Firstly, my apologies for taking so long in making my debut blog. You are all so impressive and deal with this phenomenon of internet communication so easily that I am a little scared of looking silly, stupid, naive and not worthy. But, you are a kind lot too so I shall try!
I have always been fascinated by national identity and migration – it one of the few things I actually studied with interest at QMW in the early 90’s. I have often asked myself the same question and the answer seems to differ as to the context and timing and where I am at the time.
In the Chariot we have a wonderful collection of well travelled and well educated people, including many who no longer reside in the same country as their birth.
I am also a ‘typical’ man in my love of sport this passion often links in when people who know me ask “for whom did you cheer in last night’s game?”
The Norman Tebbit test doesn’t seem to apply to me which I find odd as I was born in England, live in England and have one of the hideous purple EU UK (EUSSR for Bearsy!) passports. I have a wonderful home counties accent, a grammar school education and work for Her Majesty (I crossed my fingers behind my back when I started – I revel in being a hypocrite!)
Does that still make me English? It should but it doesn’t seem to. I don’t feel English, and I dislike an awful lot about this country and would love to live elsewhere, which I would were it not for my children. I’m certainly not a European, although I adore so much of it as I was lucky enough as a child to be shown so much of it.
Another useful and interesting debate I often use in conversations concerns human nature. I, living in the East Midlands, would naturally support a fellow east midlander in a theoretical debate that was location based against another part of England, say Manchester. However, I would be on the side of the Mancunian in a debate with a Scot. Then, I’d support a Scot over a Frenchman (or woman), then any European over an American. What is it about our psyche that causes this?
So I ask all of you ex-pats and succesfully mobile people here in the Chariot – is where from now more important as to what your identity is? Do you still introduce yourself as your birth identity?
I’d be fascinated in your thoughts as to who we all are!
Boadicea's Chariot 
Perhaps you are English, it is simply that England is not behaving as if it was England anymore.
The country has changed a lot, generally for the worse, since Labour started to tear the country apart in 1997. Is it finished? Likely not, it’s survived far worse in its history, but it will take some time for things to get straightened out again.
I speak English with a notable German accent that has some British influence on it, especially in the choice of vocabulary and some pronunciations. I also have an ugly purple EU/BRD passport which I hold onto for dear life. At the same time, I have an ugly blue US passport which just happened to come my way through a legal loophole. I do not plan on living in Germany again, nor are there any plans to remain in the USA. Both countries have their strengths and weaknesses, but neither one is really my own. Most people in my social circle are East Asian. If people ask, I tell them that I am German, but as time goes by that claim seems more and more tenuous.
On the topic of with whom one can come to an understanding… Geography has little to do with it. I discussed this with one of my mates, a Dane, who recently lived and studied in Korea where he found out that he has more in common with Koreans than with the French or Italians even if he can easily reach an understanding with the Dutch and British. For me, I find that I often have more in common with people from East Asia than those from Europe, though I will never truly become Orientalised, either. Given a choice between the French or the Americans… The Americans for me. Perhaps not those living in California or other “coastal” states, but those from the heart of the country, the profound America where people are people and they tend to treat each other as such.
Christopher – thank you for a fascinating reply that raises several points of note. I didn’t reveal too much of myself in case I bored people, but I can relate to much of what you say.
I have lived, worked and enjoyed living in NZ,albeit for 9 months: I have travelled to many wonderful places and visited all continents except South America – Argentina is my next preferred option. I have also spent alot of happy times in Australia. I find that I relate to the antipodean culture of positive attitudes with an outdoors lifestyle with blue sky more than anywhere else, I feel I fit in better there.
I hasten to add I was only using the French and American in a hypothetical example – I would rather neither in reality! The Spanish for me – mainly because of Rioja wine! 🙂
Cuprum: Rioja is a lovely thing, though I must admit that I am partial to the Portuguese and Port.
The place I enjoyed living most was Hawai’i. The humidity wasn’t my favourite, but the slower, simpler pace of life appeals to me. The pressure is on for me to go either across the Atlantic or Pacific to live as I have a number of friends on either side of the oceans.
I have lived in the USA on and off since 1976. Still a British citizen with resident alien status.
I am always identified by my voice, utterly quintessential received pronunciation and a far more extensive vocabulary than used in the USA. I never could work out why the voice stayed the same, it was not deliberate. My son, born in Memphis had the Southern drawl and could switch back and forth at will accent wise as if it were two different languages!
Whilst the Pacific NW is all very well and probably one of the best parts of America and certainly the most beautiful, it will never be home.
Equally I regret to say that Wales and the UK is really no longer home either.
Too many taxes, immigrants, heretics, queers, parasites and badly behaved children for my taste these days. Not too many in upper Carmarthenshire at the moment but you don’t have to go too far to find them!
I have visited and worked in Europe, whilst I rather like their architecture and their food, the rest leaves me pretty cold and rather tends to reinforce my lifelong held opinion that ‘wogs begin at Calais’.
My husband is a New Yorker and doesn’t think ‘too much’ of the USA these days either, but everyone thinks he is British as he’s caught my accent.
Neither of us can think of anywhere better to go and live so we lurk on the flanks of the Cascades and put ‘landmines in the drive’ to repel invaders and lay on a few ‘ex colonial sneers’ if any of the locals irritate us too much, which they daren’t; egalitarian Americans are frightened by the autocratic basilisk eye and have to rush off to their therapist for another inadequacy! We keep ourselves amused.
The Pacific NW is virtually totally homogeneous WASP ancestry and the area is still the same today, this being a farming county on the border of WA/Canada, so I tend to fit but am just taken as the Eccentric Britisher, they have known me long enough to know I am not ‘dangerous’ and grow good roses and throw good parties, (she can’t be that bad she is married to one of us!).
I have to say that I never fancied a lot of the continents in the world, too damned hot and diseased, never had the slightest inclination to go there and wouldn’t if you paid me. On the whole I dislike travelling intensely and would prefer to stay at home and garden. Thus, I have been forced to move my whole household five times across the Atlantic! The almonds of life come to he who has no teeth!
When we get bored we go to Canada and take the piss out of them instead, the most hypocritical nation on earth but good for a laugh. It makes us both appreciate America.
Hiya Cuprum – Oddly enough my own first post here was on much the same subject. It was entitled ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and referred to the fact that I would prefer to be exactly that rather than a stranger in my own land. I am proud to be Scouse, Lancastrian and English and always will be, yet I have travelled extensively, worked in Australia for three years and now live on top of a hill in deepest Portugal with no desire whatsoever to return to Blighty.
I will back Porto against any team except Liverpool and I’ll cheer on all sides playing Benfica no matter what. I will support Portugal against all comers unless they’re playing England. I’ve learned the lingo and have more Portuguese friends than estrangeiros of whatever nationality.
I think it’s a question of integration.
OZ
OZ – I completely agree. Except for the Liverpool thing obviously! I have to declare I am a fan of the greatest ever Chelsea manager who is of course from Portugal – he can do no wrong young Jose – I just hope he never goes to Liverpool!
I do like your Stranger in a strange land concept – I often feel like a stranger here but never do down under. I shall read your first post later!
Christina – thank you for such a comprehensive answer – just the sort of interesting and amusing stuff that attracted me to the chariot in the first place. I think that when I eventally leave these shores I may just become an eccentric englander!
cuprum, good evening. Thank you for a fine and interesting initial blog.
Can’t comment further due to lack of any experience of being an ex-pat but good to see you posting here.
Here you go, Cumprum – just to save you the bother of grubbing through the archive.
linkey thing
OZ
BTW – If José follows King Kenny at some time I shall be well pleased.
OZ
OZ – You would win the premiership instantly!
Having read your blog from Feb last year, (thanks for the linky thing) my apologies to all charioteers for such a lack of originality! I hadn’t read back before Octoberish so sorry! Perhaps the later joiners can just pretend for me!
Never mind, I enjoyed doing it so much I did another one! (a variation on Victor Kiam – remember him?)
It may give you a bit of a clue if I tell you I found my father’s old passport the other day – with Empire of India in gold under what looked like a faded roaring lion, issued at some stage in the 1920s. Grandfather served in India from about 1880 – fought in the Afghan Wars (Hazara 1891, is amongst his campaign medals) and South Africa (most of the The Boer War campaigns) in his thirty years in the Seaforths, and married the Rajah of Chumba’s governess, a formidable Scots lady, in the late 1890s. My father managed a number of tea plantations (“gardens”) in North-East India, where he lived for forty years, after having qualified as a marine engineer back in Scotland. Quite late by today’s standards he married an Edinburgh-qualified physician, which led to my arrival in due course. Having been born an expatriate, it was almost axiomatic that I would also seek an overseas career. Britain offered nothing in the way of any career as challenging and with as much responsibility as was given to us at a very young age overseas. From 1969 onwards I spent the next thirty-one years, living and working in eleven different countries, marrying an American from Manhattan somewhere along the way, and taking a mid-career break to pick up a Cranfield MBA in the late 1970s.
Whilst being proud of my Scots heritage, I find jingoism, in all its many forms, totally abhorrent, and we consider ourselves fortunate to have retained friends and connections from many of the countries in which we have lived over my working life, and equally fortunate to be back home in Scotland, not far from Fort George, which was home of the Seaforths, when they weren’t off subjugating the Natives!
Aw, Cuprun, it wasn’t meant like that. I am a very friendly lupine. 🙂
OZ
It’s been a while since I was an ex pat, so I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like…
In France, I was referred to as l’Anglaise, and felt very English for the first year. Then something clicked and I could speak with a strong southern French twang. I thought it was hilarious and loved pulling the wool over people’s eyes – look, no hands, I’m being French now – but people usually managed to twig from other clues – skin colour; dress sense and so on.
The day I returned to live in England was weird; I remember it vividly because it was the day before Diana died, and for that whole week, it was surreal. I felt like a ghost, hanging around, watching people in England. I was in limbo with regard to national and linguistic identity. I’d say it was about three years before I felt properly English again.
I think accent and dialect are indicators of the strength of emotional ties with places, so the broad northern twang I grew up with instantly identifies me, in English, as a northern lass. But even just speaking to someone, in French, from the south of France – not very often, alas – feels like a sort of homecoming to me as well.
I doubt that anyone can truly clear themselves of being whatever nationality they were at birth, if they lived in that country while they were growing up. It’s why so many first generation immigrants feel as OZ describes: “A Stranger in a Strange Land”.
The difficulty then arises when one returns to that land after years away. And Christopher, I think, has summed that up beautifully for me. I still feel English, but “England is not behaving as if it was England any more.”
Part of that is inevitable, because all places change. But, I think England has changed so much that I doubt that I could live there again, as I once hoped to do.
As to how I introduce myself – I don’t have any choice. I’m instantly described as “English”! I doubt that will change after all this time.
Where do I ‘identify with’? I don’t think about it – I’m just me ‘wherever’ I am. I rather envy those who can identify with their adopted lands.
As to how I introduce myself – I don’t have any choice. I’m instantly described as “English”! I doubt that will change after all this time.
That is exactly how I feel, Boadicea. Even Germany is no longer really behaving as if it is Germany, either, by the way. Though it might still be better off than England, I don’t think it is “home” anymore.
Thank you all! I shall continue with my interest in the subject and will let you know if I hear anything else on the subject.
And OZ – I know you’r friendly – I didn’t take it as a negative at all – I was just disappointed not to have been original! 🙂