English Audio Request

The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be. 　Born to Indian parents in Oxford, England, I was seven when my parents moved to California
by the third grade, I was a foreigner on all three of the continents that might have claimed me—a little Indian boy with an English accent and an American green card*. 　Foreignness became not just my second home, but my theme, my fascination, a way of looking at every place as many locals could not.
As some are born with the blessing of beauty or a musical gift, as some can run very fast without seeming to try, so I was given from birth, I felt, the benefit of being on intimate terms with outsiderdom.
It’s fashionable in some circles to talk of Otherness as a burden to be borne, and there will always be some who feel threatened by—and correspondingly hostile to—anyone who looks and sounds different from themselves.
But in my experience, foreignness can as often be an asset. 　The outsider enjoys a kind of diplomatic immunity in many places, and if he seems witless or alien to some, he will seem glamorous and exotic to as many others.
In open societies like California, someone with Indian features such as mine is a target of positive discrimination, as strangers ascribe to me yogic powers or Vedic wisdom that couldn’t be further from my background or my interest．
Besides, the very notion of the foreign has been shifting in our age of constant movement, with more than fifty million refugees; 　every other Torontonian you meet today is what used to be called a foreigner, and the number of people living in lands they were not born to will surpass 300 million in the next generation.
Soon there’ll be more foreigners on earth than there are Americans.　 Foreignness is a planetary condition, and even when you walk through your hometown—whether that’s New York or London or Sydney—half the people around you are speaking in languages and dealing in traditions different from your own.
From the moment westerners began living in Bali, soon after World War I, they sent back two messages, more or less contradictory: 　first, they were no longer foreign—they had gone native, and felt wonderfully at home in Eden;　 second, the rest of us would always remain outsiders, the gates to the garden having closed behind them. By 1930, Hickman Powell, a reporter from Duluth*, was entitling his book on Bali The Last Paradise;
soon thereafter, the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, author of Island of Bali, was wondering if Paradise was lost when its denizens* began wearing shorts.　 Here was a truly unfallen place, every newcomer seemed to report, which would fall as soon as the next newcomer disembarked*.
This is the point of the foreign. 　We don’t travel halfway across theworld to find the same things we could have seen at home.　 Those who undertake long and dangerous journeys have every incentive in stressing their discovery of a world far better than the one they left behind.　 Paul Gauguin* became a “true savage, a real Maori,” he wrote, after he traveled deep into the jungles of Polynesia (having found his first port of call, Papeete, a place polluted by “the absurdities of civilization”).　 His outsider’s appeal in the South Seas put to shame his Everyman status as an artist of uncertain prospects back in Paris. 　Somerset Maugham later adapted Gauguin’s story into a novel, The Moon and Sixpence, reminding readers that any distant port might be more liberating and richer in romance than a stockbroker’s* life.