On Being an Ex-Expatriate

im male 37 living in abudhabi My younger sister is there in US and she is a docter there and US nationality holder, she is forceing me to join her there but im reisisting the temptation for two years last time she spoke and ask me to come for vist once but but i was not agree. im going to show this article to her thanx bina

It seems that, for once, you can do no wrong Bina Shah!
This has got to be in the best-of-chowk anthology, for the comments as much as for the article itself.
And looking at the dates, it`s heartening to see that it`s acquired a sort of enduring-through-the-ages sheen... all the way from `98 to `03.

MY REASON TO RETURN HOME, IS THE MEANIGN AND PURPOSE OF LIFE.

Bina,

you are brilliant. Excellent, superlative, and i mean all that seriously.

Let me explain, this is not a response solely to your expatriate article, but a combined one to quite a few of your articles that i have been fortunate enough to read lately.

What have i read; i started with the insightful and funny marriage trap, sent it to a friend in the US (he just left, we spent 4 yrs together here at eng coll) and he replied with part 2.

I`ve read many others, the expatriate being brilliant, the review of Jinnah perfect almost, both marriage traps, bittersweet and the poem about chowk was just.... good and funny.

I`m pretty sure you won many if not all of the writing competitions you entered while in college as you claim, because you have that rare and uncanny ability to put into words and recreate the emotion that you feel, so very accurately.

Maybe i say that because i just relate to what you write and agree with it, but in short, you`re good.

I would respond to a lot of what you`ve written in various articles, but that`ll be getting a bit carried away. But for one, the para in the expat where you describe lonliness. That feeling, i know it, and one way to explain it is, crowd is not company. I`ve spent quite a few years away from home, (not abroad) and know that exact same feeling. Its so odd, almost inexplicable, but it happens i guess, to remind us we`re human.

Your description of the perpetual feeling of failure haunting many pakistanis is also so accurate.

Write on i say, hope the happiness I and others derive from reading your work fuels you to write more.

On a different note...I`m very grateful to people like you, and to the people who maintian such websites who actually make the internet as useful a tool as it can be.

p.s

I`m also writing this at work. And i guess, what sets your writing apart is that you have no pretense, and your just so damn honest.

Bina,

I am sitting at work, not able to get my work done, thinking about home and then coming across this articale. I feel connected and desire going back with all my soul and heart. But the question I have to answer is whether the path less travelled or the path more familiar.

Many years ago, I had done exactly what you have done. Went home, took two years to adjust, but I did adjust, I did contribute and I was happy. I was connected to the soil, to the people, the stories of my ancestors and something more. I knew that our nation, our culture, our spirit was moving towards a destructive and downward phase, but I still wanted to be a part of that journey, share my brethren`s pain, learn from it, and hope to be the seed for change. Be a part of the re-birth, because after every night there is the day. Don`t know what happened but somehow I had to leave again, nine years later, back to the US.

Life is a journey and there are many paths. But being concious of our choices, being in touch with our spirit, we make choices which are not apparent or obvious. But over years and over the stretch of time, their significance and their consequences in the chain of human experience seem obvious.

Just rambling. Good luck.

``The Road not Taken``

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Interesting article but it`s strange that your core argument is that your desire to return to Pakistan is vindicated by the fact that your family is there. Where your family happens to be is purely a geographical and historical fact. It does not directly have any bearing upon comparing the relative merits/demerits of living in Pakistan or in the West based solely upon factors intrinsic to each of Pakistan or the West.

If you change that one factor so that your family were with you in the US, would you ever consider leaving them in the US to settle in Pakistan? I think not...which illustrates my point exactly.

Also, your 5th paragraph depicts exactly the picture you were so keen not to accept. Namely that you were not tough enough to brave it out.

Sallam Bina.

Just wanted to compliment on an excellent written article about being the ex-expatriot.

I can relate to the first half of your life, being in the states and the job and car but there is no way I am returning home. My only other sibling, my elder brother, graduted from US and went back.

Till this day (5 years) he is unemployed and working with my father which is a very small business in Lahore. I really wish I can go back home but the circumstances are not there.

I am really jealous of you. You actually did what you felt like and are proving to other people that there is more to life then the $ and the status of your immigration here in the US.

Keep up the good work and good luck at your job.

Sincerely.

Jamal Arif.

good writing!

love your article...

i might be one of the failures who would come back.....:)

so two is better than one

i mean two failures!

Allah haafiz

thatz me

Hi Bina:

I was going through your article titled ``On Being an Ex-Expatriate``. I have read few of your other articles and the way you write is just excellent.

I did not know before reading this article that you had studied and stayed in the U.S.A., but I had a feeling that either you are writing from USA / West or you have been educated here.

I like everything you write (haven`t read a whole lot yet, but whatever I have read until now). Bina, I was not totally in agreement with one of your comments/thoughts. Although you are free to say whatever you want, but probably you would agree that as a Muslima it has to be in conformity with our religion, Islam.

Bina, I am referring to the statement:

``And I can kiss my brother goodnight every night - even though he`s fourteen and really getting too big to be kissed by his elder sister.``

This sentence is indirectly saying that kissing one`s brother after a certain age is not correct or should not be done or should be avoided.

As far as my limited study has shown me, I could not find any article saying that a proper kiss at the right place either from or to a brother or sister is prohibited after a certain age. When referring to proper place the best most people find can be the forehead, or one of the hands, preferably the right one.

Please do not say that kissing brothers / sisters is not really so common in our culture (Pakistan). Going according to culture and religion is most of the times like riding in two boats at the same time. Culture invents its own things way different from what religion has taught. I think culture should be given its own respects until it does not collide with the rules of religion.

I hope you understand me.

Thank you

Allah Haafiz

Syed Hyder Raza

P.S. Keep writing beautiful articles. I plan to read all your past and future articles.

Is it supposed to be a noble prize winning act to return to Pakistan ?It may be SR is correct in his reasons why Pakistani(the few& the scant)go back but NoNE OF THEM SEEM TO BE A VERY NOBLE REASON,EITHER FOR THE COUNTRY OR FOR HUMANITY.

Dear Bina,

I made a similar choice in my life for similar reasons. Needless to say, I do not regret my decision. I also agree with all the reasons SR has given below. He is pretty much on the mark.

However, I have often wondered if white americans also feel such loneliness and emptiness in their lives, rather single white americans. Not from a racial point of view, but from a cultural point of view. Does their upbringing endow them with skills to combat such loneliness succesfully; is this problem endemic to aliens only. I hope you get my drift. What do you think.

Also I`d like to read your fishhooks which you have removed from the public domain. My email address is mtaylor38@yahoo.com. Do you think you could email it?

regards

samandar

sounds like you made the right choice since you were after family intimacy and as you know, intimacy of any sort, is impossible to find in the work obsessed pleasure starved culture of North America; but are you satisfied with your journalists` job? America is high stress, but one feels a bit pushed here and driven to do things that might not have been in our sights in the more lethargic and constricted vision of our wonderful homeland.

I dont know why but after reading this article I juat want to go back to Pakistan. I tried my best to adjust here and you can say I have everything but I am and I was never happy. My grandfather died I could not go, my mother had an operation and I came to know after couple of weeks, I missed weddings of my best friends, I missed graduation day parade of my younger brother and the list goes on.I think enough is enough I just want to be back and happy, I know there`ll be problems hurdles but its so comforting to know that you`ll be with everybody else. Thankyou very much fo this and now I dont mind to be insane.

Thanks again.

Syed

Bet today doesn`t feel too good to be a journalist living in Pakistan.

-!Kamran Akhtar!-

``Four years of college became one year of graduate school became a full-time job and a house and a car. I was living the American dream. Except that sometimes the dream, which I`d worked so hard to make a reality, wasn`t so pleasant. I found myself alone on holidays. I found myself lonely. I was cold all the time. I burst into tears for no apparent reason in the evenings, right after the sun had gone down. When I was sick, I had to take myself to the doctor all by myself. This despite the mountains of friends I`d made in school? Things changed once I was working and commuting and living in a cold impersonal apartment block.``



ANSWER : MAYBE YOU JUST NEEDED A (Live-in?)BOYFRIEND !!!! Life ain`t fun when you`re lonely, no matter where ! DUH !!! And you could have gotten married .....

Best Wishes ... Whatever makes you happy.