My return to America came after five years in Tokyo, a drop in the bucket next to many of my "lifer" expat colleagues who had accrued wives, kids and mortgages. Their lives weren't fully checked into either Japanese or American existence, and I was somewhere in the middle myself. To a young Tokyoite whose salary qualified almost laughably for the U.S. foreign income tax exclusion, what was the participatory aspect of American citizenship?
In a word, it was voting. For five years I never missed a chance to cast an absentee ballot, doing my small part to further blue an already blue state. The expat's windows to home, social media, were as political as they were personal: friends' baby photos intermingled with tirades about the U.S. Supreme Court. I was a political news junkie who had only ever voted for candidates of one party, so with two years in Tokyo under my belt, I voted to reelect President Barack Obama and my state's incumbent Democrats without a second thought. I'll be clear: I do not regret those votes in the slightest, but they were cast very, very far from home.
In the first week after I moved into my new apartment stateside, I met an undocumented immigrant, a Desert Storm veteran living with untreated mental illness, and a homeless woman with terminal cancer who left an impression. She flagged me down on the street to jabber about the relentless late-summer jackhammering on a nearby construction site and how age had finally caught up with her. Five minutes later, I was dumbstruck when she bid me goodbye without asking for money — content, I suppose, with the ready acknowledgement of a stranger as she set off toward nowhere in particular.