When I became a foreign correspondent four years ago, I didn’t think I’d come home for a long time, like at least a decade. Home was a pleasant, privileged life in a sun-drunk Silicon Valley suburb. But I wanted to get away. People sometimes asked in mocking bewilderment, you live in a paradise on earth, why would you ever want to leave?
Ever since I was young, there’d always been a force pushing me beyond the quiet streets and blocks of San Jose. When I wasn’t being scolded for falling asleep in class in high school, I was daydreaming about the bigger world, thinking about why our world was so complex and how to make sense of its contradictions and inequalities. I was lucky that my parents wanted to teach us how to appreciate other cultures. They took us on yearly family vacations, on road trips to faraway places like Alaska, Spain, France. But my main way of satiating my curiosity about the world back then was to read a lot. As a teenager, I devoured The Economist and The New Yorker, and when I was done with the magazines, I stacked them neatly in big plastic containers for safekeeping, like putting away clean dishes after a giant feast.
As I grew up, I also came to recognize and take ownership of my independence as an educated young woman with her own money and time. I had zero social pressure from my parents to do anything other than to pursue my dreams to write. They supported my crazy idea to become a journalist. (I am the only writer in my family’s sea of computer engineers, pharmacists, teachers, civil engineers, tech startup people, doctors.) I owe a lot to my mom, who was a hardware engineer in the 1980s when it was still very unpopular for women to enter the profession. She encouraged me to believe that women are equal to men in worth, and to never let anyone trick me into thinking otherwise. By the time I entered college, I saw my future role in the world as a man does, which is, that I can do it. I can just get out there and do what I want to do. I can dare to imagine.
Without mental barriers, then, my dream was to go far — really far. I wanted to travel the world and get paid to write. The dream came true in 2015, when I got the job to move to Hong Kong to write about financial markets for The Wall Street Journal. My parents and two brothers saw me off at the San Francisco airport. When I walked toward the security gates, I held back my tears. I wasn’t going to come back to my family for a while. I locked my mind on one goal, to keep going, to Hong Kong, and beyond. Nothing was going to stop my ambition.
Four years went by. During that period, I transferred to the Beijing bureau to write about China’s economy with a special focus on the property market. I crisscrossed the country to write about ghost cities, out-of-control housing prices and weird architecture. On my vacations, I hopped around Asia, to clubs in South Korea and beaches in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. I was doing it; I was living my childhood dream in reality.
The transformation of my life in Beijing’s hutongs
Somewhere along the way, a series of events began to change my perspective. When I moved to Beijing in the fall of 2016, within a few months of each other, my grandma died, then my mom had a stroke just after Thanksgiving. I visited my mom shortly after the incident. It was a shock to see half her body affected by temporary paralysis. For two weeks, I drove her to physical therapy appointments and listened to her study her book of common English vocabulary words, reading each syllable in a voice that sounded like she had cotton balls in her cheeks. Seeing my mom, a smart and strong woman, have to learn how to walk and talk, like a child, was really hard.
Luckily my mom’s pretty tough on her own. She told herself that she was going to get better, and so she did. She practiced her speaking exercises and lifted weights at the gym to train her brain how to communicate again with her muscles. She won’t walk or speak exactly the same as before. But today, she’s fully recovered. Throughout that whole ordeal, watching from afar halfway around the world in China, even though my mom was in excellent hands, I felt like I had abandoned a responsibility to be there. I began to consider whether I should drop my foreign correspondent job and return home.
When my grandpa, whom I admired for his courage to immigrate to the U.S. from China in the 1950s, died last year, it accelerated the thinking process. Family was drawing me back home. I had a new dream that wasn’t about work or attaining the next level of success. I envisioned a life spent with them: splitting a bottle of champagne with my two brothers, taking my dad out for ice cream, treating my mom for dim sum lunch, even tagging along for errands. Whatever, just to be with them. So at the end of May, I quit my job. I’m taking a break to travel the world for half a year and then I’m returning home to hang out with my family. It won’t be forever. Just for a chapter, together.
