The Microgenre of Modern Expat Literature
Photo by Edwin Yang on Unsplash
In an unsurprising twist, the recent election results have led to a surge in interest in moving abroad. That happens after every election, and it was bound to have been more prevalent this time around. After all, it’s only a troublingly slight exaggeration to say we’ve put one former wrestler in charge of our nation and another in charge of our educational system.
American interest in expat life has been on the rise in general. Appropriately, this interest seems to have given birth to a corresponding microgenre of literature. We might call it self-flagellating expat didacticism.
As with the trend it reflects, the genre is maddeningly characteristic of our era. The literature is screeny and algorithmized with the hallmarks of the lower-middle-brow vibe of social media-adjacent “content”:
“5 things living abroad has taught me about…”
“I’m a US expat—here’s how working from my laptop has triggered my spiritual awakening”
“How Trump’s pick of an illiterate, felonious pedophile for the Supreme Court looks to a US expat…”
“Yes, expat—you are just another first-world bro”
And so on.
Despite its ostensible intent to educate, it’s a passive-aggressive genre that is ultimately about venting and wish-fulfillment. I can’t imagine that it’s ever actually punctured anyone’s “view from within the Matrix.” America’s obvious decline has made awareness of its warts unavoidable, and the literature is more about catharsis than edification.
Its notes are predictable but no less apt for that: healthcare, culture, food, student loans, safety. It’s simply a fact that those things suck in the United States for most people most of the time and can be found in a better (or at least less annoying form) elsewhere.
The literature gives us a chance to pile on the US, and piling on a victim is satisfying even when the target is less abusive, distant, and self-satisfied than American institutions. The US has become a calloused oligarchy that makes the lives of its citizens much harder than they need to be, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to beat up on it for a bit.
Beyond the beginner texts, there’s also a grad-school level to the genre. This is the side of the literature that nuances the obvious. It’s made up of expats who’ve at least partially worked through their rage and come out on the other side. It’s a sort of expat aufhebung for the digital nomad set.
Having now returned from their vision quest to the top of the mountain (or an AirBnB in Chiang Mai), these expat elders can remind us of how good we really have it. Yes, it has its problems, but the US is still the US: it’s big, dynamic, and wealthy. In an advanced move, some versions of this thinking point out that our complaints about American decline reflect the same entitlement and arrogance that they set out to diagnose (first-world problems, duh!).
The 400-level literature is as true as the 101-level stuff as far as either goes. The United States is infuriating and abusive, but a weekend out of the country can make the self-pity of even the most jaded vape-smoking, failed-to-launch podcaster seem truly absurd. It’s true—we have it good, and often only the perverse psychology of our own privilege gets in the way of us appreciating that.
One could try diagnosing the genre, but it’s so earnest and transparently typical of its time that I don’t know how fruitful that would be. One could go the other way and argue that it distracts from structural critique or whatever, but that would be tedious and overly literal.
In some ways, the spirit of the moment is hard to read and even harder to predict. And, in others, nothing could more clearly be itself.