Ex-pats (and here I am talking really about young ex-pats, and mostly male ones) are basically D&D PCs. They generally have no family or responsibilities in the country in which they live; they usually have a fairly high disposable income because they have no real financial commitments beyond paying rent; they are treated as exotic outsiders by the mainstream culture; and they often also have the unconscious arrogance that comes from being "young, dumb and full of cum" in an exciting location far from home. The sense of freedom one gets is intoxicating. Everything feels like an adventure.
While they might not be going around slaying orcs and pillaging dragons' treasure hordes, they do find themselves getting into all manner of scrapes, both good and bad. I moved to Japan when I was 21 1/2. Before I was 22 I had broken my toes diving off a sea cliff, had numerous fights, dated and broken up with a stripper, befriended a Peruvian drug dealer, fallen asleep on at least three or four 5am trains after nights out on a Sunday mornings and woken up at strange railway stations with no idea how to get home, had flings with several married women, and imbibed about three times more alcohol than I had in my entire life prior to that point.
And I was by far and away the most sensible of my friends. One of my housemates was robbed of all his possessions by associates of said Peruvian drug dealer after a party; another fled Japan for Australia after having apparently taken something or other that disagreed with him and descending into serious paranoid delusions about being pursued everywhere by an old woman on a bike with a camera. I knew a number of people who did prison time for various offences concerning drug possession, theft and/or violence, several of whom were subsequently deported. Like me, I am sure that they all left their home countries as sensible young men imbued only with a spirit of adventure.* Being at large in foreign climes with no roots or ties or social constraints turned them into rogues. Not quite murderhoboes. But possibly getting there.
I would not like to go back to those days. But I would like to run a sort of ur-cyberpunk campaign set among petty ex-pat criminals in an exotic location. Picture it as an Elmore Leonard novel taking place in a non-existent simulacrum of a Havana, Shanghai, Zanzibar or Adelaide, but with cyberarms and Johnny Silverhand songs on the radio. That I could get behind.
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*That's not to mention the people who go to live overseas because they are fleeing the law in their home country, quite a number of whom I have met, nor those who are just crazy, weird, or psychopathic to begin with; it's possible of course that I fall into that latter category somewhere without me knowing it.
I've spent almost all of my life outside of my home country of Australia, and I relate to everything you said here. Moving around the world as a child, it didn't take long before I developed the game of simply explaining anything odd I did as being an entirely normal thing in Australia. The world was a lot bigger in the pre-Internet era, and nobody knew anything about Australia back then.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how the tighter a culture's internal rules are, the looser they can be for outsiders. Because Japan has such specificity in how Japanese people behave, they have no expectation at all that any foreigner can manage. Therefore they are generally tolerant of foreigners being oddballs.
In the United States (I generalize here, as I know the US has a lot of different cultures), there is a less exacting code of behavior, but there is a lot less tolerance for people that step outside it.
You are right about that for sure but it's something I notice even in a relatively open society like Britain's. I've seen so many people come to work here from overseas and treat the place like an exotic playground in exactly the same way I acted in Japan when I first lived there.
DeleteUS has a bunch of cultures. Of those, the ones that aren't rooted in an immigrant community were a result of:
DeleteMixing cultures at an individual level, more or less.
A bunch of strangers from different countries and cultures negotiating some minimum cultural consensus that let them conduct business with each other without killing each other too much. Folks too deviant to adapt to whatever it was locally left or were killed.
So, despite knowing that the foreigners I know locally don't grok this, and maybe aren't interesting in living here and converting to American culture, I treat them as if they were opting into the consensus that permits American society to function. I ignore them to mind their own business, as I would prefer to be ignored. I treat them as opting in, because they haven't done anything worth capital punishment, which I would consider opting out.
US is in an interesting state. Quietly murdering extreme deviants (such as unpopular robbers, etc) has gone out of fashion, so the enforced norms and consequences are much less obvious. That means that there is a silent dissatisfaction with some of the newcomers who are flamboyantly not falling in line with the consensus. Harsher enforcement may come back into fashion, or perhaps the old consensus will be replaced with a newer, different consensus, or maybe the thing could fragment.
The blog post gives me a lot of very useful things to think about. Thanks.
That whole Capitol Theatre performance just smokes. You can see quite a lot of it on youtube. My favourite is the epic conclusion with Jungle Work.
ReplyDeleteOh right, here it is. A better 82 minutes than whatever's on Netflix, probably. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp1Pb-yVuv0
Delete"had flings with several married women"
ReplyDeleteYou're bragging about that?
And why not, Anonymous 12:18?
DeleteNot bragging about it - for heaven's sake, look at the context and read the rest of the sentence. Does it come in a list of things to brag about?
DeleteThese things happen. We're all grown-ups.
Fuck it, I'd brag about that.
DeleteYou know, I always sort of thought of you as a 'the inklings' style british person, for how much you talk about the charming countryside, anglo-saxon ruins, etc. Not to put you in a box, but this post kinda threw me and my understanding of you for a loop. That's what I get for thinking I fully understand someone based solely off their RPG blog.
ReplyDeleteI am sure everybody feels this way but I'm not easily pigeon-holed. I think I have a pretty elastic or changeable character.
DeleteI think lots of people have different sides to their life that others wouldn’t much suspect, especially if they only casually know them. So I found this quite interesting. As a tourist a couple of times in Europe (Italy, France, Germany) found there was a touch of this - specially when they found out I was Australian. I got let off for a few quirks that Brits, Americans and Canadians did not. This was the 90s so I doubt it is the same now.
DeleteI like your inclusion of Adelaide in your list of cities: it is a good list, and a good idea. I’ve also been to Adelaide a couple of times, know people from there, and feel I could totally make a good setting for an rpg city from it. Probably not an fair & accurate portrayal, but in the sort of campaign you’ve painted, I don’t feel that would matter too much. I do think that the mix of cities you present would actually all work together quite well. Something to think about, as are many of leads/points for follow up in the rest of the interesting comments. Thanks for the post, it has provoked quite a few useful thoughts.
Ex-pat culture can do that to people. I was painfully nerdy in college. A few months later I was drinking all night at a picnic table in front of a mini-mart with a failed dentist commiserating about how he got chylmidia from a language exchange, a manic-depressive alcoholic diabetic ranting about how all women are bitches while we egged on the most straight-laced member of our group to buy the next round of beers naked.
ReplyDeleteA familiar situation to us all.
DeleteHa! This is all wonderfully familiar. I was in Japan at exactly the same age.
ReplyDeleteAlong with the things you mention, a big factor in expat roguery is the lack of any set schedule beyond work. When I was there, I was, to some extent, reined in by playing for a local rugby team. That entailed several practices a week, much dining, a bit of travelling, and, of course, weekend games. It provided a shape and structure that - in retrospect - was probably very healthy. But there was still plenty of room for roguishness - though not quite to the destructive extent I saw in some people I knew.
A few months ago, I found myself on a transcontinental conference call with someone who'd been in the same part of Japan at the same time. We didn't know each other terribly well then, but once we'd worked out how the other was, you could almost hear the whirring of gears as memory banks were scanned for any awkward and half-forgotten tales ...
As a foreigner living in Hong Kong for quite some time, I have more or less survived my expat adventuring career. Aside from the shenanigans one can get up to when living outside of cultural norms, one aspect of this post struck me: The familiarity of living in a place is an important factor in how much shenanigans one can get up to. Tourists can't really understand how ridiculous they seem to locals and anyway they follow a sort of tourist script. Any variance from local norms is obscured by the fact that tourists are gone so quickly and tend to be busy doing "tourist things". Expats are so weird precisely because they have enough exposure to a culture to understand its outlines and routines but do not conform. The amount of time they spend interacting with locals is so much higher as well, so their differences are much more salient.
ReplyDeleteYour cyberpunk game sounds like it would be interesting. It would be interesting to see how you create the local culture as a foil for PCs to mess with.
In what year did you go to Japan and where? I was there only 1 year (1994/1995) on Kyushu but was in the position to travel around quite a bit. Many good memories and I still have a soft spot for the country.
ReplyDeleteTotally off-topic, but I just had two weeks of deligthful commuting cause I only found out two weeks ago that you revived your blog after the hiatus last year.
ReplyDeleteI devoured each and every post after the resurrection.
Thank you for staying true to writing and, at least equally important, sharing.