About a year has passed since I first started this website/blog and though I haven’t been writing on a consistent basis, it’s something I haven’t given up on. This is going to be a long post reflecting on the past and why I started my website/blog. There have been countless distractions along the way, but I’m not giving up.
Life doesn’t always go as planned and sometimes you end up in a place you never see yourself living as a kid growing up.
It’s been close to ten years since I arrived in Japan to start a new life that began with a job teaching English. Since then I’ve changed jobs twice, though I’ve been fortunate enough to not need to relocate. In fact, I’ve been renting the same studio apartment for the entire time. It’s not something I had made any plans for but this is where I am today.
Looking Back
I’ll be jumping around so there might not be a continuous timeline or topic, but it should (I hope) all come together in a logical way that ties everything and explains how and why I am where I am today.
Where I Come From
I was born in Minnesota the youngest of four brothers to immigrant parents who became naturalized citizens of the United States. Sure, I’m all American, but I never really fit in anywhere in the predominantly white majority culture or strongly influential minority ethnic cultures like Black or Hispanic/Latino that make their mark on the American experience.
When I was just a kid in the 1990s, people seemed rather ignorant perhaps about people with “yellow” skin in Minnesota, and probably most of the Midwest. I remember in elementary school that some classmates thought of me as being from elsewhere instead of the states. And even today I think there are still many children of color, even of white European descent perhaps, who face ostracism or discrimination by their peers because they don’t fit that mold of being “American” enough for them, especially if their parents are immigrants, or if they themselves didn’t live their entire lives in the states.
It’s wrong and stupid to group people from all sorts of cultures together in the same category because they have roots in an entire continent filled with different countries, languages, beliefs, and so on. East Asia, southeast Asia, south Asia, the Middle East, and so on are all part of Asia and any American with roots in a country in any of these regions would be considered Asian American.
Technically, my first language is Mandarin since that’s what I learned first and I had spent my early childhood in Taiwan. I was still just a baby when my family had left Minnesota for a temporary return to Taiwan. My family moved back to provide care for my grandma, who had suffered a stroke and passed away a few years later.
My family moved back to Minnesota a few years after that and I was in time to start first grade. I remember my mom telling me about moving to America where there’s snow in the winter some time before everything was packed and we hopped on a plane. To be honest, it didn’t feel like going back to my home country, but that’s because I wasn’t even old enough to remember anything about it as a baby. I was going an an adventure for all I knew.
My Formative Years
To be continued in part 2…
Thanks for reading and please look forward to part 2!
One Chance Works 