Two Books that Made My Expatriate Life Bearable

Two and a half years ago I moved to Germany. It was perhaps one of the worst decisions of my life.

Looking back, I don't know what else I should have or could have done. There is no alternate path I can see that, if only I had followed it, would have led to better things.

I just didn't know what else to do.

I had been living in Malta for 3 years. The first half of that time had gone well for me. I had a good job that I liked, and it's not too bad living by the beach.

But then I lost my job and decided to throw myself into an artistic life, to finish my film school studies, write, and sell my creations. It was a huge struggle, but I stuck with it and scraped by until my film was all but done and my money all but gone.

I had asked my film school teacher what I should do after I finished studying. He said unequivocally that I should move to Germany, because that's where stuff was happening in the European film scene. At the same time, my sister was getting ready to study in Germany, so I thought, perfect, we can live together, I can work and pay off my debts while she studies, and everything will be great.

But it wasn't.

I searched and searched to find a job in the area where my sister was heading, but I had no luck. Every day I woke up so depressed, hoping against hope that there would be an email waiting for me, that someone would answer to say they were interested in hiring me.

And every day there was nothing.

As my money ran lower and I realized that staying in Malta wasn't even helping my film reach completion, I decided to just take the leap anyway and fly to Germany. I asked some relatives there if I could stay with them until I found something, and they agreed. People encouraged me, it will be much easier to find work once you get there, they said.

But it wasn't.

What I expected to be a few days turned into six months of unemployment. I realized that neither I nor my teacher had had any idea what was involved in getting a job in Germany. Basically, if you don't speak the language well and have all the proper degrees and certificates, you can just forget about it. I couldn't even get a job in a kitchen or a factory, much less in the film or media industries.

My relatives tried to help me, but it was a very dark time. I sent out hundreds and hundreds of job applications. I searched and pitched for freelance options. I put my efforts into taking online courses to improve my skills and my chances. At one point I even got involved with a film project, but it ended in disaster, while my own film continued to languish in non-completion. I sent out stories and never heard back, listed art pieces for sale but made no sales.

I felt like an outcast, a pariah. Besides all the normal frustrations of adjusting to living in a new culture, there was the constant knowledge that nothing I had done or become in my more than 3 decades of life was worth anything here. If you're not part of the system and don't follow all the steps exactly, if you don't have the right papers with the right stamps on them, you won't fit into this well-oiled machine where everyone has their designated place.

But just leaving to try somewhere else wasn't an option either. You need money to get started anywhere, and if you don't have a job to go to, I absolutely would not recommend it.

During that long winter of the soul, I read a children's novel called The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw. The funny thing is that I had seen this title on a bookstore shelf perhaps as much as two decades earlier, but hadn't gotten around to reading it until then. And it turned out to be perfect timing. Do you ever find that? That you buy a book or mean to read it, only to have it lie around for years, and then when you pick it up, it's just exactly what you need at that exact moment of your life?

The Moorchild is a beautiful story about a "changeling" child named Saaski. According to Irish mythology, sometimes fairies steal babies from their cradles and leave behind an ugly child or just a log in their place. Rather than taking the perspective of the lost baby, this story explores what it would be like for the changeling, cast out from the realm of the fairies to live in the completely foreign world of humans.

The book is poetically dedicated, "To all children who have ever felt different."

As an expatriate, you are caught between two worlds: the country you came from, and any other country you will ever live in. You will never fully belong to either of these worlds again. Traveling changes you. To find home, you can't go back anymore, and going forward only means finding more places you will never truly fit into either. The only place you even have a chance of fitting in is with other misfits.

And so perhaps you can see why this book was so meaningful to me that I read it twice within a few months. Even now when I think about it, I get a warm feeling because it was such a comfort to me. I would love to make a movie of this story someday, and I actually did contact the rights holders (the authoress unfortunately passed away a few years ago) to ask if I could write it as a screenplay, but they said they only negotiate those matters with established production companies. So that's something to work toward, I guess. :)

The second book that turned out to be a godsend for me was Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

Now, I'm not a horror-lover. Slasher films are simply too much for me. And I must admit that I had fostered a judgmental feeling towards Stephen King for many years; I looked on him with the suspicion I feel for all writers of bestsellers--that they're probably pulp writers, popular during their time but forgotten soon after.

I know this was a snotty and unfair attitude. Because when I actually watched Hearts in Atlantis and read Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, I was so moved by them and found them so beautiful that I wholeheartedly cast aside my former prejudices and respected Stephen King for the artist that he is.

So last Christmas, when my sister and brother-in-law told me to choose a present on Amazon.de for them to order for me, I put a few books on my wish list, including The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I had never actually heard of this title before, and found it by googling "non horror stephen king novels." ;) To my delight, they bought me all four titles on the list, and I went to work devouring them.

This is a horror poster we made for fun at the photo studio where I work now. I didn't notice till this moment how similar it is to the cover of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. :)

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a story about a nine-year-old girl named Patricia MacFarland who gets lost in the woods and finds solace only in listening to baseball games on her radio and having imaginary conversations with her favorite baseball player, Tom Gordon. That doesn't sound like enough of a premise for an entire book, nor does it sound terrifying, but I assure you, it's both.

As Trisha searched for parallels between the baseball games she listened to and her own chances of survival, I turned each page in transfixed horror, wondering if this child would make it out of the woods where everything real and imagined was trying to kill her. Would she "get the save?" Would I?

Living in Germany can feel a lot like being lost in the woods. Even now, I often have the feeling of being punished just for existing. I am constantly breaking rules without even meaning to, because there are so many of them that you can't possibly know them all. It can seem like every time you take a breath, you have to pay a tax or a fine on it, or get someone to sign a paper proving you were allowed to do it.

This is a tree in the town where I live. A plaque beneath it states that since 1418 it was used as a "place of judgment." I think that means it was a hanging tree. And that it's more than 600 years old.

So often I've wondered where it was that I left the path, what the path even was or should have been. Sometimes you can only make a guess about what the right direction is and then put one foot in front of the other, thousands of times. And maybe you guess wrong and waste a lot of time and energy. You cast your eyes about, looking for "the save,"--that moment when your luck will change and you'll be found and everything will be okay. And it doesn't come and doesn't come and all you can do is keep on walking.

When I finished the book, I flipped right back to the first page and started reading it again, because I knew this was a special book in my life and I didn't want to miss what it was telling me. And it was different reading it the second time, when you know the end from the beginning. I guess if we knew the end from the beginning in real life, life would be easier too.