Things Never To Say To An Expat

Living in a country where you were not born, but which you have made your home, or another home, or are attempting to, means that you're often confronted with a recurring number of sayings and situations which impact on the way you see yourself in that society. With the possibility of my officially applying, within the next several months, for dual French/Australian citizenship, the prevalence of these reactions is becoming more and more striking for me. Usually these occur, like most forms of surprisingly painful social interactions, from others simply trying to be friendly. Often they are less offensive than simply boring and repetitive: it's not necessarily anyone's fault, it just means that living with this sort of thing daily or weekly, year after year, can sometimes take its toll. There are all the wonderful reasons you've chosen to live in another country, and then there's this. It's one reason I tire at times from French parties and social interaction, as I know a lot of English-as-a-second-language expats do who live in Britain, Australia or the States. It just becomes tiring to explain the same things over and over, instead of being able to talk to other people about music, books or film.

And this week has been strange: I've had a few howlers directed at me, mostly in professional circles. With this in mind, I thought I'd outline a few guidelines to observe when speaking to expatriate people. I'd be interested to know from expats and others whether they agree with these or not: maybe they think some of them are excessive, but at least in my experience they constitute a range of questions and topics of conversation I personally never want to hear again.

Let's begin.

1) NEVER compliment people born in another country for their language abilities. That is, NEVER. Even if they say that they have come to America or France six months ago and appear to speak perfect English or French. But this is a nice thing to say, isn't it? No, it isn't. It immediately creates a quite solid barrier between the "native" and the "imported" language-user. Unless of course you compliment other Americans or French daily about their good diction or correct grammar. That is, if you regularly declare "Nice subjunctive, Frank!" to fellow "I-was-born-here"s at parties, feel free to ignore this rule. Otherwise, don't do it. It's deeply patronizing. Only this week I received the following compliment: "I can hardly hear any accent when you talk. It's extraordinary! You must have had incredible teachers, or you're very brilliant." In this situation the expat will always nod and smile, but she or he is inwardly thinking: "Your dog sits marvelously. You must have taught him very well"

2) Don't correct peoples' mistakes in a language unless you are on EXTREMELY intimate terms with them, or if this precedent has already been discussed between you. Consider correcting someone else's verb conjugations as being an equivalent social act as asking somebody about their sexuality. Again, if you frequently correct other "I-was-born-here" friends for not using "whom" as a post-prepositional pronoun or direct object, you may also ignore this rule.

3) NEVER say to someone: "Enjoy your stay in the country!" unless you explicitly know this person is planning to LEAVE said country at a specific date. Otherwise, it implies that you either want them to leave, or that you consider that this would be the natural thing for them to do, as their natural home is elsewhere. If you would not say to your friend Frank: "Enjoy your stay in America, Frank!", do not say the same to your German friend Ursula. She would be permitted, in my book, to walk off.

4) This is more common, but: even if you can think of nothing else to say in a conversation, do not start talking to an expat about anything that even remotely resembles a national cliche. What is a national cliche? Probably anything about another country which is the first thing that comes into your head. It doesn't offend me if French people start asking questions about the desert and kangaroos: I just find it incredibly stupid, considering that I spent my time in temperate rainforests in the north-east of Australia and then went to school and university in the cities. But more than this silliness aspect, expats just find it incredibly boring. If you ask a Columbian about drugs or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, chances are people have already talked to them about drugs or Gabriel Garcia Marquez literally around 100 to 200 times already. Literally. This conversation is not too bad when you initially arrive in a country: it can be fun and a bit silly to compare stereotypes. But after some 5 or so years it gets excessively painful. Imagine 20 or 30 years of this.

5) Also, and along these lines, avoid confusion of people with their governments. Americans in Paris don't necessarily want to talk about Iraq any more than Germans in America want to talk about the Nuremberg trials. If you're curious, the best thing to do is to avoid leading questions and ask very open ones like: "What is it like in Columbia?" The person will then tell you much more surprising and interesting things than if you'd asked him or her about cocaine.

6) This is sometimes more difficult still, but try very hard not to make very serious mistakes about where somebody comes from. My girlfriend is Ukrainian and, after saying this, consistently receives as a next question: "So, what was it like living in Russia?" When you confuse a country with another country which borders it- yes -but has also imperially repressed it, torturing and massacring its inhabitants for thousands of years - including Stalin's starvation of millions of its citizens, now referred to as the Ukrainian Holocaust - it does not produce a pleasant effect for the person involved. Communism in post-bloc countries is a recent, and usually very painful, thing. It would be like confusing Poland with Germany around 1959. Would you want to do that? I think not.

Anyway, I received two of these just yesterday, and thought it would be good to outline a few of them. Other suggestions welcomed. And in case one might weirdly think that these types of phrases and reactions are more common to people who "travel less" or are "less educated", I should note: these remarks most often occur for me in 1) universities 2) from doctors, dentists, optometrists etc., and 3) from bureaucrats. That is, from the professional classes even more so than your local cabbies or grocers.

And also: there are different types of "correct" or "appropriate" language use, just as there are different types of "incorrect" or "inappropriate" language use. Thus, the phoneme-swamp is complex. For instance, I'd prefer almost any foreign street-sign in English to almost any of the "correct" English sentences I hear on Fox. (Not that there's much correct English on Fox anyway, but you get my drift . . .) This doesn't mean we should forget the notion of clear or eloquent or beautiful English use. It simply means there's a distinction to be made between language as pure instrument and language as fundamental structure.

With that in mind, please go into the toilet beard know . . .


(P.S. And for those Japanese, Mandarin etc. readers, some good equivalent sites on the decorative use of those languages' characters by baroque Anglophones, or more often, the decorative use of Japanese in China.)