Body in Motion

Susan Cheever’s column “Drunkenfreude” opens with an intricate portrait of the drunken party-goer everyone remembers: can’t quite stand up, slurred speech. It all sounds so familiar until Cheever admits the party was nearly 10 years ago and comments that people “all still drink, but no one gets drunk anymore. Neither do they smoke.”

I know Cheever has a few years on me but I can’t help notice that she got it both totally right and totally wrong. My friends in the US hardly smoke and binge drinking isn’t quite what is was in college. But when I look around me here, I can’t help but think I know that drunken party-goer. The one who stays out all night, has a glassy haze in her eyes from about 9pm onward and seeing her sans liquor or hangover is a rare occurrence. She bums fags and lights and laughs at everything.

Welcome to expat country where open bottle laws are worth a giggle and a snort and smoking is only banned in hospitals (if you’re standing near the oxygen machine). Cheever doesn’t mention it but the fact that you can no longer smoke anywhere in New York, where cigarettes run at least $6 a pack and winters are unpleasant, is a big deterrent. But here in the tropics where smokes are cheap, terraces are plentiful and the rain never lasts, smoking is easy.

Are we such weak creatures that an enabling environment brings bad behavior?

I can only hazard a guess. It’s a little bit of enablement and a little bit that most of us won’t be staying so our legacy can only last so long. But then, one could say the same of the liver.

Those of us here chose this life, whether it’s because we believe in development, hate the winter, want cheap household help or just like to see the world. So do we chose ourselves? Should job announcements ask alcoholics to step forward? Or do we make ourselves, once here in foreign land?

Surely, it’s not all of us but I do wonder how it’s so many of us. Do we magically revert to healthy lifestyles when we leave or is the transformation permanent?

But it’s not just us expats. The US military also has a high numbers of smokers, but then they also have ready access to cheap smokes overseas. Nurses too have been tagged as smokers, despite their professional training, probably due to stress.

Stress isn’t something most of us think about in a place with blue skies and little traffic, but it does sneak up on you. Perhaps there’s more to the drunken laughter emanating from the expat bars than we think.