It didn’t turn out quite like I imagined.
Unlike moving Japan, where everything was taken care of, when I flew into Bangkok, no one was waiting to escort me to a five-star hotel. There were no welcome banquets, no orientation sessions, and no introductions to a new employer. I had to manage all that on my own. On the advice of Lonely Planet writers, I chose a guesthouse in the Rama IV area and spent a few days getting acclimated to the heat and exploring my new neighborhood. I had been to The City of Angels only once before, perhaps less than a year previous, so thought I knew what to expect. As I found out, being a tourist is a wholly different experience from being a resident.
I printed CVs and started visiting schools. Without the internet, I was reduced to scouring Lonely Planet, bulletin boards in expat neighborhoods, Bangkok expat publications, and information gleaned from locals. After a couple of weeks, I had a couple of part-time jobs, one with a language school teaching high school and university students, the other more interesting one from a Thai Navy training institute (not to be confused with the Naval Academy) where officers and enlisted personnel went for short-term training, including language training. I was charged with preparing a group of mostly enlisted sailors who would in the near future fly to the US to train on operating systems of a used ship the Thai navy had purchased from the US government. My students would be responsible for sailing the ship back to Thailand. It was the only job where I never had classroom management issues.
It was also the job with the most interesting and varied commute. In Atlanta, I drove an old VW Beetle with no air conditioning and effectively no heating. In Japan I tootled around on a scooter. But in Bangkok, I first rode a motorcycle taxi to the port and then took a ferry up the Chao Playa river, where I alighted and walked through the grounds of Wat Arun and the surrounding residential neighborhood before arriving at the training center. The motorbike and ferry ride were fairly horrible most days but making my way across temple grounds and through the neighborhood were daily anthropology observations of urban Thai life. There were food stalls, produce vendors, monks, tourists, school children in uniforms, Naval officers, and people in business attire on their way to the office – an amazingly colorful swatch of life.
After five years in Japan, it was enlivening to be in a new culture again, and especially so for Mutsumi once she arrived. She had lived for some weeks in Canada several years prior and this was her first extended stay in Asia. She enrolled in an English course at the British Council and one of her classmates became a life-long friend whose extended family members became our hosts in Thailand and our guests in USA and Japan. We tried spending weekends exploring Bangkok, but the heat and traffic took its toll. Some days getting across town was a terrible chore. I went for an interview at an international school near the airport and spent hours sitting in traffic. It got so we didn’t want to go very far because it meant spending a good part of the day sitting on a bus or sitting in a taxi. The metro had yet to begin construction.
But it wasn’t just the heat and traffic. I was also not terribly happy with my jobs. The materials at the Navy school were relics from the Viet Nam war and included dialogs featuring soldiers counting missiles. The language school tried to recruit me to be its academic director in charge of its teachers but managing a gaggle of flaky expats was not on my list of aspirations. Neither job was horrible, but after having just completed my Masters, I was disappointed that I hadn’t yet found anything more inspiring or paying considerably more. So in January, four months after arriving, we left.
My plan was to attend the job fair in March at the Baltimore TESOL conference. In those days, conferences were vital sources for job seekers, places where teachers could speak with recruiters from a dozen schools from all possible corners of the world. But given that we didn’t need to be in the US for several more weeks, we decided to take in some of Southeast Asia.
I am now sad to say that I did a runner on my Bangkok jobs. I left a note in my desk at the Naval training center; I don’t recall if I did so with the language school. I suppose I felt uncomfortable informing my superiors of my resignation so soon after starting and thought leaving a note was a way of avoiding that encounter. I never heard anything from those employers. Afterwards, I felt poorly about what I had done and never did that again.
Mutsumi and I traveled south by rail and bus through Thailand, staying a few nights here, a few nights there. On the ferry to Ko Samui I ate ice from a chilled beverage, ice that was presumably not made from filtered water, and spent that night in the Bandung International Hospital. I was so delirious when the ambulance arrived the doctors seemed to think I had contracted malaria. Fortunately, Mutsumi was there to explain and after a night of antibiotics and rehydration, we were on the beach recuperating.
We carried on, crossing into Malaysia with stops in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Malacca, followed by a few days in Singapore before heading into Indonesia with visits in Jakarta, Borobudur, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Bali. That was perhaps one of the more memorable trips in our lives, most especially perhaps because it was planned and executed ad hoc. It was until then the most extensive travel in which we had ever engaged, most significantly with each other, and featured many memorable adventures, including motorcycling around Penang and Bali, and climbing active volcanoes in Java and Bali. I journaled the trip in a set of notebooks that I haven’t yet had the courage to read again.
We left Bali for Taiwan, from whence we took perhaps one of the longest flights we’ve ever made, Taipei to New York. Looking back on it now, it’s interesting to note that the first people we met on arriving in America were acquaintances from Japan who have been life-long friends, people with whom we have maintained regular contact for 25 years or more. We were welcomed at JFK airport by Saji, a Himeji JET colleague at that time editing for a New York newspaper , who put us up and showed us around the city for a few days before we departed for the conference in Baltimore. There we ran into Alan, a graduate school classmate who still teaches in Japan. Unfortunately, the conference was not productive in terms of job offers. I had a return call from Raytheon about a position in their Saudi facility and was invited some weeks later for an interview at their Boston office, but no job offer was forthcoming.
The professional frustration I encountered at two TESOL conferences and in Bangkok was to follow me to Atlanta, where Mutsumi and I lived with my parents until I could find something in Atlanta (or beyond). The first and perhaps most pressing challenge to staying in the US was Mutsumi’s visa status. As a Japanese citizen, she entered the country visa-free as a tourist, but that lasted only 90 days. While that temporary visitor status could be extended, a more permanent solution was required and marriage seemed to be the most expedient means. Perhaps because we had both been divorced only recently, it may have seemed shameful to announce another wedding so soon. It would have been costly and time consuming and we were living with my parents and on our savings. Just the two of us was enough. So, we planned a private secular ceremony to be conducted at the Atlanta courthouse.
In preparation we completed paperwork to prove that we were both divorced, and at that time in the state of Georgia we had blood tests for AIDs and other STDs. We then had to apply for a license and make a date to appear at the courthouse. We choose my parents’ wedding anniversary because it was only weeks away and we knew they were planning to celebrate with a weekend trip, which meant Mutsumi and I would have the house to ourselves for a few days. We also wouldn’t have to worry about including them in the ceremony. In fact, we kept the entire thing secret and when they returned, they were presented with the news that we were now married.
Shortly thereafter Mutsumi applied for permanent residence and that resolved her visa issue, but I was still struggling with employment. I went to a teacher’s recruitment event in Atlanta and found that my credentials and experience were largely worthless, that without a teacher’s license or US based-experience, I was at the back of the employment line. I was offered the rather unappealing opportunity of participating in an expedited licensure program, which meant agreeing to teach in some of the least desirable schools in exchange for the authorities temporarily waiving the licensing requirement (which I would have to meet during my first year during my non-working hours). I decided to pursue other options.
Lacking teaching work but needing money, I contacted Rebeca, the woman who gave me my first job at Kinko’s and who has remained a dear friend. She was still a Kinko’s store manager and was in fact looking for someone to run her desktop publishing desk. I was grateful to have the work, but severely deflated. Five years after leaving, I was back at my old job and making only a survival wage. My parents got tired of us taking up space and asked us to leave, but with poor paying work the options were limited. We settled into a 1-bedroom in downtown Atlanta in a complex that was built in perhaps the 40s or 50s and featured appliances that appeared to have never been replaced. It was old and noisy but convenient to quite a lot of interesting stuff that we couldn’t afford.
One of the bright spots of this period was genealogy research. I don’t know what spurred my interest. No one in the family was similarly engaged or showed any regard for family history. I guess I did some reading on the process because I still recall following standard procedure, which calls for first interviewing the oldest surviving relatives before starting a public records search. On a trip to Cincinnati, I interviewed my paternal grandmother Alma, who would have been near 80, and also got as much information as I could from my mother and father. My other grandparents had by then passed away. I was quite fortunate living in Atlanta as it houses one the country’s several federal records repositories and I started spending free evenings and weekends scrolling through microfilmed census and military service files. Because most of my family was from West Virginia and some of the neighboring states, I was unable to so easily access state records. There was still no internet at that time to facilitate such research, which meant sending postal requests for certificates of births, deaths, marriages, and title deeds. I assume most of this activity took place in the days before I started teaching because I would not have had much time once I did. After several months digging and exhausting much of the federal archive, I had managed to document seven generations of both families. No one in either family has since added anything to what I have already discovered. This is not terribly surprising as I did most of the easy work.
On the teaching front, I kept networking, reading the classifieds, and contacting local institutions until I received three offers for the fall semester, all part-time adjunct positions that together didn’t amount to a full-time wage. At Georgia State University I was offered one advanced grammar class in the ESL program, and at Dekalb Community College one writing class each in the ESL program and the Developmental Skills program (for potential native English-speaking students – mostly working adults - who did not have sufficient math or writing skills to enter college).
The employing institutions treated adjunct faculty much like full-time faculty in their expectations of working hours. We were supposed to make ourselves available to students outside class hours, to attend course meetings, to attend department meetings, to attend department functions, to spend hours prepping, marking, and writing feedback, but we were paid peanuts. Still, I thought I was lucky to have the opportunity, so I poured myself into the work. When I wasn’t at Kinko’s, where I did 40 hours a week at the desktop publishing desk, I was in class, driving to and from class, prepping, marking, and attending meetings. I was rather quickly exhausted.
Mutsumi was also struggling to find work. While she was still a tourist, and then waiting to have her permanent residence approved, she volunteered at Grady Hospital, the city’s largest health care facility (and also my mother’s employer for 17 years). There she learned quite a bit about American work culture and had the opportunity to interact daily with people from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. She found her schoolbook English hadn’t exactly prepared her for daily life in an urban southern hospital.
Years earlier she had lived for a short time in Banff, Canada on a language immersion program, but there she had been a customer. The school took care of things for her and she was placed in a home-stay with a family that looked after her when she was away from school. I did my best to help in Atlanta, but I was working much of the time and not especially pleasant when I wasn’t. It was a tough time for her as she had to struggle day-to-day to understand, to be understood, to navigate a foreign culture, and to deal with an increasingly frustrated spouse. And just when she found a paying job, I decided to throw it all in.
I had remained in contact with Chris Brooks, a musician by profession with an interest in language who returned to school late in life to acquire the credentials to teach English. We had first met at the Atlanta TESOL conference in 1993 after which he had taken a posting to the English department at Kuwait University. I received letters from him every couple of months and at one point he suggested I forward my CV for him to present to his department manager. Some weeks after doing so, I was offered a position, a full-time appointment requiring 16 teaching hours per week, two semesters a year, and including loads of free time between semesters, a free furnished apartment, annual air tickets, and a salary on which I could not only live but even save. In addition to greatly improved working conditions, Mutsumi and I would have the opportunity to explore a new culture and perhaps vacation in nearby locations. There really wasn’t much of a choice and a few months later, after selling what little we had or storing it with my parents, we were on the plane to Kuwait.
Looking back now, I wonder what I might have done differently to have avoided those two years of frustration and disappointment in Thailand and USA. When the job in Indonesia fell through, I could have stayed in Japan and perhaps continued with my job in Ieshima, but after five years of middle school, I was ready to move on. Transitioning to university work would have meant more part-time labor and probably more commuting between more campuses. Having completed my degree, I was eager test myself outside Japan. I could have carried on a bit more in Bangkok but was frustrated spending hours in traffic and that didn’t appear as if it would improve anytime soon. I could have carried on in Atlanta, but after two semesters was worn out and still without many financial reserves or any prospect of significant change in the immediate future. The job in Kuwait was like a rope passed down to someone at the bottom of a well. I didn’t know it yet, but the next 12 years would be fairly settled.
Moving to Kuwait was a welcome relief. When we arrived in Bangkok and again in the US, we had had to figure it all out for ourselves. Kuwait University, though, arranged our air tickets and couriered receipts for our visas, which we collected on arrival at Kuwait airport. When we exited baggage claim, we were met by my friend and now colleague Chris, who escorted us by taxi to our new apartment. And after a few days of visiting this ministry and that to clear paperwork, we were legal residents of Kuwait and I was a full-time university instructor with my own private office.
At that time, the university had English programs attached to a number of faculties and colleges. My appointment was to the Medical faculty, which had its own campus in Jabriyah, some distance from the main campus in Shuwaikh. We delivered a science-based ESP curriculum which I remember included large amounts of reading from science journals, something I was not at all used to but took to with some relish. We held classes only in the mornings and as I recall I taught two groups of students two hours each, 0800-1200, Sunday to Thursday, though as I write this I realize this comes out to 20 hours a week, and I don’t think I ever taught that much at KU. Perhaps we taught only four days. I remember teaching half load in the spring semester.
One of the amazing benefits of my new posting was access to the internet. And not just in an internet café or a university computer lab, but right in my own office at my own computer. Some Kinko’s customers had asked me about internet services in 1994 and 1995, but the stores hadn’t yet been configured and I knew nothing about how to use it. A friend in Atlanta subscribed to AOL to access usenet, but that seemed like a rather complicated and expensive endeavor just to trade text messages, so I never took much interest.
The internet in those days was horribly slow. You could watch a jpeg appear on the screen line-by-line and depending on file size it might take minutes to download completely. Audio and video were impossible. The best use of internet then was for displaying formatted, WYSIWYG text and so early web sites were pages of fancy text on a colored background with a few low-res images and most importantly perhaps, links to other websites and email addresses. It was really email that seemed to drive the growth of internet, the ability to send and receive instant text messages. It didn’t happen overnight, but very soon office mailboxes were collecting more dust than memos and international correspondence.
Early on, it was not uncommon to find many acquaintances without access to email, who didn’t even know what it was or how to acquire it. Mutsumi and I would send messages to my mother via her hospital work account, but my parents did not have a personal computer or a modem, and neither did Mutsumi’s parents, though many years later both would. I had sold my Mac when I left Japan and hadn’t yet replaced it because we didn’t have much money in Atlanta and when we got to Kuwait I had my own office computer, which seemed sufficient at the time. I remember Mutsumi and I used to visit my office on weekends to check email. We were able to send messages to Mutsumi’s family without recourse to the post office by using an email-to-fax service.
The only trip we made during our 18-month stay in Kuwait was to Egypt. As there were so many Egyptian expat workers, regular flights to places other than Cairo were readily available, so we skipped the capital and spent a couple of weeks exploring Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel. We didn’t have a car in Kuwait, but it was such a small place that you could (and can still) easily get around by taxi or riding with friends. We explored some of the smaller towns around Kuwait City, visited a farm, went to beaches, the markets, and the malls. And, well, that’s about it for Kuwait, a country with an area of only 18,000 square kilometers. I guess it was fortunate we didn’t stay long.
A couple of things drove us out. Mutsumi wasn’t especially happy. She found herself at home a great deal and had trouble locating regular work. A few translation and interpretation assignments came her way, but nothing sustaining. Having only completed an Associate degree out of high school, she decided to upskill by enrolling in a distance Bachelor’s program at a Japanese university (online learning was still only a dream so all books and assignments were exchanged through the post) but was frustrated by the lack of study materials outside the course texts. She seemed sensitive to stares and overt attention from men (of which there are many in the Gulf working far from their families), something she never had to deal with in Japan, Canada, and the US. And she was probably tired from our repeated relocations.
I found my work mostly engaging. The students were quite good and at that time the medical faculty was co-ed, so the classroom had an interesting mix of both male and female students, national and international (with students from neighboring Arab countries). Course content was new, so I learned quite a lot about health and medicine. I ran training sessions on using computers to compose papers, and on using the internet for research and communication. I also wrote and maintained the department’s website. The days were mostly short, and I acquired a part-time evening job teaching communicative English at the Banking Institute, a professional development unit established by Kuwait’s leading banks. There I got to interact with working adults and learn a bit more of the local culture from a more mature perspective.
I was unprepared, however, for the chaos caused by a scorned colleague. Michael the dapper Irishman had been in the department a number of years and thought he should have been promoted to director. When he wasn’t, he decided to make the new director’s life unpleasant. Cathy was in fact out of her league. She had the appropriate degrees but not the experience, and especially hurtful from Michael’s point of view, zero experience in our department, where she was dropped in as a favored appointment, the wife of a Kuwaiti with some pull at the university. Faculty meetings became impossible as Michael objected frequently, made cutting comments, and generally disrupted work. Michael also seemed to find ways to provoke students to contend with Cathy over attendance or assessment regulations. Factions started to form. Work became a rather uncomfortable place.
And I was missing Japan. I had posters of Japanese landscapes in my office. I was reading books about Japan. Despite having lived there for five years and being aware of some of the shortcomings, my perception, I believe now, was entirely romanticized. I think what I was missing was not so much Japan itself, but my experience of Japan, the experience of being a fresh expat in a country where I was well looked-after, something I would in fact – if I had stopped to think about it – never experience again.
Summer holidays were approaching, and we agreed Mutsumi would return to Japan in search of opportunities, while I would continue another semester in Kuwait. We flew to Japan and spent a couple of weeks before I went to Korea to look for future work. That turned out to be a fruitless trip in almost all respects. I didn’t find any job leads or make any long-lasting acquaintances, though the director of the King Sejong University summer program did offer me immediate teaching work in the university’s summer program. I did about three weeks there, collected my pay, and never heard from them again.
I returned to Kuwait happy that I would be relocating to Japan but concerned about finding work. The more immediate problem, though, was loneliness. It seems Mutsumi was an emotional anchor and without her I was terribly anxious. I began to drink too much and realizing this might not be helpful, I took up running. The former lasted longer than the latter. In a manner I don’t remember now, I began to explore Buddhism and meditation. My first meaningful exposure had been in university, where we read Zen in the Art of Archery in my Asian history class. I found something appealing about the absurd logic of Zen, the way it seemed to short-circuit thinking to produce A-Ha! moments of insight. Perhaps I got some material off the internet, though in those days it would have been quite elementary. Ebooks did not exist and very few people were publishing extensive websites with pages of text. It is also unlikely I found books on the subject in Kuwait bookstores. Perhaps I had brought books purchased during my summer visit to Japan. That seems more likely as I recall practicing a bit of meditation in my Korean hotel rooms. The book I remember now that served as my extended introduction was Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. Whatever I was reading then, it led me to begin a meditation practice, sitting quietly in my apartment for several minutes at a time to reduce the anxiety of loneliness. It worked to some degree, I suppose, because I kept doing it, and why would I continue if it were producing no benefit?
Apart from a sense of loneliness, there was also anxiety about finding work in Japan. Mutsumi was in Kobe with her family, and I had informed management of my plan to leave, so there was not much room for maneuver. I could arrive in Japan with an offer in hand – or unemployed. Fortunately, I now had the internet, and it was possible, even in 1996, to search for work and apply for jobs, which I did and without much success. Until one day I received an email informing me that because of a recent vacancy, Fukuoka University needed one more instructor. Was I still interested?
I was not in any position to be offended at not being a first choice and happily accepted the offer even though neither Mutsumi nor I knew much about Fukuoka. I had been there once when my parents had visited Japan during my JET years. My father had been stationed at the Fukuoka air base during the Korean War and had wanted to revisit the site to see what it might be like years later. I remember him just staring out at the airfield lost in memories of his youth. Mutsumi was born and had grown up in Nagasaki, so had perhaps at least passed through Fukuoka once or twice. But neither of us had spent much time there or knew anyone there apart from my new employer.
Leaving Kuwait was something a relief. I was happy to be returning to Japan. I was happy to be reunited with Mutsumi. I thought I was going to recapture my JET experience and be a contented foreigner with an extended university career. It turned out to be not so extensive, but it also turned out that I would live in Fukuoka longer than anyplace since Miami. Wandering ceased for more than a decade.
I would see three of my Kuwait colleagues again, both in Japan and in the USA, but over the years we lost contact and these days we hear from only Chris, usually in an annual Christmas letter. We have never returned to Kuwait.
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