Expats under fire!

I was ordered to self-censor and it bothers me

The year is 2008.

It’s late august and the Beijing olympics are coming to a close.

They were by all accounts a roaring success. China took the opportunity to display it’s military might. It’s streets were scrubbed clean. The birds nest stadium, which has subsequently been dismantled, was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and everything ran like clockwork.

2008 was also the year that the British Council posted me to Tianjin. A small city (by Chinese standards) just south of the capital. It is here that I called home for a year before moving to the capital itself.

It was an exciting time. A time marked by intense periods of social interaction and even more intense periods of loneliness. It was an overwhelming experience.

In many ways I got a taste of what it might feel like to be famous. The constant attention was draining. Perhaps even unsettling, given that it was because of the way I looked not because of anything I had achieved.

We hear a lot about the struggles that foreigners go through. No one talks about the advantages that being an ‘outsider’ in a foreign country can bring.

You can have a competitive advantage just by being you. The language you speak. Your life experience. Your cultural values. All of these, while taken for granted in your home country, make you different abroad. It can be both a blessing and a curse.

In China I was an expat. I landed there because I had applied for a teaching position and been accepted. Myself and the other 80 applicants who were posted all over China were expats.

This was a term I would hear on a daily basis and yet never in a million years would I think to question it. I just assumed this was a term that everyone understood.

However, over the years of living in foreign countries I have increasingly been asked the question what does expat even mean? Who are expats?

And since starting my YouTube channel in 2022 I have, on the few occasions that I used the word in a video, been consistently asked to not use it. Initially I was so clueless that another commenter had to explain why.