Nostalgia as a pathology was first defined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who, as a young medical student at the University of Basel, observed its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries serving in the lowlands of France and Italy. For these hired guns, the condition manifested as fever, fainting, anxiety, insomnia, stomach pain, cardiac arrhythmia, and death, among other symptoms. The disease was taken so seriously that whistling one particular milking song called “Khue-Reyen” became punishable by death. So, for a while the disease came to be known as mal du Suisse.
These days I often find myself thinking about Hofer’s mercenaries, stalking through the lowlands with a permanent whistle in their ears. I like to imagine them as an army of Werther’s, yellow-panted and blue-jacketed, each clutching an identical, damp notebook in their breast pockets. When I first learned about Hofer’s study in my freshman year of college, I used to think that a band of hired guns was a strange sample to select for the scientific study of homesickness. Now, nearly a decade later, I think I understand. Only a mercenary could contract such a fatal heartache, because he is further from home than a regular soldier. He has cut himself off from the heart.
Since I relocated to Sydney three months ago, I have experienced many symptoms of chronic nostalgia. At night I lie awake listening to NPR podcasts. I have lost weight, which I am secretly thrilled about. I have become obsessed with, consumed by, the news in America.
Nostalgia also torments me during my waking hours. Sydney is perpetually flooded with sunshine, a cultural export of California. If I close my eyes while walking through the farmers’ market in Pyrmont Bay Park, the scent of strawberries and saltwater teleports me to the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace. Like a famous ex-girlfriend, America is everywhere I look, in the form of movie trailers, advertising jingles, franchise restaurants, and cereal boxes. Here is what I have learned: as an ex-American, nostalgia is as inescapable as gravity—not a perfect analogy, I am aware, since an American flag flies on the moon.
To protect myself from inflammation, most days I just stick to my apartment. For those of you familiar with Sydney, I live on the nineteenth floor of a new development called Opera Residences in Bennelong Point. The place came fully furnished after the taste of someone I knew well. It’s not uncommon for me to spend the whole day here in the living room looking out into the harbor, making coffee, and aimlessly jotting things down, like I’m doing today.
It’s not that I can’t go back to America, or that there’d be men in uniform waiting for me at the airport if I returned. It’s just that I no longer have anything there to go back to. To be clear, I’m not in Sydney to hide. In fact, I’m actively putting myself in harm’s way by being here because this is one of the only places in the world people know to look for me. But I promised myself I would stay until I finished this book and hopefully cured myself of nostalgia.
I say “cure” because the warmth of these feelings toward a country that never embraced me strikes me as suspect. How can you feel nostalgic for a place or person you knowingly betrayed? I’ve learned recently that my feelings, in general, should not be trusted. I started to wonder if this sudden flare-up of nostalgia was masking a more chronic condition, something deeply rooted I haven’t come to terms with yet. That’s when I realized that in order to cure myself of this disease, I needed to investigate its etiology.
To begin, here is something that you must know about California. Its allure is simple. For centuries, gold has drawn the Chinese to California like mayflies to lamplight. Like iron shavings to a magnet. We flooded into the ports of Jiu Jin Shan (Old Gold Mountain—what the Chinese called Herb Caen’s Baghdad by the Bay) first on barges, then on planes. After gold, steel. After steel, silicon. That brings us to the present. Remember: we’ve always been looking for gold in San Francisco.