Beware Paul Theroux!

Daniel Speechly on Being White and Old in Asia

Dear Republic,

Our ‘Overidentification’ prompt produced a lot of great pieces — apparently a lot of people have suffered from the problem of overconnecting with some work of art and, in a word, ruining their life with it. We’ll try to run a bunch of them as time goes by. Daniel Speechly starts off by cautioning us that you may, in all innocence, read a Paul Theroux novel and then next thing you know find yourself old and white and living in Korea.

-ROL

BEWARE PAUL THEROUX!

My interest in the exotic Other started when I was a child, but unlike other childhood interests, I never grew out of it. Instead I leaned in, feeding it with books by Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, and Simon Winchester. Their nonfiction travel narratives piqued my interest in distant lands and fed my desire to travel until the feeling became so overwhelming that I had to close the perceptual gap between acquired knowledge and lived experience; ultimately leading me to move halfway around the world to Korea at 23 years old.

Looking back and airing out the dusty pages of Video Night at Kathmandu, The Great Railway Bazaar, and Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, I see that the allure of the exotic has had a profound influence on me. What I learned about Asia drove many of my most important decisions, guiding me to not only discover home in a distant land, but also pushing me to learn a foreign language, helping me become accustomed to new flavors of food, and even teaching me new ways of perceiving the world.

Part of the allure was the opportunity to find a Shangri-la of self-discovery. In Korea, I knew I would feel as free as my favorite narrators, and I knew I would be able to seek the texture of life that American suburbia had seemingly scrubbed clean. But like a character in a novel, my goal to discover deeper meaning seemed always just out of reach, over the next hill, beyond the next conversation, or possibly hidden in the message at the end of the next book I might read. I thought I would find what I was looking for, and maybe I did, but I didn’t realize it would take me 17 years, many books, and a great deal of introspection.

Sitting in Seoul, reflecting on the end of my youth and contemplating the decisions that brought me to the halfway point of life, I see that I have become a trope of sorts. There are many migrants, immigrants, and expats who have made the same decisions I have, and we are of a kind. I also see that I have walked the well-worn path of many fictional characters landed on the shores of the orient–characters who I have unwittingly followed as guides or even role models. And in the intervening years, I have not only become a resident of a foreign land but also transformed into a middle-aged man: a person in a place I never quite imagined I would be.

“Saint Jack” and “The Year of Living Dangerously”

Two novels, Saint Jack and The Year of Living Dangerously, have particular resonance in this recollection. These books introduced me to the inner lives of men who I would later learn to emulate; men like me: white men living in Asia. I learned from their pages that the allure of the East is to love to be lost, yet find one’s way. For Saint Jack and Guy Hamilton, the respective protagonists, life in Asia was tantamount to being born again, or maybe more like experiencing a never ending pubescence, wherein one remains in a constant state of awakening.

Having unknowingly fallen into such an extended state of puerility explains why it took me 17 years to mature, that is 17 years on top of the 23 I had already lived. Arriving in Korea certainly felt like being born again, for nearly every moment of my new life was accompanied by a steady stream of new experiences: new sights, new sounds, and new smells. And for 17 years the never-ending novelty arrested the natural progress of life, giving everything a dewy youthfulness that seemed to stop time.

But after 17 years—after finding a sense of belonging and establishing a home—I looked in the mirror and saw that I was no longer 23. This realization coincided with the fact that Korea no longer elicited the same sense of novelty nor curiosity that it once did. It had become ordinary. In fact, it had become domestic. And the state of domesticity I had become accustomed to stood out in stark contrast to my initial feelings upon arrival in the country, for when I disembarked my first Korean Air flight, I experienced a rush of alertness I’ve only ever encountered when becoming completely lost in an unfamiliar land (entering an exotic country or completely losing my way in the wilderness). It’s a deeply perplexing feeling, but one which I’m inclined to enjoy. Unfortunately, I no longer have a way of encountering it in daily life other than through second-hand experiences in novels and films.

In this regard, Saint Jack and The Year of Living Dangerously echo my personal narrative arc. Saint Jack, Guy Hamilton, and I each acclimated to the reality of aging in a home away from home. And together, we learned that the life we live becomes us, until it is indistinguishable from the environment in which we have settled, that is, until it becomes home, replacing the memory of home we had nearly forgotten. And likewise, we also learned the much harder lesson that there is no such thing as going home, for the home that we carried in our hearts stopped existing the moment we left it behind.

Mr. Baseball

Before I arrived in Asia (before I became a voracious reader and discovered Paul Theroux and Christopher Koch) and well before I became a reflective middle-aged man, I watched 1992’s Mr. Baseball, the “fish out of water” story of New York Yankees first baseman Jack Elliot (played by Tom Selleck). In the film, protagonist Jack Elliot is demoted from the Yankees and sent to the Japanese League to play for the Chunichi Dragons. While reconciling his American need to be an individual with the Japanese requirement to be part of a team, Jack discovers another, better version of himself.

As a young boy, I intuitively understood the message of the film (be an individual, but also fit in and earn the respect of others). Perhaps I also learned other important messages from the film as well, such as the platitude that communication can move conflict toward a type of resolution that ultimately results in understanding. I probably learned a host of other cliches too, but to a young boy cliches hold the weight of newly discovered novelty. But looking back in all honesty, I must admit that I was probably less aware of the message of the film than I was of the captivating scenes of the exotic, particularly the incongruities presented for exaggerated comedic effect: Jack Elliot towering over his Japanese teammates and hitting his head on low doorways; Jack Elliot not fitting into a bathtub; Jack Elliot struggling to sit on a tatami and eat a meal off the low dining table called a chabudai. Watching Jack Elliot was like watching a real life Gulliver in a nonfiction Lilliput; it was fascinating. In this context Mr. Baseball's most redeeming value may not be its many messages, but instead how it proves that reality can be as interesting as—if not more so than—fantasy. In other words, Mr. Baseball showed me that embracing the allure of the exotic is not only fun but also potentially revelatory.

In the scope of my life, Mr. Baseball has wound up being so much more than just an entertaining film. And it’s not just a comedy. It’s a parable that showed me that the best way to live in a complicated and changing world is to embrace the Other. Watching it, I learned that the world was much bigger than the American suburbs. More importantly, I learned that the inner world, where we all eventually grapple with who we are and how to relate to the Other, is far deeper than imagination. In this regard, Mr. Baseball was an early epiphany.

Old and White in Asia

The question now is this: who am I?

I am, of course, a white man living in Asia; and like the characters in the sub-genre I love (the one about white men living in Asia), I’m on the path of self-discovery. But I’ve been on the path so long now that I’m left to wonder whether this is simply what life is. And I wonder whether I needed to fly halfway around the world to learn this, or whether I would have come to the same conclusion no matter where I lived. Aren’t we all just trying to connect with one another, and hoping to figure out who we are? In this light, might we all be, metaphorically speaking, white men in Asia.

Daniel Speechly is the Academic Manager at a private language institute in Seoul, South Korea. His most recent publications appear in Litro Magazine UK, LIT Magazine at the New School, and Lit Mag News. You can find a full list of links to his writing at NFEscapism.com.