It happened again last week – I was walking down a major boulevard in Los Angeles (the fact that I was walking had already marked me as a visitor from Jupiter) and I passed a Thai restaurant. I had already eaten dinner, but you know how these things are: I just couldn't resist looking at the menu to see what they had. Inside, elegant table settings and cozy chairs signaled higher than normal prices for Thai cuisine; in fact, I thought from the decor they might be serving French food here. On the menu, I saw "Thai salad " – was it som tam? I read the description; it sounded like your garden variety American green salad. I also saw things like chow mein and hamburger. Sure, they had some Thai dishes, like pad see eiw and tom yung kung, but most dishes weren't even listed under their Thai names. There wasn't a Thai letter, consonant or vowel marker, to be found on the menu. I was disappointed.

It bothers me that other Americans, who have no experience with Thai culture, will walk into a restaurant like this, sit down and have chow mein or lettuce and tomatoes with peanut sauce dressing and then later tell their friends, "Oh, I had Thai food for lunch today." It's just not right, somehow. They're going to get the wrong idea about what Thai food, Thai people, and Thai culture are all about.

I suppose this particular problem of mine emanates from my desire to see real, authentic artifacts of Thai culture here in the United States. But why? Why should Thai people who come here have to preserve everything exactly as it was in Thailand? Well, because I want to feel for a minute like I am back in the kingdom itself when I walk into a Thai restaurant, I guess. In other words, I don't have an answer for that; it's just about how I want to feel. Maybe I'm being sort of selfish.

But this quibble about food is part of a larger issue. Every immigrant who comes here probably wants in some way to join in with what is held as "American", whether it be cooking hamburgers, playing baseball, saying "dude" or "cool", or getting body piercings, or some other thing. They come here for the money, for security, for the weather, to be reunited with family who already came here, to own an SUV, I don't know... And part of living anywhere is joining in, right? Didn't I try to do the same thing when I was in Thailand? Of course I did. I ate mostly Thai food. I learned to speak the language, however badly. I tried to act respectfully of Thai customs. I ate durian. I rode around on a Honda Dream instead of in a Ford Explorer.

What we have here is a curious crossing of paths; on one side, immigrants from countries like Thailand who are coming to the US and want to be American, and malcontents like me, who would really like to get the hell out of the US (or the UK, or Canada, or Germany, or wherever) because the place we are from has just lost all it's magic for us. And we meet in crossing, look at each other, and wonder: If the place I am leaving is so bad, why are they going there?

People who emigrate in search of better economic opportunity or freedom from war, famine, or oppression will always know that their choices were logical and understandable by most people. They may have had little choice in the matter, or if they did have a choice, it was a no-brainer to them and their friends: Go to America, make money, send your kids to school. They may feel sorry about the people and life they left behind, but not about leaving the hardships they were facing. Those who voluntarily leave a place like the US, however, are usually acting for individualized reasons that are not understandable to most people. Their reasons are hard to justify by any conventional standards, and they are simply acting because of a strong inner voice saying, I want more, there must be more to life than this. They may have days in which they wonder what it would have been like if they had just been more "normal" and stayed at home.

Ultimately, there are two views for the person who voluntarily leaves a well-developed country like the US or Japan to go live somewhere else. One, they can rejoice that they have the vision to embrace other cultures wholeheartedly, to see things the way most of their countrymen cannot see. In this view, they are rich in understanding and blessed with a bigger world than they had before. But in the other view, these people are loners in a strange predicament: in their own country, nobody understands why they want to give up all the wonderful things to go live somewhere else, and in the country they are going to, no one will really accept them as one of the clan – at least, not until they have lived there for at least twenty years. They will never fit into either society completely, and the only people who will really understand them are... other people like them.

Well, before I get too depressive about this, let me say that I am proud of what I have done, and there is no way on earth I would ever take back my years of living overseas. I couldn't feel sorry for myself for being on my own path in life any more than I could for being good at chess (I'm actually pretty bad) or having a big nose. I still am on a secret mission here in the US, about which I cannot divulge any secrets, but when that mission is finished, you will be likely to find me, most likely, somewhere in Thailand.

Meanwhile, can I request that those Thai restaurants please put some Thai letters on their menus, and stop passing off egg foo young as Thai food? Thanks, I appreciate it.