The Accidental Foreigner
Starting Over (…and Over)
We did it, World! We made it to 2021! We have a new United States President, and we have COVID vaccines making their way around the world. Can you smell the hope that’s right around the corner?
Oh, wait, we also have new strains of COVID popping up in various places (e.g. UK, Japan, South Africa), and there’s this new activity called “insurrection” that people at the U.S. Capitol participated in. Kim Jong Un gave himself a new title, and various places all around the world are in new lockdowns despite the vaccine. 2021 isn’t looking so hot, is it?
Instead of pinning hopes on the calendar changing numbers, I’m a big proponent of making changes whenever and wherever the fancy strikes. I’ve made huge career changes and even moved to a completely different country right in the thick of the pandemic in July 2020. That said, huge life changes involve both blessings and heartaches, and my recent move from Los Angeles to Taipei, Taiwan has definitely been both.
My parents immigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the 1980s and raised my brother and me in a suburb of Los Angeles. In my past professional life, I was an attorney slaving away at a law firm. I decided that wasn’t the path for me and set my sights for Hollywood, in which I’m still forging that path. I’ve had the privilege of traveling all around the world, but Asia in particular always tugged at my heartstrings. It felt like Asia was calling me back, so in 2019, I started serious efforts to heed that call.
I made the decision to move to Taiwan in early 2020. Never mind that my Mandarin is at best mediocre, but I felt like I knew enough to get by and I was committed to studying with a tutor. Never mind that the Taiwanese film industry and Hollywood are universes apart (I would learn this later); I was committed to feeling things out. Never mind that I never lived abroad before; “It shouldn’t feel like living abroad,” my brain said, “because you’re Taiwanese by blood.” [cue raised eyebrow]
And never mind that this decision happened in the worst year for travel. I spent my last day in my Downtown Los Angeles apartment on March 13, and spent what was supposed to be my last week in California with my parents in their suburban home. Just days before my March 20, 2020 flight, California instituted shelter-in-place, and Taiwan rolled out quarantine procedures for anybody coming in from abroad. As these were the early days of COVID, guidelines were clear as mud and getting muddier by the day. I canceled my flight until I felt sure (and safe) about traveling, which wouldn’t happen until July 2020.
So, my grand story of starting this new, amazing chapter of my life in a different country fizzled out into three months of sheltering in place with my elderly Taiwanese parents and playing video games to keep my mind from turning into mush. There will be pieces on my going through the stages of grief while sheltering in place. There will be pieces about video games and the parallels in life I found within them. And though I liken the three months of sheltering in place to a form of psychological torture, nothing could prepare me to be the Accidental Foreigner in Taiwan, learning nuances of a culture that “I should already know.” 2020 was a year of starting over (and over and over), both externally and internally.
To those who feel lost, physically or emotionally; to those who feel caught between cultures; to those who feel like they’re not at that “perfect age” to make changes — these personal essays are dedicated to you.
