By David Haldane

March 16, 2026

 

 

It began as a misunderstanding. “Sweet N’ Low?” the woman in the coffee shop wanted to know.

All I could do was stare blankly back. “Excuse me?” I replied, genuinely perplexed.

“Regular or Sweet N’ Low?” she repeated, less sweetly and lower than before. “Which do you want for your coffee?”

And that’s when it hit me. A feeling of uncertainty rapidly descending into dread. Was I experiencing the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s, my deepest lifelong fear? Or had I simply become an alien in my once-familiar lair?

Noting my consternation, the young woman held up a tiny pink packet. And suddenly I remembered. “Yes,” I said, momentarily relieved, “please give me some of that.”

But now I also knew the answer to my question, and it definitely wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

Let me explain. Sweet N’ Low is an iconic brand of artificial sweetener common in America. In the Philippines where I now live, however, it sounds more like a mysterious jingle. The upshot: visiting my former hometown of Los Angeles would surely require some adjustment.

It began in the parking lot. “Put your money in the slot!” a machine rudely demanded. Waitaminute, I demurred, what money and what slot? Same with the targeted address: 300 S. Spring Street. Not that the neighborhood was unfamiliar; I had once worked at the former LA Times building just down the street in Times Mirror Square. And yet somehow it all looked strange. Which way should I go, this way or that? And where to cross the street, here or there?

I had come to get some critical documents legally certified. But looking for the California Secretary of State’s office made me feel even more like a foreigner. Where the heck was it, and what would I say when I got there? How would I talk to the strangers who acted like foreigners themselves?

Arriving there didn’t help. “Form a straight line,” a Spanish-speaking security guard ordered, “and wait your turn.” At one point I got into a conversation with a young New Yorker, a legal aide who said she came here often. But she’d been in LA only a short time and frequently felt out of place. “This city,” she confided, “is hard to get used to.”

Then a siren went off, halting all conversation. “Attention!” an automated voice announced. “An emergency threat has been detected; please make your way to the exits.”

Jesus, I thought, where are we, in Israel?

For a few maddening minutes we stared at each other in silence. Then, suddenly, another voice tore the silence to shreds. “This is your security guard,” it said. “Please disregard that alarm; it was an error.”

“Thought so,” my new friend from New York said. “They do this all the time.”

And so it goes for American expats visiting home. The comforting news is that our numbers may soon increase. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, more people moved out of the US than moved in, the first time that’s happened since 1935. And it’s got people wondering.

“Is…the land of immigration becoming a country of emigration?” the paper mused. “The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live here.”

The self-deportees cite several reasons for their exodus including high living expenses, violent crime, and increasingly turbulent politics. “The wages are higher in the US, but the quality of life is higher [abroad]” declared one expat who could probably be my friend.

My sense of alienation got framed forever a few days later in the parking lot of the airport from which I was scheduled to depart. There, transfixed as if by oncoming headlights, two motionless bunny rabbits sat staring into space. You read that correctly: clueless furry animals with long gangly ears.

How had they gotten there and what were they doing? I had no clue. And yet the message echoed loud and clear: they looked as out-of-place as I felt.

Perhaps it was an omen. A good one, I hope.

 

SUBSCRIBE FREE HERE

 

_____________________

David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author living in Northern Mindanao, Philippines. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.