Permanent Foreigner

On refining the theme of this newsletter and embracing my outsider status.

Photo by Amos Bar-Zeev on Unsplash

Two years ago,

Elle Griffin

inspired me to launch this Substack newsletter and publish my autofiction book, in serialized form. 

The catch was that I hadn’t written the book yet. 

I would need to write it, chapter by chapter, and publish each of them when they were deemed ready. The quest was not to finish it fast, but to walk the long, lonely path of writing my first book. Some days, the task was simply to push through to the next chapter, even if the last one had left me not quite satisfied. On other days, the task was to bask in the sweet nectar of encouragement from kind readers. It’s been a slow process and letting myself be visible through my words is surprisingly less scary than I thought. 

Puzzling ideas

And because writing a book is an uphill marathon, some parallel ideas sprung to my mind, begging me to develop them and share the essays on this page. I love a good debate, so I hope more readers will chime in with their views and turn them into interesting conversations.

While writing these essays, though, my Substack became a puzzle of various themes. A smorgasbord of topics, writing formats and genres. I felt like the essence of what I wanted to share was being diluted in this literary salad bar. 

Beyond Substack, I have an unfinished novel draft sitting in the top drawer of my desk. I also have a bullet-point list of short story ideas, neatly recorded in a notebook. Even more essays left halfway through, waiting their turn to be brought to light.

The foreigner lens

All of these writing projects have a common element: their underlying theme is the experience of being a foreigner, always searching for a sense of belonging. And that is a feature, not a bug, in my life’s journey. 

I realized the essence of all my writings is about my condition as a long-time expat. Explorer of foreign lands, adapter to different cultures, perpetual new-in-town. 

So, I’m returning to my essence, as I believe that good stories come from that authentic place inside us, if we stop and realign ourselves when we go astray. I also want to make it easier for all the new readers here to have clarity on what to expect in this newsletter. 

The term ‘foreigner’ might have a temporary quality to it.

You can be a foreigner for a short while only, and after that, you either return home or adapt to the place and become local. But as a long-term multi-country expat, I realized that no matter where I am in the world now, I am a foreigner. Even if I lived for over 12 years in the same area now, I’m still a foreigner here. When I go back to my childhood place, I am a foreigner there too.

This has become a permanent characteristic of mine, just like having green eyes. But unlike the color of my eyes, my outsider status influences and shapes all of my experiences, from how I work to the friends I make and the home I keep searching for. Even how I perceive my place of birth. 

This sounds foreign to me

I sometimes come across as a foreigner in how I use the English language in my writing. Although I have a native level of English, I wasn’t born in an English-speaking country. My mother didn’t whisper lullabies to me in English. I’m not native, they say. This is more subtle than a grammatical error that I can probably avoid. It’s in the examples I give to explain a concept, in the type of associations I make, in the particular adjective that I choose to place next to a certain noun.

I’m a foreigner even to the language I think in, I feel in, I dream in. 

So I’m honoring my ‘permanent foreigner’ identity, and from now on I’ll focus more on how this quality shapes the stories I tell here, whether essays or fiction. 

Still have the brain space for another piece? Check this one out:

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