If not here, then where?
On uprooting, impermanence, and finding home.
Welcome to Every Tiny Thought!
I write about the quiet, complicated, and often contradictory parts of life—especially identity, home, and this new chapter of becoming a parent. This space is where I share honest storytelling, personal reflections, and moments that don’t always make it into casual conversations. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’m so glad you’re here.
Shortly after I turned eighteen, I left home with two suitcases and a student visa, bound for a small college town in Virginia. I didn’t know it then, but I was beginning a long journey not just across countries and states, but through years of uncertainty about where I’d finally call home.
Over the next twelve years, I moved from Virginia to Washington D.C., Houston, Ann Arbor, Phoenix, and finally the San Francisco Bay Area. Each of my previous moves was shaped and dictated by necessity: internships, graduate school, job offers. The idea of choosing a place simply because I wanted to live there felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. The place itself hardly mattered. I went where the opportunities were, and the community came second.
The Bay Area was the first place I intentionally wanted to move to. I spent a summer here during a graduate internship, while my then-boyfriend (now husband), Arthur, was in graduate school nearby. That summer, I fell in love with this place. I loved everything that makes a Bay Area summer feel perfect: the mountains, the ocean, the food, the almost-always sunny weather.
After years of living in the U.S., it was in San Francisco that I experienced the rare, quiet comfort of fitting into the crowd and becoming unnoticeable. Here, I found everything I had missed: the food of my childhood memory, Chinese grocery stores stocked with the pantry staples I grew up on, and people who looked like me.
Before Arthur graduated, I told him to look for jobs in the Bay Area and promised I would join him soon. It would be another three years before I could finally move here, after a two-year detour through Arizona.
In My 2021 In Review, I wrote about finally feeling settled for the first time in a decade.
For the first time in a long time, I am living in the present tense, not having to wonder what will happen next year and how to plan for it. I didn't know it before and thought it was just the way life is, that you always look onward and forward. I didn't know how heavy that made me feel before until I started to feel lighter these days. It's an incredible feeling - not having to think about where I will be a year from now, work or immigration-wise. I had been wondering when I could finally be in the same place with my partner, and I can stop wondering now. And I am so grateful for that.
It’s strange, yet comforting, to realize that I will soon have spent the majority of my adult working life here. Being far from home, we learned early on how important friendships are. In many ways, friends have come to fill the roles our families might have played in our everyday lives. On holidays like Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, when most people gather with family, we gather with friends whose families are also far away. We’ve become each other’s emergency contacts, even listed as the non-parent contact at the preschool that one of our friends’ kids goes to.
If you know about the Bay Area, you know that it’s huge, and our friends live all over the Peninsula and the East Bay. It often takes 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, to see them. But I learned, through years of moving, that finding a community requires intention and effort. We try to be proactive about staying connected: hosting picnics, dinner gatherings, and potlucks; organizing overnight trips, and setting up recurring meet-ups. Arthur, who once avoided small talk with strangers, somehow worked up the courage to talk to each of our new neighbors to say hi and add them to a building group chat. Now, we collect packages for each other when someone’s out of town, borrow household items as needed, and take turns hosting meals.
Little by little, with each passing year, here feels more like home.
If not here, then where else?
With the future of international students and workers in the U.S. growing increasingly uncertain, I find myself asking the question:
If one day, we have to move, where would we go? If not here, then where else?
For a long time, the idea of leaving the U.S. terrified me, having to abandon everything I’ve built since I was eighteen and start over, reinventing myself somewhere else. It felt strange to admit that, despite being a foreigner, this is the country I know best. Because of visa complications and the added chaos of the pandemic, I did not get to travel much internationally in my twenties. I only made it back to China once in the last six years. But fear alone doesn’t make the thought disappear. It still lingers in the back of my mind, uninvited but persistent.
When I left China at eighteen, I didn’t realize I was signing up for a life far away from everything familiar. Just as things had finally started to feel clearer in recent years, the future has turned murky again.
After so many years, the idea of uprooting again no longer feels as intimidating. Like many things in life, the more you do it, the more you learn to adjust. But that doesn’t mean it gets easier.
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In the early days of the pandemic, the administration threatened to halt all new work visas. I was still waiting for my first work visa to be approved and had no idea how long I could remain in my job and in the country. I began looking into Canada as a backup plan, just in case things fell apart. Having a Plan B, C, or even D is a reality we come to accept.
Canada offered a more straightforward and predictable immigration process. It prioritized work experience and education level over luck or years of waiting. I had a great time visiting Vancouver the last two times. Yes, there would be more rain in the winter, and I didn’t know anyone there. But the public transportation, the culture, and the large Asian community made the idea of starting over feel possible. Moving during a pandemic would’ve been a logistical nightmare, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
This past winter, we spent two full weeks in London, catching up with friends from middle school and high school. Despite the dreary winter days, with the sky darkening by three in the afternoon, we could somehow see ourselves living there. The ease of public transportation, the abundance of public parks, the endless food options, the free museums, the bookstores, the metropolitan feel of the city, and its proximity to so many other countries. Most importantly, we already have close friends living there. Somehow, in this new place, a community is already in place.
If one day we have to move again, whether it’s London, Vancouver, or somewhere we haven’t imagined, I know we’ll find our way. We've already done it before, starting from scratch in unfamiliar places, building new relationships, and growing them.
It won’t be easy. It never is. But we know how to begin again. Because home, I’ve learned, is never a fixed address. It’s the people we gather around us.
💌 If this resonated with you…
I write about the quiet, complicated, and often contradictory parts of life—especially identity, home, and this new chapter of becoming a parent. You can find more of my writing on similar topics here. If you’d like to support this kind of honest storytelling and receive more personal reflections like this, consider becoming a subscriber. Your support helps keep this space going and means so much to me.
The anxiety that this administration is producing, ugh. I have no reason to, but as a naturalized citizen, it all feels somewhat unsettling. It's good to keep your options open. Vancouver and London are great cities. I love both. Community makes a home, no matter where you land.
Your story of finding a home and community in the Bay Area was beautiful to read. Your waffles look absolutely delicious 😋