Wish You Were Here

Global perspectives of Vancouverites abroad

By VV Staff

Americans love to take vacations, and that’s all well and good, but there’s no substitute for extended periods of travel abroad; seeing the world and taking the time to settle in and get a good feeling for foreign locales is considered by many an essential component of the good life, and a necessary education for an informed citizenry.

Without exception, those darker elements of the American psyche—the xenophobia, the collective historic amnesia, and the sense of cultural superiority—are diluted and countermined by those individuals who are lucky or resourceful enough to gather information firsthand about what it’s actually like out there beyond our borders.

The more Vancouverites who join the ranks of the well-traveled, the better off we’ll be. As further evidence of this indisputable fact, The Voice has compiled three profiles of globetrotters originally from Vancouver currently living abroad.


The European Tour
By Steven Walling

“I’m going to tour Europe.”

It’s a cliché amongst the college set (and the Hostel victim set). But for Cynthia Fels, a student (and Vancouverite born and bred) attending the University of Cincinnati, study abroad offered a tried-and-true method for a budding architect to soak up the history of her craft.

A child of Vancouver’s downtown, and a graduate of the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, Fels set out to immerse herself in the various locales that serve as settings for her subject matter. After establishing a strong working grasp of her field through UC’s highly prestigious College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, she headed off to get her hands dirty in the architectural landscape of Europe.

Taking advantage of an internship offered by a firm in northern Italy, Fels jetted from her base in Genoa to places and parts very far afield indeed. In Italy she got a firsthand look at different approaches to creating the infrastructure of international cities.

“Although the States has a type of history all its own,” Fels explained, “Italy is entirely different. Here, you have to confront ancient ruins, old city walls, modern reconstructions of post-war deconstruction, monuments, old palaces, and a city infrastructure that actually has importance and value. [...] Back home there is frequently the idea that you only build something to last 20 or so years. You can’t do that here.”

Fels discovered that some of the usual tourist hot spots were more peculiar—or, as she discovered in the case of Naples, downright “disgusting.” Vedi Napoli, e poi muori! “See Naples and die,” indeed!

In small villages such as Bari, however, she discovered “women at tables in the streets making pasta by hand.” Outside of Naples, Fels was relieved to find that plenty of the magic of Italia was still alive and well.

Even for an adventurous young collegiate however, the language barrier still tended to be a problem. Recalling a dinner with a fellow American in Italy after many months of foreign travel, Fels admitted that she was relieved to speak her native language again.

“After all of my horrible attempts at communication during the last three months, it didn’t intimidate me [to converse].” Now that she no longer had to “evade difficult explanations” or attempt to explain herself with an extremely limited vocabulary, Fels realized just how hampered her communication had been.

After a stop in Turkey with her parents, Fels went on to tour Scandinavia with fellow students, visiting Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Afterward, there was plenty more of Italy left to see.

I asked Fels what part of her travels most reminded her of her home in Southwest Washington.

“The place that was most like Vancouver was Rottofreno”, she replied. “It is a small town near a larger town, and is mostly expanding because of lower rents and larger homes. Everyone who lives there works in the other town, and as a consequence there is a severe lack of cultural development.”

After learning that, she topped all this travel off with a camping trek through the Croatian countryside, I began to wonder if the whole enterprise was nothing more than just a grand excuse for a vacation. How much could all of this Finnish sauna-taking and riding about on Genovese Vespas really be preparing her for a serious career in architecture back home in the States?

“Travel is a very important part of understanding humans, our culture, and the world around us,” Fels mused.

Naturally, a college student basking in the Mediterranean sun might be prone to say such things, but there was more: “Not only is it good for personal development, but it is an important part of professional development. Most Scandinavian architecture programs are based on the idea of the ‘study tour.’ You travel to see architecture in its best form, through all stages of history and culture. Through my own study tours on this adventure, I learned much more than I ever could through a book.”

Perhaps travel—particularly in the aged capitals of Europe—is indeed the ideal antidote to the lack of foresight and aesthetic sensitivity that has plagued urban planning and architectural design in much of the U.S. Let’s hope Fels brings some of that experience and idealism home to Vancouver when her wanderlust abates.


The Ex-Pat in Prague
By D. K. Holm

Steffen Silvis has the unusual distinction of having abandoned Vancouver, Portland, and America twice. The first time was in 1986, when the aspiring actor and playwright journeyed to England to follow his dream. His foray in the land of Shakespeare, Shaw, and Stoppard lasted ten years.

Among his many accolades, Silvis has been a winner of the South London Playwright Festival, the London New Play Festival, and the Warehouse Theatre’s International Playwriting Festival. His play Liberty Oregon was nominated Best New Play for the London Fringe Awards and was produced in Los Angeles in 2004.

For personal reasons, he returned to the United States in 1996. Then, by a series of flukes, he ended up the theater critic for Willamette Week.

“Quite honestly, I’d never considered working as a critic,” he says now. “The job at Willamette Week really did fall into my lap. Dear God! I’ve been a critic now for over ten years!”

Due to “downsizing,” he left the paper in 2005, but thanks to his work as an editor at WW, as well as his success as a playwright, Silvis came to the attention of the English-language weekly The Prague Post, which hired him on as arts editor and film/theater critic the same year. He’s been there ever since.

Silvis was born in Raymond, Washington, a town, as he put it, that is “right out of Raymond Carver.” In those bygone days, rural Washington was not yet gentrified.

“Certainly, there was more indiscriminate logging of trees then. It was also less crowded with people; funny how one gave way to the other. The town where I grew up, Brush Prairie, was, up until recently, a place that never even achieved the designation of tank town. Now, it’s being consumed by suburban creep.”

Of his childhood, it’s the weather Silvis remembers most fondly. “There used to be actual snow that would stop the world in its tracks for a week or more, and those were great times. Summers, too, when we would go up to the Lewis River to swim, or ride rafts down from Molten Falls to Lewisville Park.”

As a student of the arts, a burgeoning writer, and an apprentice vegetarian, Silvis knew quickly that he was different from most of his peers.

“My brother and I both started craving concrete at an early age. Riding rafts and taking snow hikes was all very fine and well, but we needed the energy of the city. Vancouver serviced this need, though, again, these were the early ‘70s before the mall at Jantzen Beach opened, so Vancouver was still a proper city: Hadley’s Department Store, JCPenney, an actual Woolworth’s with a fountain counter, two good cinemas (my first real film experience was at the Kiggins). Main Street, especially at Christmas, was packed with shoppers. It’s hard to imagine now. Other than Kiggins, Joe Brown’s and Paul’s Elbow Room, most everything else is gone. Anyway, it was through our all too few visits to ‘the city’ and my addiction to early Hollywood films that led me to spend far too many hours fantasizing over leading an alternative, more urban life. This was not readily understood by my rural peers.”

In London, Silvis worked primarily at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for most of his 10-year residency, though he also had a two-year stint selling books on Charing Cross Road.

“As for a theater career, I was an actor for many years, then, when I arrived in London and the job at the Opera House, I found myself in theater management. I started writing plays in earnest in 1992, and had my first production the following year. At that same time I was admitted into the Hammersmith Playwrights Group, which was run by the actress Vivienne Pickles.”

Silvis felt instantly at home in Europe. “It’s a vast generalization considering the amount of cultures I’m confining to this statement, but things are more civilized here. A person is more likely to meet people who have read the same books, seen the same obscure films, and are enthusiastic about the same artists. That isn’t just among Europeans, though. The American ex-pats one meets are also, usually, highly educated, intelligent people. Oscar Wilde’s maxim that ‘All good Americans, when they die, go to Paris’ seems very apt.”

Life in Prague demands the additional effort of speaking a different language. “Czech is exceedingly difficult. Even fellow Slavs panic before it. But the Czechs want it to be tough. It has been the one successful defense against outside powers swallowing the culture whole. Even the diacritical marks over Czech letters lend the look of barbed-wire to the written language.”

As an “ex-pat” he’s part of a distinct community, which, he says, has been called “Wilde’s Paris updated—that’s the official propaganda. There is a large community here, and many of the old-timers have opened cafes, bookshops and galleries. There are even little magazines flourishing, and a very good press, Twisted Spoon. In reality, Prague, as an ex-pat experience, is more left-turn than Left Bank. There are no Hemingways or Steins here. Or if there are, they’ve done a good job of keeping quiet. Still, it’s a good life here. The Czechs are the most liberal people I’ve ever had the pleasure of living amongst. They are also, arguably, the most intelligent, too. Various EU reports lately have borne this out, with the Czechs being first in European book purchasing, second in command of three or more languages (the Estonians were first), and in the top five of European countries that are turning more land over to organic farming. They are behind in a few matters (a keener awareness of cycling would be nice), but with the Czechs you trust that they’ll eventually get it.”

Silvis still keeps his eye on America, but prefers to do so from a distance. “Europe serves as a great screening device. You can get the best of American culture (music, writing, theater) without having to personally wade through all the dross. The exception to this is film, sadly. Like everywhere else, Hollywood is in command, and so you see the same shit films here as there, though it’s worse as conditions become less favorable for finding good American indy cinema.”

To Silvis, modern America is a place that seems to be “crying for help, more than anything else. There’s a collective abnegation of individual, mature responsibility, it seems to me. For all its touted ‘freedoms,’ America remains the most conformist of cultures. What do I wish for everyone? The means to survive this age of madness and venality.”

Despite his day job at The Prague Post, Silvis hasn’t abandoned his original goals. “I’ve just finished a play, and have thrown it into the hands of my agent in London. In the interminable interim, I’m working on another play now, with the ideas for a following one beginning to intrude on my thoughts.”

Silvis has no immediate plans to return to the states (“Hard to say. There’s always the chance I’ll have to go back…”), but will admit, “Naturally, I miss family and friends, though many have made the trek over to visit, which pleases me greatly.”

When asked to try and improve America in ten words or less, he responded, “Read Jefferson. Read Emerson. Read Thoreau. Just read.”


Becoming "The Other" In South Korea
By James Walling

Born and raised in Camas/Washougal by conservative Christian parents and liberal grandparents who benefited from the New Deal, Gabriel Pettyjohn learned to seek new horizons—both literally and intellectually—at an early age. Most recently, his travels have brought him to The Republic of Korea.

“I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family that chose to home school me for many years,” Pettyjohn explained. “I think being cooped up at home for so many years is perhaps what gave me such a strong desire to travel and see as much of the world as I have.”

Arriving in Gimhae, South Korea, a few days before Christmas after a stint in Guatemala, Gabriel settled into the eighteenth floor of a high rise near the private school where he teaches English in the afternoons.

“I arrived in Korea just in time to realize that it gets very cold here in the winter and to be shocked that my idea of what a dense city is was so innocent.”

Gimhae—a city with approximately the same population of Greater Vancouver—is packed into an area the size of our downtown core.

“Most people live in concrete high rise apartments that are all around 25 stories tall and to my eyes all look pretty much the same. There are thousands of them and they fill the valley.”

According to Pettyjohn, roughly 80% of Korea’s land is too rugged to build on and much of it is needed for farming, so the astonishing density of the cities is a matter of urgent necessity.

Pettyjohn had been on the lookout for job opportunities in East Asia when he settled on Gimhae.

“At the time I decided to teach English, I was mostly thinking that I wanted a base from which to see and experience the culture in as many other countries as possible.”

The Korean peninsula is ideally located for travel in the region, and Pettyjohn has taken advantage of it by taking quick trips to Japan, Shanghai, China, and other Korean cities.

On a recent trip to Japan, he joined up with a mountain climbing club from the German-owned water pump factory where he teaches English conversation classes on weekday mornings in Gimhae.

As immune to culture shock as Pettyjohn had become by the time he made the move to Korea, he was nonetheless impacted by the experience of becoming a minority in a society that is hyper-conscious of racial minorities and immigrants.

“The first word I learned in the Korean language was wae gook, the word for foreigner, because I heard it spoken all around me wherever I went. Korea was one of the most isolated countries in the world for quite a long time. For hundreds of years there were laws which required any foreigner who landed here, even because of a shipwreck, to simply be killed.”

Needless to say, such brutality no longer occurs, but Pettyjohn faces his share of blatant racism.

“When I arrived here, perhaps the most difficult thing to adjust to was the constant attention; always being stared at, pointed at, clearly whispered about, sneered at, laughed at, gasped at, mothers pulling their children close, and at times startled screams if someone had not noticed that a foreigner had gotten too close to them. This sort of behavior toward me continues to happen most every day.”

When asked about what misconceptions Americans have about Korea, Pettyjohn conjectured, “Most Americans have no concept of Confucianism. They [also] have little knowledge of what commodities are made where and what companies are based where.”

I asked Pettyjohn if he misses home, and he allowed that he does—family, friends, and Burgerville being highest on the list—but for the time being his plan is to make a one-month visit sometime in early ’08 before returning to teach in Busan for another year. Beyond that, he’s set his sights on Shanghai.

When I asked His Worldliness to impart a little hard-won wisdom to the folks at home, Pettyjohn talked about the need for “innovative education that promotes sharp independent and creative thinking,” and also the urgent need to teach “every student of the nature and state of the larger world outside of their national boundaries.”

“I think that the world is fast becoming a place where new ideas and clear thinking are required to see the challenges that Vancouver and every other city will have to face,” Pettyjohn concluded.

Suffice it to say, we are in agreement on that one.

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See also this issue: Q&A With a Vancouver Marine in Iraq