The Psychic Refugees

How I hate the shorthand term “expat.” It has become codeword for a whole litany of meanings, so many of them pertaining to evasiveness, laziness, or escapist fantasy. Yet there is such a diversity of those who willingly move abroad with a relative pillow of economic comfort, whether temporarily or permanently.

There are the professionally ambitious types, those who move abroad either sent as corporate or diplomatic representatives, or who move abroad for job opportunities. These are the smartly dressed Westerners you see in bars in Hong Kong, the young Europeans working on Wall Street, the uniformed Japanese and Koreans piling into taxis in Kuala Lumpur.

There are the youthful, or at least youthful in spirit, adventurers, the people who go for the cultural immersion, the rock climbing, what have you. They may teach English for a year or two, or try their hand as snowboard instructors or dive masters, or work in publishing, in media production, in NGOs, yet their core mission seems to be expansion of experience.

Of course, especially in Southeast Asia, there are the creeps, people for whom the satisfaction of their libidos seems of primary concern. Often retired, you see them in loud, open-air bars in Bangkok, just off of Sukhumvit Road, heads shaven, shooting pool, or with frail Thai girls in their laps. A great many are retired, and their main goal seems to be dying with a belly full of beer in the arms of a 20 year old.

But one group that doesn't get addressed much are what I call the psychic refugees.

These are the most invisible group. In my limited experiences with them, they seem skittish, uncomfortable, shifty-eyed, vaguely autistic, and often boiling with anger.

I am going for a drink with friends, a mix of locals and foreigners, and a few people I hadn't yet met. I sit down between friends, across from a stranger. He looks at me, unsmiling, through gritted teeth, a Marlboro mostly turned to ash in his left hand.

“You want some WINE?” he scowls at me.

And yet I don't think it was intended as a scowl.

Or there was the hunchbacked man on the metro muttering to himself, wearing a purple buttondown and loud necktie, swinging loosely from side to side as he held the handrail at 9:00 or so on a Sunday morning. As the recorded announcement on the train said “next station Phrom Phong,” he yells out “We know!” in a thick, neighing New Jersey accent. People's heads turn, and as the only other foreigner on that part of the train, I move away to avoid guilt by association.

I could go on. Any Westerner who's lived long enough in Bangkok should have plenty of stories like this.

Some of these cases could be written off as simple instances of mental illness. You watch people whose bipolar disorder isn't nearly enough in check, or whose psychotic breaks are written off as eccentricities until they land in jail.

And of course there is substance abuse. There are the foreigners who have picked up a taste for the cheap Thai meth manufactured in superlabs across the Burmese border, or who happily lick the table clean after lining up rail after rail of heavily cut Thai coke, or who simply come into their offices in the morning blackout drunk. And who, unlike many others, have lost the ability to maintain a sheen of normalcy.

But there are the less definable losers, the men with vaguely monastic bowl cuts and ill-fitting shirts, who just seem off. Maybe you get into a conversation with them, and they go into a long rant about their hodge-podge spiritual beliefs, or their foaming-mouthed antitheism. The sort of people who come off as rather sad but harmless, but whose Internet history you probably don't want to look through.

You wonder what drew them abroad. Did they come to Thailand because they didn't fit into the societies of their home nations? If so, did they come wanting to assimilate into an imagined Thai culture, to meet an imagined Thai lover? Or did they simply want to be free misfits, unexpected to participate in society and liberated from the need to do so?

***

I sit back, comfortable in my judgment.

But these days, what am I? When I walk down the street, what is my demeanor? What is it people see when I walk down the street with two days' stubble? Are they seeing my nervous ticks? Am I staring at the big-titted Japanese girl in a bikini on the cover of the magazine in the shop window a little too long, am I slurping my coffee?

Because it is only what bothers you about yourself that truly unsettles you. The grotesque is a terribly contorted form of your own mirror image.