Part 1 of 2
A new year is always a time of reflection. Perhaps even more so after the last three years among the expat community; almost every fellow expat I know has a pandemic story of displacement, or getting stuck somewhere, or some other sudden, unexpected change prompted by the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent variants.
Upon reflection, I believe the winding path of life, complete with stumbles and rocky patches, has held me in good stead for where I sit today. Able to breathe a little easier, be at peace with holding space for things that don’t go quite as planned, and capable of once again being curious and soaking up the opportunities that come our way.
After all, the life of a expat spouse involves learning to dig into your own inner resources, especially if you also want to continue having a career of your own. Fortunately, I’ve long described myself as passionately curious — a quality I believe has enriched my life in a multitude of ways, especially as a long-term expat and creative professional.
A global family
In my little family, each of us — my husband, our two teenage daughters, and myself — was born in a different country: Ireland, U.K., China and the UAE.
I was already an expat myself when I met my future husband in Hong Kong, while working as an environmental consultant. I had studied abroad there, then returned after having earned a master’s degree in soil science back in England; my husband was rotating between Shanghai and Hong Kong for a U.S.-based engineering consultancy. Soon after we got married in 2004, however, I was made redundant from my consultancy role. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming; my company had very few married women, let alone mothers. The sentiment was that once a woman got married, one way or another, she would leave the workforce — so women employees were not a worthy investment.
Fortunately, I took this as an opportunity to become a freelance environmental consultant, which was a step I may never have taken otherwise. While maintaining my base in Hong Kong, I worked on development projects for multinationals and development agencies all over Asia, making good use of the 6 month sabbatical I had previously taken to study Mandarin and business studies in Beijing.
Later that year, my husband’s job then moved to Guangzhou, and he did a weekly commute, or visited me on the weekends wherever I happened to be. (We had our first anniversary while I was on a project in the Philippines, and a babymoon in Vietnam while I supervised a site excavation!) After I became pregnant in 2005, I joined him in China, where I spent the next two years as a work-from-home Mum with monthly travel to development projects.
On the Gupte Scale, I’d rate our move as a 11 out of 15. The destination was a 4: not as culturally enriching as Beijing, but very cosmopolitan thanks to all the multinational companies based there. Location was a 4, too, due to ease of travel from there, particularly to Hong Kong. I would rate resources a 3: there’s a wonderful supportive expat community who will help out but not everything you might want, especially as a new mother, is available.
Around this time, I decided to more seriously pursue photography — as a previous art student this was a passionate hobby that I had studied in Hong Kong at night school with a goal of capturing our travels more truthfully. As with my environmental career, photography combined my creative and technical strengths. Initially, I focused on travel photography, contributing to local magazines and expanding to bigger publications including in-flight magazines and Lonely Planet magazine, and eventually to telling the stories of families in our city.
Heading west to the Middle East
We made our next move in 2007 for my husband’s new job in Abu Dhabi, while I was pregnant with our second daughter. After nearly 15 years in Asia, and given that I had absolutely zero contacts in the construction/environmental industry anywhere in the Middle East, this was completely new territory — I’d never even stepped off the plane in the region for me! But I soon realized this was actually my golden opportunity to give a photography business a go and set myself up as a Lifestyle photographer, visiting peoples homes for family photo sessions, or places with meaning for them such as the desert, to capture a more real life side of family life than with typical studio photos.
This relocation rates highly on the Gupte Scale. Abu Dhabi is a modern city with many resources. Timing-wise, it wasn’t perfect as I’d just started to get settled in Guangzhou and the UAE did feel significantly different compared to the Asia I’d lived in for so many years, Destination-wise, I loved a new place and region to explore; our first holiday as a family of four was to Jordan and Syria when our youngest was 5 months old, plus it was so much closer to our own families back in England and Ireland. Overall, I’d give it 12 out of 15.
I capitalized on the experience I’d gained in consultancy and working freelance which held me in good stead for running my own business, and over the next decade built up a wonderful client base of international and local families who invited me into their homes to tell their stories year after year, or to celebrate life events with them. I loved what I did and felt a huge new lease of life in tapping into my creativity and also using that curiosity inside me in meeting so many incredible people.
My business went so well in fact that when we left Abu Dhabi for a year, from 2014 to 2015, when our children were 6 and 8, I flew back periodically and saw enough clients to support our family through a year of travel — another leap of faith, and the adventure of a lifetime. While my husband took a sabbatical, we homeschooled the kids, threw them and a tent in the back of the family car and set off across the Arabian Gulf to drive from Abu Dhabi to Ireland, and back again.
Expanding our horizons
As our family expanded its travels, so did my business opportunities. After returning to Abu Dhabi in mid-2015, I branched out to accepting commercial clients, while maintaining my focus on telling stories with connection, depth and emotion through my images rather than just a set of typical poses. I accepted teaching opportunities and wrote my first book, on embracing real life photographic stories wherever you are.
With future relocations or travels in mind, I also built up my portfolio of passive income from agency work, stock photography and stories from our travels, and my online mentoring for other photographers, focused on expanding creative and storytelling depth in images. Meanwhile my husband had gone back to the same company, albeit in a different role and he had more travel himself so my work fitted more and more around our growing girls who frequently came to photo sessions with me.
After two and a half more years in Abu Dhabi, we decided the time had come for our next adventure: driving our camper van across the Arabian peninsula and relocating to Goa, India for a slower pace of life.
What happened next? Read on for Part 2 of Kirsty’s story.
All photos copyright of Kirsty Larmour.
