

Am I a cool-as-f*ck global nomad, or just a snooty, glorified yuppy with no real home?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Nicole Kidman was recently slammed for breaking quarantine when she traveled to Hong Kong to work on the TV adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel “The Expatriates”. Well, she is playing a Hong Kong expat so naturally she’d get away with things others wouldn’t be allowed to — because expatriates (myself included) are some of the most entitled people I know.

In 2011 my husband’s job took us from Boston to Hong Kong — one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and most expensive cities. As a global mobility analyst, he had traveled and worked in more than 500 cities across the globe and our favorite post-dinner games were “What’s the capital of (insert name of country)?” or “What’s the currency of (insert country)?” Secretly — and sometimes not so secretly — we took pride in the fact that neither of us identified strongly with the countries of our birth ­or the cultures we grew up in — Singapore for me and America for him — and that we saw ourselves as free-floating, transcultural citizens of the world, untethered to any single culture or country.

Earlier this year, my husband got laid off. We decided to move back to the United States where we figured the lower cost of living would allow us to stretch our savings until he found a new job. We picked Portland, Oregon for our re-entry into American life. Neither of us had been to this city before, but we had heard it was progressive and bohemian, with no shortage of impressive international cuisine. We also knew that being in the Pacific Northwest would give us easy access to the great outdoors, which we both love. So Portland it was.

On our first day in our new adopted city, we checked out the downtown area. This part of the city had been ravaged by the riots that began in 2016 and most of the nice restaurants were shut, so we scoffed down burritos from Chipotle. Our explorations took us down streets lined with tents — the dwellings of houseless individuals who looked like they were strung out on meth, nodding off on smack, or just having a too many really bad days. Outside some of these tents were plastic bottles filled with yellow colored liquid. The smell of despair on the streets was as pungent as the stench of piss.