Opinion | The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn

Does this annoying American rant sound familiar?

“Call this a govment! Why, just look at it and see what it’s like. … They call that govment! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country. … Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come a-near it agin. … I says, I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me — I’ll never vote agin as long as I live.”

If you happened to guess Ellen DeGeneres, you’d be wrong. It is Pap Finn — who, for his obnoxious nativism, would probably be a Donald Trump supporter today — jawing to Huck in our national masterpiece “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” voicing a complaint that you’ve perhaps heard since the recent presidential election results were announced. Some people have acted on the threat, finding refuge in various countries overseas. This, oddly, at a time when millions of people are contriving ways to come to America.

What seems a contradiction is resolved in my core belief that expatriation, like old-fashioned laborious travel, is flight and pursuit in equal measure. It is both the desire to leave home and the passion to find something new, to pick up stakes and discover who you are in a different landscape and culture.

Pap’s rant was the inner voice I channeled more than 50 years ago when I began writing my novel “The Mosquito Coast” in the 1970s — years of long lines at gas stations, the Arab oil embargo, punitive interest rates, sagging morale and Japanese takeovers of high-profile American companies. My main character, Allie Fox, ranted like Pap about America’s decline and, suiting the action to the word, departed for Honduras with his wife and four children, in the hope of prospering in someone else’s country. But, of course, he remained his stubborn American self and went much too far, and his expatriation ended badly.

I told a similar tale in my novel “The Lower River,” some 30 years later and in many short stories; the theme has been much on my mind. I spent 27 years, between 1963 and 1990, as an expatriate (six years in Africa, three in Singapore, 18 in Britain). I was not joyriding; I was first inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, one of the wisest and most eloquent ever delivered — sentiments unspoken today — “Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.”

But under my cloak of idealism, I was procrastinating about my future, and I felt I’d find answers by being alone and far away. I became a teacher in Africa and found myself transformed — so enlivened by the experience, I kept traveling and working abroad, until I quit teaching in 1971 and, with three novels published, moved with my small family to Britain, devoting myself wholly to writing. I don’t think I changed anyone’s life much as a teacher, but I know that expatriation was the making of me: liberated me, humbled me, revealed to me who I was and what I wanted my life to be, as a writer. I often thought of Rudyard Kipling’s lines, “God bless the just Republics / That give a man a home.”