[Missed Chapter 2? Read it.]
As my year of trying to find a job in Europe rolled on, I established a routine: roll through San Francisco on my bicycle every morning for many hours and then ruthlessly research companies and industries, sending out resume after resume, trying to find an entry point where I might convince someone to hire me.
One of my strengths has always been writing cover letters that get attention, so I usually had someone interested in speaking with me. Whenever a recruiter reached out to talk on video, I was always eager but not desperate. Years of interviewing people for my work as a journalist and writer taught me how to be confident speaking to strangers who show up with an agenda, but it also taught me not to expect magic to happen in every conversation. I can’t win people over if they have fundamental differences in opinion. I can usually tell within the first minute of an interview (whether I’m the interviewer or interviewee) if it will be a productive chat or a complete dud.
When someone interviews me for a job, I’m good at being honest about myself and the work that I do. I freely share my strengths and weaknesses in the hope that I can unlock a similar, shared preference for plainspoken honesty with the people who are interviewing me. This makes me somewhat naïve. I am perhaps similarly naïve by being direct with potential employers about the work that I do and the kind of company that I want to work for: quality work over quick work; writing messages that sound like real people instead of recycling safe PR-centric nonsense; putting my thumb on the scale when making decisions so that creativity and experimentation have a clear advantage over maintaining the status quo.
Not every potential employer responds to this kind of radical honesty, but then again that’s how I filter out the bad ones. I don’t want to find myself stuck in a job that I’m not proud of doing at a company that I loathe because I compromised before they even started paying me. I don’t say this because I’m too smart to get stuck in that position, but because I’ve been there before.
It didn’t help that, in the beginning of my search, I was clueless about salary ranges and the laws of employment for foreigners in individual countries. Recruiters had no time to explain these details to me, but every failed conversation uncovered fresh evidence about how things actually worked, which slowly led me to a new understanding of the marketplace of expat labor. Each failure helped me hone my pitch for the next opportunity.
The pros and cons of being an American
It helped that I came from Silicon Valley. That naturally drew their attention. It also helped that I legitimately had a wealth of writing, editing, and design experience from print to web and beyond, built up over two decades, experience these companies actually needed. I was especially good at creating new publishing processes out of whole cloth, or at least helping companies significantly improve how they currently did things. But as time wore on, I saw that I was perhaps too insistent on seeking out a group of people who believed, along with me, that good writing and design and user experience mattered. I had my standards, but maybe it was time to lower those standards.
It didn’t help that I was American. These people need to know that you’re committed to staying in their country for a long time before expending their limited resources to hire a non-EU worker. They already have a wide (if not deep) pool of talent to choose from throughout Europe, multilingual knowledge workers who are clamouring to make the move from Bucharest to Berlin. They’re all much younger, willing to work for less, and don’t require complicated work visas.
I didn’t care what I got paid. Frankly, that felt like a pretty good selling proposition in my favour. I assumed most Americans who looked into the idea of moving abroad gave up right after plugging their existing salary into an online currency converter and refreshing the page, thinking, “This can’t be right.” The amount of money you can make in San Francisco compared to any European city is astronomically higher for many complex reasons, but I had done my research on cost of living and knew that comparing them didn’t even make sense. Even at these early stages of my journey, I knew that if your ultimate goal in becoming an expat is to become wealthy, you will probably end up disappointed. You don’t do it for the money, you do it for the experience, unless you come from a very poor village outside of Bucharest.
Another reason I didn’t focus too much on salary is that, in my research, I had learned that hiring a knowledge worker from abroad – of my age – meant that a German company had to pay a decent minimum monthly salary, and that amount was always higher than the median German salary. I had lived frugally my entire life and was confident I could survive on whatever was offered to me, if I could only convince someone to offer it. I didn’t intend to negotiate.
The rejections kept piling up as spring turned to summer and then to autumn and winter. It was hopeless. I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince employers to hire me from a performance on a Zoom call. I needed to be in the room, either charming them with my wit or turning them off with my arrogance, whichever the case may be. These weren’t huge corporations with travel budgets to fly applicants halfway around the world for a meeting. I had to make it easier for them. I had to be in Berlin.
My original plan had been to set off on my new adventure just after Henry graduated from high school, but it became increasingly clear that nobody was going to take a chance on me unless I took a chance on them. What if I left early? What would Henry think?
Where America went wrong for me
When Trump was elected in 2016, naturally a lot of left-leaning Americans proclaimed loudly on social media that this was it, the final straw. It was time to leave the country. I’d never met a single person who had actually left for political reasons, but I was definitely sympathetic to their point of view and was ready to become one of those people. I hadn’t made any such vow, but I had long ago concluded that America was fundamentally over, and had been for some time.
I maintain a long list of grievances against my homeland. I’m a socialist at heart and enemy of conservatism in nearly all forms. (Except for the single most important one that everyone conveniently forgets, conservation of the land.) I get off on paying my taxes because that means I’m doing my part. I’ve never felt like part of mainstream America, but in that year before I left, I felt more and more sidelined as it became clear just how conservative the country had become, indeed was still becoming.
By my calculations, the political landscape of America began to devolve nearly 40 years earlier when Ronald Reagan ripped out the solar panels that his predecessor, the saintly Jimmy Carter, had installed on the White House roof. Reagan’s election transformed an entire generation of labor union supporters into supply-side republicans with the promise of lucrative business-minded policies and sensible assurances that the lower classes would no longer be allowed to rely on government handouts. The democrats responded by marketing a competing product (now with 30% less greed), but they were just as geared towards pleasing corporate donors.
It’s been downhill ever since.
“In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy…. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
– Jimmy Carter
Dreams are just goals without deadlines
Breaking the news to Henry that I wanted to leave earlier than planned wasn’t easy, but I’ve always been honest with him. He had been supporting me all along, listening to me constantly kvetch about my struggles to find a pathway to Europe. He awarded me with his blessing, perhaps reluctantly considering he would have to spend the last three months of school (party!) living with his more strict mother. I was happy to provide her with that small gift of parental exclusivity because I knew it would be painful for her when he left San Francisco for good.
I had always told myself to give any city at least three months to see if it’s the right place for me, and that lined up perfectly with how long you’re allowed to stay in Germany on a tourist visa. By now, I was well-versed in researching Berlin from afar and was able to find an expensive one-room sublet for three months in Prenzlauer-Berg.
I picked a departure date at the end of February and bought a one-way ticket.
If I was going to leave, I needed to make it hard to come back. I sent a letter to my kindly old Chinese landlord Spencer telling him that I would be giving up my rent-controlled San Francisco apartment. I sold everything I owned and gave everything else away, depositing all of the proceeds into the open hands of my son, as penance for leaving him three months before graduation.
I left San Francisco with two suitcases and my beloved bicycle, which I packed in a box and shipped off to Berlin.
“Sorry, kid,” I joked to him at the airport, trying desperately to make light of leaving him early, hugging him more strongly than ever before, for the last time in a long time. “You might need to work this out with your therapist someday.”
This bird has to fly.