Today on Monday Mysteries we tackle a question that has puzzled me for quite a while: how do you define someone who is an expat?

You see, it’s never seemed quite right to refer to myself as an expat.  To me, an expat was someone like Ernest Hemingway and his crowd in Paris in the 1920s. You know what I mean: the people who were slightly disenchanted with their home country and who would not necessarily ever be able to go back, but who occasionally longed to go back in any case.

But that didn’t describe Chris and me. I mean, we didn’t move to Vancouver 10 years ago, or later to Bolzano  or to Tübingen because we were dissatisfied with the U.S. No, we moved because there were interesting work opportunities available and offered to us in each place and we enjoyed the challenge of trying something new.

But after we moved abroad, I started noticing that a lot of people seemed to be using expat more broadly.  Although, I was still noticing that it was often used by people who didn’t really enjoy living outside their home country, but who were forced to for work. And that didn’t quite describe us either.  Chris and I have enjoyed living in all our new places; even with the occasional ups and downs and paperwork hurdles, it’s been an adventure we wouldn’t trade for anything. So, Chris and I didn’t seem to fit that mold, either.

But still, I wondered if I was being too resistant to calling us expats.

Then today, I stumbled on a different modern definition of expat.  At the moment I am working filling out the customs forms for moving our stuff back to the US, and I was talking with an American woman at the moving company.  I was curious about some questions on the form that required contact information for “your employer”, and I explained that at the moment neither Chris nor I are employed. And the woman — knowing that Chris and I have not lived in the U.S. for the last 10 years — replied in a very matter-of-fact tone and said,  “Oh, that doesn’t apply to you.  It’s only for expats.”

So there you go.  I now have it from someone else that proves conclusively that Chris and are definitely not expats: whatever the definition really is, we clearly don’t qualify.

Of course,  I guess that means that finding out what we are instead of expats will have to be an unsolved part of today’s Monday Mystery.  😉