Stepping Into the Same Culture Twice

You know what an expat is, but have you met a repat?

This is what I’ve come to think is a good--and the most obvious--term for people who’ve gone abroad for some length of time and then found it difficult to reintegrate after they return home. Expats live abroad and ingratiate themselves into local culture; repats go abroad and return home.

There’s a gap in English here. I don’t know of any word that fits this meaning, and it’s distinct enough from the definition of expat to qualify as being different and render expat inaccurate to indicate what you really mean. So, repat.

Yet this isn’t mere semantics: estimates for the total number of expatriate Americans living abroad range from about 2 million to as many as 6.8 million citizens. Including the rest of the world, the numbers are truly massive--think of all the diasporas out there, and how many people in them eventually go back home.

People returning home from time abroad are an enormous group, so it would seem likely there’d be terminology related to them circulating in popular culture, but this doesn’t seem true. It seems they actually aren’t considered much in society at all (at least not American society, the perspective from which I’m writing). The fact that even the U.S. government can’t really put its finger on how many American expats there are seems to say that citizens who’ve been abroad and then return are flying under the radar.

That means that people often don’t anticipate the culture shock that comes from being back at home again. Reverse cultural shock, as many call it, is real and can be offputting.

I felt this myself to some extent several years ago when I came back from being in Italy for about four months. Even a relatively short period of time is enough to sensitize you to new things, and desensitize you to things you’ve known all your life. The new becomes the standard, and the old sloughs off into memory.

This gives us a chance to ponder human identity.

We’re built to adapt quickly, and coming back from being in foreign places shines a big light on just how fast we can get used to different circumstances. Our speed in adapting is actually a lot like the way we adapt very quickly to getting more money or another change in living standards. For a bit, we’re struggling with it. Soon, we get accustomed to it and it becomes fairly normal.

That’s human identity for you. Our identity is fluid and vibrant, subject to continuous change as we mature, join or leave certain groups, find or leave home, and react to what we experience. The experience of returning home as a repat from a long period abroad and experiencing one's own culture as a foreigner might throws the changeable nature of identity into stark relief.

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