expatriate

I recall several of my American friends in China who had to undergo "repatriation training" to get them to "regain their patriotism". Sounds pretty ridiculous, especially when they only had been living abroad for 3 years, but true.

Extra care with manners, restaurants that require men to wear jackets, small towns with shops that are unattached to any chain, Spanish Moss and outdoor ceiling fans on wraparound porches. We love all those things, and more.

But we are not there, anymore. Visits are not the same as being in the South.

To be separated, estranged, is to be apart but left wanting. Wanting... what? The experience of a past that lives on... stubbornly, fitfully, but often gracefully.

• Freedom from civic responsibility: if anything goes wrong in the motherland, you're not there to suffer from it and if (when) things go wrong in your host country, it's not your fault - you're just a foreigner.
• Freedom to be a bit odd: it is expected that foreigners will be act abnormally, so you can cloak your real wierd tendencies as mere national differences
• Freedom to be a cultural magpie: you can cherry-pick aspects of your native culture and those of that into which you have moved.
• Assuming it's a real foreign country, i.e. one where they don't speak your first language, your kids, should you have any, may well grow up bilingual. This will be deemed to be a great gift by all those you know, and is indeed quite handy, although not that uncommon in the world as a whole; about 70% of the world population speaks more than one language (it's just that the kids who are bilingual but whose other language happens to be Wolof or Tagalog - or even Spanish or Arabic - will just be assumed to be being awkward if they try and make anything of it, while having fluent English on top of whatever they speak there is prestigious, of course).

It's too late; you're hooked. And even if you had your doubts, house price differentials may either make you scared to get off the housing ladder in an expensive area or leave you unable to afford a rabbit hutch if you now live somewhere cheaper. You can probably move to a third country quite easily, but the one that raised you will never quite be right again.

Ex*pa"tri*ate (?), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Expatriated (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Expatriating (?).] [LL. expatriatus, p. p. of expatriare; L. ex out + patria fatherland, native land, fr. pater father. See Patriot.]

1.

To banish; to drive or force (a person) from his own country; to make an exile of.

The expatriated landed interest of France. Burke.

2.

Reflexively, as To expatriate one's self: To withdraw from one's native country; to renounce the rights and liabilities of citizenship where one is born, and become a citizen of another country.

© Webster 1913.