I have lived back in the US for five and half years after
almost eleven years in Asia. This is my first personal blog post in over six
months. For the past year or so I have been writing business related posts on
Linked In which gradually seemed to replace my need to write on the personal
blog. Blogging really was a “need” when I first started in November of 2010.
I wrote more than one hundred blog posts over five years. I
wanted to capture my memories of life overseas so that I wouldn’t lose them to
the the passage of time. I also used writing as therapy to help me deal with
the transition back to “normal life” in my home country.
Yeah, I know, we are dealing with first world problems here.
Like anyone born in the United States of America, I have a natural advantage
over most of the other seven billion people on this planet. Anyone living at
what is considered the poverty line in the US is a minimum “five percenter” and
closer to a “one percenter” compared to the rest of the world. Ok – you cynics go
ahead and check Google before continuing. Better yet, get on a plane and take a
walk in rural SE Asia, China, Africa, etc. I write this post from the
perspective that I and anyone else reading this are part of the “lucky few” on
planet earth.
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| My buddy from a floating village in Cambodia |
My wife and I often ruminated about how the US changed
during our lengthy sojourn in Asia. For the most part we felt the changes in
the US were not positive. Political correctness had swept the land. I was often asked about
living in “communist China” and caused more than one raised eyebrow when I
would respond that in many ways there is more freedom in China than in the good
ole USA. Many Americans have a really hard time with that concept.
Don’t get me wrong. I love America and didn’t go “native”
during my years in Japan and China despite my strong positive feelings for both places but as we learned in “expat training” before we left the for Japan,
coming back is often a big adjustment after just three years outside your native country. However, when
you stay away more than ten years the degree of re-entry difficulty is
multiplied significantly.
My first twenty-two months back in the US were very challenging.
During that time period I tried without success to reintegrate into what was
often referred to overseas as the “home office” or “HQ”. I knew from day one
back in Charlotte that the company and I had both changed too much for me to
ever successfully transition. Like any bad marriage, I should have just
ended the relationship and moved on but things like two kids in private colleges
and being clueless about what “else I would do” enabled the inertia that kept
me unhappily wed to my corporate masters.
On Sunday nights, I was like a kid that gets a stomach ache
at the thought of going to school on Monday. My first year back I made more
trips back to Asia than I really needed to just because the I couldn’t stand being in the US office. I had a steady diet of seemingly endless corporate nonsense. Every meeting I attended
started with a “safety share”. I will never forget the safety share about “not
taking your shoes off on a plane until you reach cruising altitude”. How did I
“safely” get four million frequent flyer miles before I heard that gem of
aviation wisdom?” When I had to attend four or five meetings on some days; I often
got “safety share reruns” with immutable wisdom like: “lift heavy objects with your legs and not your back”. You can't hear that too many times in one day. I
am all for safety but this was just another seemingly good idea taken past the
point of common sense.
Twenty-two months after my return, I was the beneficiary of
the “corporate euthanasia” program also known as a RIF (reduction in force).
Normally in a RIF there is a certain group or class of employees the company is
seeking to cut. For example, a new accounting system could lessen the need
for payroll staff and the company might seek to drop the number of clerks from
12 to 8 by offering a package for people to leave. In my case the group was one
person – me. Yes, they literally went through the charade of declaring my
position to be a group that needed to be reduced. Details of that happy day can
be found on a prior blog post. http://jpl-expatblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/moving-on.html
It has been almost four years since I became corporate
“jetsam”. Only the first few weeks were
difficult. Fortunately, my ex-pat package enabled me to save more than 80% of
my income for over a decade and the end of my tuition paying years were in
sight. I planned as if our savings and modest pension payment from “early
retirement” would have to fund our lifestyle going forward because I thought my
future prospects as “someone of a certain age” were limited. Fortunately, my
wife and many friends had a much more positive spin on my options.
I had worked for over two decades in a global but small
market which was about to start a serendipitous boom. Better still, China and
Japan, the two countries I lived and worked in as an ex-pat were at the center
of the opportunity. Initially my scar tissue from getting fired prevented me
from fully “connecting the dots” of the potential laid before me.
Fortunately, I had several friends that helped me to figure out how to leverage
my suddenly greatly in demand skill set.
Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of working
with a diverse mix of manufacturers, investors, analysts and even a couple
governments around the world. I have learned as much in this short time as in any other era of my life. Working for myself means I do not have to waste half of the
day in mind numbing meetings with no meaningful agenda or participate in
training seminars on topics from office ergonomics to diversity role playing -
I think taking a train across Qinghai province China fifteen years ago and
drinking “mao tai” with my "new best friends" might been an acceptable substitute
for the diversity course.
When you have spent more than a decade traveling to places
where people regularly ask to touch your skin or hair and occasionally attempt
to touch your eyeball before trying to feed you delicacies that were formerly the
internal organs of “some unidentified living thing” – having to attend "corporate training" where a young, white female who
has never left North America teaches you about "cultural sensitivity" and "diversity" probably
isn’t going to have much of an impact. In my 25 plus year corporate career I was responsible for hiring a many people - less than 5% where white males and that includes fifteen years of being based in the US.
At a time when most of the friends I play golf with on Tuesday
mornings are either retired or about to retire, I am more concerned about how
to balance my time between work and leisure because there are more interesting
opportunities in front of me than at any time in my life. I don’t see any point
to “retiring” as long as what I am calling work involves traveling to places I
enjoy like Japan, China, Australia, Korea and Argentina; meeting people who are
often more friends than business associates and getting paid to do it.
My time as an ex-pat working in one field for so many years
has enabled me to work largely on my own terms now. My decision after getting
fired in 2012 not to take another “job” with a big company was probably one of
the best moves I ever made.
I originally started blogging at the suggestion of a well
respected Asia expert who also counsels returning ex-pats. He told me I should
write a book about my experiences overseas to help me put my time abroad in
perspective. I didn’t feel my experiences were interesting enough to justify a
book so a blog was my compromise.
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| I never wrote the book but my wife turned my blog posts into one |
Tomorrow is the 4th of July. I am glad to be back
in America and, despite all the problems the country currently faces, I am
proud to be an American although the current election “process” certainly has me concerned about the future of our system.
If you made it to the end of my pre-holiday ramble:thank
you. It may be awhile before I blog again. The blog did its job helping me
transition from my ex-pat experience but now it seems like it makes more sense
to focus on spending the next few years on having more interesting experiences
than writing about my old ones.
