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EP 23: Home Sweet Home? Returning from overseas living is the hardest part
38 Plays1 month ago
This week on The Auto Ethnographer podcast, host John Stech ruminates on the homecoming phase for expats. You may think the hardest part of a foreign assignment is moving overseas and getting to learn a new culture and new language. John argues that the most challenging part is coming back to your home country.
John lived overseas with his family for eight years, starting when his children were quite young. By the time they returned home, the children barely remembered having lived in the United States. John relives some of his adventures in Egypt and Russia, setting the stage for examining the difficulties of settling back into his home culture.
While living overseas with family you are immersed in learning, in challenge, in adaptation. You have to learn about a new culture which is all around you in your host country if you want to have a well-rounded overseas experience. Every day brings learnings, challenges, and adventures.
In the meantime, back in your home country, in your hometown, life goes on like normal. People have adapted to you being gone. And they continue their lives with focus on their everyday activities.
Once the overseas assignment or living concludes and you pack your belongings and head home, you may be surprised at the indifference that people display towards the wonderful adventures you’ve just had. You’ve also adjusted to living in a different culture that may then require readjustment to living back home.
This episode examines those feelings and emotions. John also shares how his family coped with the return to the United States and what they did to remain connected in some way with their international experience.
If you find the conversation riveting, and perhaps even a bit reminiscent of what you have gone through, please leave your comments on the homepage at www.auto-ethnographer.com
If you give permission to The Auto Ethnographer to talk about your feedback, using only First Name and Country, on a future podcast, your feedback will be included in a future conversation.
Or leave your comments on the YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrD6CPH0KXdKrIRBnTHpuQ
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
But surprisingly, the hardest culture, the biggest challenge, was coming home and merging back into my own home culture.
Introduction to Culture and Global Automotive Industry
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Auto Ethnographer. I'm John Steck, your host on this journey. We travel the globe to bring you stories about culture and the global automotive industry. Fasten your seatbelt and let's get started.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Autoethnographer. Today is kind of an interesting subject. It's something that every expat has to face at some point or another when they've been living overseas.
The Challenges of Returning Home as an Expat
00:00:39
Speaker
Or if you're thinking about going overseas, it's something that you should think about even before you leave because that topic is coming back home. I found that the hardest part of my expat experiences living abroad has been to go home, to merge back into the culture that I'm from, or at least one that I've adopted throughout my lifetime in the United States.
00:01:07
Speaker
It's hard. Returning home is the most difficult part at the end of living overseas.
Cultural Adaptation Experiences in Egypt and Russia
00:01:14
Speaker
So from my perspective, I lived abroad with my family for eight years and we lived in multiple countries.
00:01:23
Speaker
We started off living in Egypt. It's another podcast episode where I talked about how we moved to Egypt, how we got ourselves ready for that adventure.
00:01:33
Speaker
We lived there for a little bit more than one year. And then we spent seven years in Moscow, Russia, which seven years, you really start to adapt and learn how to live inside of a culture different than your own.
00:01:47
Speaker
What we didn't expect on coming home was a parade. We didn't expect people to have balloons and streamers and fireworks when we got back to the United States.
00:01:58
Speaker
But what we also didn't expect was indifference. Life abroad is interesting. interesting It's really an adventure to live overseas outside of your own culture. You have to learn everything about how to adapt, how to live in that new culture, which which isn't your own.
00:02:16
Speaker
and And it can be dramatically different like Egypt and Russia was to my family. Perhaps you even have to learn a language or two when you're living in this overseas assignment.
00:02:27
Speaker
And every single day there's something new and there's a learning opportunity for picking up something from the local culture, from the local language, just the everyday life.
00:02:40
Speaker
These learnings, they can happen in a class. They can happen in small interactions that just happen on the street or in a cafe or in a grocery store.
00:02:51
Speaker
For example, my son one day in Egypt, he was maybe four or five years old. I went outside and and there he was by the side of the street playing with a young Egyptian boy.
00:03:04
Speaker
The two couldn't talk. My son spoke only English, a little bit of German at that time, and the Egyptian boy spoke only Arabic. They had no way to communicate, but there they were playing by the side of the road with these little toy cars and making little motor sounds and driving the cars around. them And that was one of those things that, that really made me smile because you realize that the children are completely open, blank pages, open to each other, open to cultures, open to, to different people and that are different from themselves, even if they're separated by no common language.
Unique Cultural Encounters and Language Barriers
00:03:41
Speaker
Another time. we, when I was living in in Russia with my family, we went to a town called Gus Khrustani, which is east of Moscow and is famous for big glass works, for all sorts of glassware.
00:03:54
Speaker
We went on a sledding trip with work colleagues there. and all of their families. And we were the only Americans in the entire group. I think we had probably 10 or 12 cars in our convoy driving out to the east of Moscow for this overnight trip.
00:04:10
Speaker
And the real objective was, of course, to see the the glassworks and the museum. But what the kids wanted was the sledding trip. We went to this amazing place where there were some great sledding hills and the kids spent hours running up and down the hills with the the Russian friends.
00:04:28
Speaker
And again, they they couldn't really understand each other and and truly communicate, but they were having so much fun. It just simply didn't matter. On that same trip, I also had an interesting opportunity.
00:04:42
Speaker
I was introduced to a priest, a Russian Orthodox priest, who was busy repainting the inside of an old church. What was really amazing was that he had never met an American, and ever, in his life.
00:04:58
Speaker
And this was in 2010, when certainly the ah when know certainly the The Iron Curtain had already fallen, know, basically 20 years before. So we enjoyed a conversation.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yes, it was through an interpreter, but it was still great to share our views. And he asked me lots of questions, what life was like living in the United States. And I asked him questions about what life was like in this small village and taking on the responsibility by himself to repaint the inside of this beautiful old church.
00:05:31
Speaker
On another occasion, I was just west of Moscow in the summertime in a small village called Istra. And i had gone to go look at a monastery that was nearby that I heard was very beautiful.
00:05:46
Speaker
And afterwards I went to go get some lunch. And I walked into this little grill and the proprietor stood behind the counter. And this was very primitive place.
00:05:58
Speaker
You could see the charcoal grill. ah You could see the the different meats behind the counter. And and some of the the meats were on the on the grill already grilling up a shashlik, the meat on a stick.
00:06:12
Speaker
and that was an adventure for me because I tried my very best to speak Russian as, as best I could. i had been practicing, i had learned quite a bit of Russian, and I was talking and I was ordering, and I kept giving my order all of the parts that I wanted. What I wanted to drink, what I wanted to eat as the main course, a salad and even a soup.
00:06:38
Speaker
And the gentleman behind the counter just kept looking at me like he had no idea what I was saying. And I was quite sure that my pronunciation was correct. And then it turns out he tells me he's not Russian and he actually also doesn't speak Russian very well, just like I didn't.
00:06:54
Speaker
And we looked at each other, we smiled and we had a big laugh that here we were for five minutes trying to put the order together by a spoken word as opposed to me just pointing at the menu on the counter.
00:07:08
Speaker
I would say one of the ah the the biggest adventures that that drew me together with friends and and colleagues in those two countries in Egypt and in Russia was actually something common.
Jeep Excursions and Universal Family Values
00:07:21
Speaker
It was a brand. It was the Jeep brand, a brand for which I was responsible in both countries.
00:07:27
Speaker
And whether I was a member of the Jeep Club in Egypt And we would take our monthly Sahara desert Jeep trip with, with many, many families and usually about 20 to 30 Jeeps far out into the desert, sometimes one day, sometimes overnight.
00:07:46
Speaker
And then there were other times when we did exactly the same thing in Russia. We would have 10 or 15 Jeeps loaded up with colleagues from work and we would drive out into the forest and we would camp overnight, sitting in the evening, grilling shashlik out in the forest, having a vodka or two, and then having lots of conversation deep into the into the night.
00:08:11
Speaker
And I also learned one of the most famous sayings that the better you're off-roader, the further you have to walk back to get a tractor to pull you out, of course, when you get stuck.
00:08:25
Speaker
These were the small moments that helped me understand that people around the world are fundamentally the same. We all care for and take care of and love our families.
00:08:38
Speaker
We take care of them with shelter, with food. We keep them safe and we provide them with education and all of the nurturing that they may need, including, of course, health care.
00:08:53
Speaker
Maybe we look different. We wear different types of clothing. We have different beliefs and our customs are different. We're simply not the same. But at our core, we are the same.
00:09:06
Speaker
We want fundamentally the same thing for our families. And then it was time to return to the United States.
Reverse Culture Shock in the US
00:09:15
Speaker
Like I said before, we didn't expect a parade, but we thought that people would at least be curious.
00:09:22
Speaker
This time we moved to New York State. Our departure point had been Michigan, Detroit, when I had been working with Chrysler and the Jeep brand. On the way back to the United States, I had changed manufacturers. I was now working for Volvo Cars and their office was outside of New York City in New Jersey, but we had decided to live in New York State.
00:09:44
Speaker
We had a new town. We had new schools for the children. We had new neighbors and I had new colleagues. So for all of us, everything was new.
00:09:55
Speaker
So yes, we were back in our home country. but everything was different and we had to relearn everything from scratch. And ironically, it turned out we almost had to relearn our own culture back home.
00:10:11
Speaker
The first weeks back, I think the kids were amused to be back in the United States. They really couldn't remember living there as small children since we had been out for eight years.
00:10:24
Speaker
They were back for summer are vacations for six or seven weeks at a time, but that's different when you're staying with grandparents or friends over the summertime and not living in your own home and not having your daily life activities and going to school.
00:10:41
Speaker
So this was different. This was new. This was fun. This was novel for the beginning. But over time, we noticed there was a bit of an emotional disconnect.
00:10:52
Speaker
There was this absence of curiosity about what we had experienced living overseas, something that we were bursting to tell. There was a richness to our journey, but but this seemed to be somehow invisible to the people around us.
00:11:08
Speaker
Was it envy? Was it a lack of exposure? or just that my stories and my kids' stories made no sense in the local context?
00:11:20
Speaker
Personally, I think it was the last two of these. As you probably know, many Americans simply don't travel overseas. You can probably blame that a little bit on the relatively small amount of vacation time people get in the United States, um but but they simply don't travel and and less than half of Americans have passports.
00:11:42
Speaker
So, and they particularly don't travel to Egypt or Russia, places which are, I would say, much more exotic um than the the kind of normal European vacation trip that a lot of Americans take.
00:11:54
Speaker
So it was strange that even with these unusual locations that we lived, Cairo and Moscow, that people didn't seem interested. They didn't know what to ask.
00:12:06
Speaker
I'll give you one example, something that that hit me every single time, every weekend, really. My son and my daughter were avid soccer players or football for the global reference.
00:12:17
Speaker
ah They were playing every single weekend. And you know over the years, my daughter eventually developed other interests, but my son kept playing indeed all the way through university.
00:12:28
Speaker
And every weekend I went to the soccer games. So In Egypt or in Russia, i I did the same. We would go to the the games and we would be somewhere at a field in Moscow or in Cairo.
00:12:45
Speaker
And the international parents and and also local ah parents, they would all be diplomats or or foreign and local executives, or they were working at some sort of non-governmental organization, an NGO.
00:13:01
Speaker
We spoke about geopolitical issues. We talked about global economics. We talked about international trade and all of the things that kind of these that the blended together and into this more worldly set of topics.
00:13:19
Speaker
And then back in the United States, I went to my first couple of soccer games in the fall of 2014. And I sat down on the bench by the side of the field.
00:13:34
Speaker
There were some fathers from my son's team, and I sat with them. And they talked about lawn care, when to cut the grass, how often to fertilize,
00:13:48
Speaker
Do they water it in the morning or in the afternoon? How late in the season should you cut it one last time?
00:13:57
Speaker
I was just missing the the wealth and the depth of the conversation that I had so loved while living overseas. It just wasn't there. And I got it. I understood because here, you know, we're individuals who didn't have that that experience. not None of them had ever lived overseas, so they they couldn't share that feeling.
00:14:20
Speaker
and and And as everybody normally is, you get overwhelmed by daily life and and the daily things that you do. and And you simply don't have time to think or talk about something outside of that.
00:14:34
Speaker
sitting by those soccer games and talking about lawn care really drove it home for me. I think that was what I always used to explain um how my disappointment was kind of realized coming back and just not having the same kind of scope that I had enjoyed for for eight years.
00:14:58
Speaker
I think the entire family felt a little bit misunderstood or even in some ways undervalued for the experiences that we had had. There was an exception, I have to say.
00:15:10
Speaker
And that was that during parent teacher meetings at the school, the teachers would always tell us that our kids seemed somehow more mature, older than their age, and even worldly was an expression we often heard, much more so than their American peers.
Educational Differences and Personal Growth
00:15:30
Speaker
And That was when we knew that we had done the right thing to take the children abroad and and let them grow from those experiences. There was a interesting sense, I think of reverse culture shock.
00:15:45
Speaker
um My kids, they told me that their first day of school in September of 2014 strange. Both of them went to different schools. One was in high school, one was in middle school at that time.
00:16:01
Speaker
So they had different school hours and they returned separately from their first day of school. And I asked them, how was the first day? And without them having talked to each other, without them having somehow prodded each other on giving the same answer, they spontaneously answered with the same response.
00:16:20
Speaker
They said that the school felt very, quote unquote, white, and that the children spoke very American. they They were so shocked after having international school experience where they had 60 or 65 different nationalities under the roof of the school to suddenly have what what they perceived as a very, very homogeneous student population.
00:16:49
Speaker
this was for them a giant shock. They also told stories later on few months in that during the social studies class, for example, when you study you know the history of the United States, world history um and and look at geography, that when it came time to pull down the United States map and identify the states on the map, my children just couldn't name many states at all, except the ones they had visited to see their grandparents back in the United States when they would visit for the summertime.
00:17:25
Speaker
However,
00:17:29
Speaker
kudos to the teachers. They pulled down the world map because my children had been a little bit, I guess, self-conscious about not understanding which states were what.
00:17:41
Speaker
So when the teachers pulled down the world map, my kids could identify just like that dozens of countries around the world on the map. where most of the other children in the classroom didn't know anything outside of the United States and probably couldn't find many of the locations that were being named by my kids.
00:18:02
Speaker
That was a moment that really showed how the different schooling, the different upbringing and just a different worldview um played into their personal developments.
00:18:14
Speaker
How to cope with this? It wasn't so easy actually to come back and to to realize that yeah people didn't care and to slide back into my own culture.
00:18:25
Speaker
What i had to learn to some extent was that some journeys in life just aren't meant to be validated by other people. You just had to use it to develop yourself.
00:18:38
Speaker
And it wasn't something that you necessarily had to share. It was part of your heart, part of your learning that you would keep. for the rest of your days, something that you would carry and value and treasure, but you didn't necessarily have to share with other people.
00:18:58
Speaker
Again, if they don't ask, there's no need to share.
Maintaining Past Identities and Curiosity Through Travel
00:19:04
Speaker
One of the interesting parts was how to re-root and to grow and to reframe ourselves coming back into essentially our our home culture.
00:19:19
Speaker
Interestingly, um we all kind of revolted against doing it for quite some time. So just as an example, both of my children had their own car once they were in high school.
00:19:32
Speaker
And these were both of them were Volvos at the time. And it was possible, for example, in the settings to change the readout display between metric settings and you know us imperial settings.
00:19:46
Speaker
And my children for years drove around with their outside temperature indicator in Celsius. And they talked in Celsius and they confused all their friends at school in Celsius who didn't know what Celsius was and were essentially only able to communicate in Fahrenheit, which ironically my kids were not able to communicate in because they had not lived with Fahrenheit for eight years.
00:20:11
Speaker
That was ah definitely a ah form of protest. The other protest, I think I could call it is my daughter insisting on spelling words in the British way.
00:20:24
Speaker
For example, theater is spelled with R E as opposed to E R having aluminum as opposed to aluminum.
00:20:36
Speaker
These were just small things that kept them ah kept them going, kept them connected to where they had spent you know so much a part of their lives. At that point, it was half their lives.
00:20:49
Speaker
But as for the the kids, they took every opportunity to travel overseas. just over the past two years. My son had done a solo trip to Scotland, traveled with his girlfriend to Portugal, and my daughter had spent five weeks backpacking Indonesia on her own.
00:21:09
Speaker
She also had met with her boyfriend and they traveled over in Denmark. So every chance they got, they would take the opportunity to go back and travel someplace international and to explore the world beyond beyond their own country's borders.
00:21:28
Speaker
I would definitely say that travel skills are my children's superpower. Slowly, images of living in Egypt and Russia, they they fade into memory, into that fog.
00:21:44
Speaker
So it becomes important to occasionally open up that that file folder on the laptop, look at the digital photos and and just relive our adventure in Egypt, relive those wonderful days that we spent in Russia until 2014.
00:22:03
Speaker
Every now and then I'll even just send a random photo to my kids by messenger just to show them, Hey, look what you were doing five years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago when we were living, you know, in Cairo or in in Moscow.
00:22:18
Speaker
It's always fun to to share those moments and and then to relive it and and to remind them, yes, you actually you actually did do that and you actually were there you know at the pyramids or at Luxor in Egypt or on Red Square.
00:22:35
Speaker
The most powerful thing that we all did when we came back to the United States was that we all sought out people that had some similarity in their experiences to us.
Connecting with Others with Shared Experiences
00:22:53
Speaker
In the case of my children, they befriended quite often ah international students who were who were there, either you know by the semester as an exchange student or who were even living in the United States long term.
00:23:07
Speaker
So they often befriended students who and didn't look like them, who didn't talk like them, who who had different customs and different beliefs. The same went for me at work.
00:23:19
Speaker
I often talked to other individuals within the company at Volvo um who had a little bit more experience, be it Americans who had lived abroad or some of the Swedes or other nationalities that were working in the office in New Jersey.
00:23:37
Speaker
I was also very lucky in that I was responsible for the Latin America region as well as for Canada for about four years. And that allowed me to either travel quite extensively and and to continue to see different places and and meet people from many different countries, 22 different countries.
00:23:56
Speaker
Or I had daily calls, meetings, conversations with with people from different countries, which to me has, as I've said in every podcast, is is my my utopia to to be mixed and blended and and talking to people from different places, different cultures, different backgrounds.
00:24:17
Speaker
But what about you? What about the listeners? I'd love to hear from you um either leaving comments at YouTube or on the homepage, www.auto-ethnographer.com.
00:24:35
Speaker
Have you lived overseas? Did you return to your home country? Did you have a similar experience? Was it wonderful coming back home? Or was it possibly a little bit of a letdown, possibly a little bit of a disappointment and and an anticlimax after being abroad and experiencing something so different from your home?
00:25:00
Speaker
I'd love to hear about your experiences. And if you allow me to, i can even mention some of them on a future podcast.
Defining Home and Cultural Stories
00:25:08
Speaker
think in summary, the word home is kind of interesting because I've used the word home country and home a couple of times.
00:25:17
Speaker
It's I think it's not really a place. Home is not a place. It's more of a concept. And I think home is probably the stories that you carry inside of you.
00:25:28
Speaker
and And whether you tell them and they're heard or not, you carry them with you. I think that's where home is. Even if you look at the bottom of the autoethnographer website,
00:25:41
Speaker
there's a section that indicates headquarters and the headquarters location is identified as where the luggage is. And that's so true. Wherever the stuff is, that's where the home is.
00:25:55
Speaker
So the auto ethnographer podcast, it's all about culture in the global auto industry. And we've had guests from all over the world and different cultures have been a challenge for everyone to get to know as, as all of my different guests have identified in the past.
00:26:13
Speaker
It's, it can be a challenge, but it's also a wonderful challenge. Something that's really interesting and fun to try to tackle.
Living in Thailand and Ongoing Cultural Exploration
00:26:22
Speaker
But surprisingly, the hardest culture, the biggest challenge was coming home and merging back into my own home culture.
00:26:36
Speaker
But I say that now from Thailand where I'm currently living. So the adventure continues and i leave you with that thought.
00:26:47
Speaker
Where is your adventure? Until next week, keep on driving.
00:26:54
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on today's journey. Please remember to like and subscribe to The Auto Ethnographer and leave us a rating or comment. For more information, visit our website at auto-ethnographer.com.
00:27:06
Speaker
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