Feeling the Expat Community's Embrace

I can’t get over how welcoming and patient the expat community is in Da Nang—or at least the community that I’ve been lucky enough to tap into, through Phil and, ultimately, his sister Angie, who’s been living here for five years now. I’ve been on the receiving end of more generosity in the past couple of months, including from near strangers, than I ever would have expected.

Cases in point:

1. One of Phil’s coworkers opened her doors to us and let us stay in her apartment for our first two weeks in Da Nang, because our apartment wasn’t ready yet. No questions asked, no hints at the burden we most definitely were.
   
2. People know that I don’t have a motorbike (yet) so they either offer to pick me up or come to places in my neighborhood, within walking distance of my apartment. On one of these occasions, I was pitching a proposal to a potential client.
   
3. Expats are more than willing to offer tips on the best places to go for a wide range of needs (getting business cards printed, finding a particular kind of yogurt, cheap patterned fabric shorts, etc.). We’ve been particularly beholden to Angie for this!
   
4. Folks that are planning to move have sold us things they aren’t planning to bring with them at a deep discount, a mere fraction of what we’d pay in a shop.
   
5. One friend showed us the way to a good instrument store because he couldn’t remember the address. “Come to my place, and follow me there,” he said. “And don’t buy amps here. There’s another place for that.”
   

The list could go on.

Not to downplay any of this generosity, but there’s also an element of karma here. All expats remember what it’s like to be a newbie, and many have had friends do plenty of favors for them in the past.

This leads me to another interesting element of the expat community. There’s a revolving door effect—I know the names of many expats who have gone home or moved on to another destination, but whom I’ve never met—which has led me to group the expats I know into categories: those who don’t plan to be here for long, those who do, and those who don’t know what the future holds for them.  

I guess this exists at home, too. People put down roots in different ways—narrow and deep, like oak trees, or shallow and wide, like grass.