Where I Am (Revisited)

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve blogged or really updated people on my life. Last time I wrote a blog post was 2021 so it’s been 5 years and things have certainly happened since then.

When I recovered most of my blog posts, I re-read them. It’s been an enjoyable stroll down memory lane. My blog started with travel posts about my trip to Asia and Europe and continued into my early adulthood in Denver and the start of my Austin-living.

I wanted to revisit some of those posts and offer some reflections and updates on them since 5 years and turning 30 can change a lot of things.

I posted Where I Am on October 18^th, 2018. I was 6 months into my first job out of college and living in Broomfield, Colorado. That was a hard time for me financially. I was in a job that paid $12/hr and only let us work 35 hrs a week with no health benefits or any real job perks. I lived all the way out in Broomfield and had to commute 1hr and 40 mins by two different trains because I needed to find the cheapest rent I possibly could which was sharing a house with 4 other random men for $450/mo. It was a godsend to have Charles give me his 1998 Toyota Corolla to use that unfortunately only lasted a few months but then fortunate to have my dad give me his 2008 Subaru Outback.

I was meticulous about tracking every single expense down to the penny. I was living off rice and beans and anything I could find on the clearance rack at King Soopers. This started my hobby of finding clearance racks at grocery stores. There were times where I seriously contemplated going to a food pantry because I just didn’t know how I could pay for my rent, gas, insurance, train fares, and still afford food. It’s really the time when my eating disorder started. Maybe for another blog post… I was tired all the time and drained. Essentially, I was trying to stretch every dollar I could and every meal I could. It didn’t help I had a bad boss who forgot to pay us often.

I was trying to make a career in the design field. I didn’t want my degree to go to waste and become one of the many people that I know who tried to get into the design field and ended up becoming a programmer or some other unrelated field. This was absolutely the closest I was to quitting and leaving my dreams behind of being a designer though. I was constantly stressed, constantly felt in flight mode, and developed OCD habits that became destructive later. It was just not worth it.

I talked mostly in the 2018 blog post about reflecting on a friend group that wasn’t fulfilling to me. I talked about taking a hike, enjoying the solitude, and evaluating the people I was surrounded by and reflecting if they truly were fulfilling to me.

During my time alone, I evaluated the people I was surrounding myself with and realized that part of this exhaustion was because I couldn’t talk my kind of politics with the people I was around. By “my kind of politics”, I mean race, history, theory, justice, and philosophy. All with a heavily liberal lean. All of which were underlined with a passion for making the world and community better.

I think I felt a little empty when I was around people who didn’t have those values, didn’t understand those values, and most of all didn’t care. Therefore, focusing more of my time and energy with those two groups has made me feel part of a stronger sense of belonging. And maybe, more importantly, I can see myself becoming good friends with them and I think they see that as well.”

That was much needed and I stressed about that trip because I would have to pay for extra gas than normal in a month to get out to that hiking place. I think it was one of the key moments where I realized that people I surrounded myself was important to my state of being and reflected on who I am as a person. It’s the whole “tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are.” I think it was a realization that some of the people I associated with did not align with my values and maybe were not good people. Like at their core they weren’t kind, fair, or considerate people. Your friends can do something wrong and mess up but ultimately what you let slide, what you tolerate, what don’t speak up about, and the behavior you continue to allow says something about who you are. And to the bigger values (race, gender, equity, justice, love, nature, etc.), I realized it was spiritually harming me to continue being around people who were opposed to those values or were not good, kind people.

I talked about being worried I was slipping into the Yappie (young Asian professional) lifestyle which I think was influenced by that other friend group that wasn’t fulfilling me. They partied a lot of didn’t have much in their life beyond going out and eating, things that stressed me out anyway with my financial state.

A lot of the people that I did feel fulfilled by were friends from college and Ethnic Studies, friends who volunteered at the Asian Pacific Development Center, and friends from activist groups. I realized those were the people I felt most myself with which is such a key thing during a time of your life when you are figuring out who you are. It’s not like I dropped the other party friends wholesale, I still hung out with them and even got into a relationship with a friend from that group, but I realized they weren’t people I wanted to hold close in this period where I was growing into adulthood.

Traveling Blogs

Then we jump back to my traveling blogs of early 2018. There are a couple of important posts that encapsulated my experience and the impact of the trip. Being Simple, the first post when I talked about Hong Kong was, in hindsight, just the beginning of things I would reflect on and experience in China. I wrote:

But here, I feel like I’m simple. I feel like just another person on the street. Not an Asian person, not a Chinese girl, just a person. I know I’m still different, I’m still Western and American, but I get to at least experience being simple here. And people don’t stare at me, they don’t so much as glance at me! It’s a pressure that I didn’t realize I had until I came here.”

This was absolutely a monumental part of not just the trip, but my life thus far. I had never been around all Asian people and been able to experience this. And it wasn’t until that moment where I realized I felt the constant hyper-visibility of being Asian and being a minority until I was in a place where I was not.

And then I moved deeper into mainland China, through Jiujiang and onto Shanghai where I experienced another core life moment that I hope I never forget. I expected my Chinese New Year to be lonesome one where I tried to find any food I could and instead I was invited to a large family dinner with welcomed arms. I was taken aback by the kindness and openness that I was accepted with. I was touched by them calling me by my Chinese name after I showed them my abandonment papers. I felt something in my soul heal even though I couldn’t speak Chinese very well and I wasn’t really a part of their family.

I was planning on spending my new year’s eve alone and going to a bar but instead I got to spend it, as someone who is Chinese probably should do it, with a large happy family, lots of food, and lots of wine.”

And then came the end of the China leg of my trip. I cried and cried. I don’t want to go. I remember it so vividly. I could not stop the crying at the Great Wall of China and that little courtyard where I disappeared into normalness. I cried at the empty playground in Gubeikou listening to Aretha Franklin and how much this place meant to me. I cried at the thought of going back to America and to Colorado where I would be Asian again and different and Other.

I recently read this book from Chia-Chia Lin previous book, Unpassing, this passage hit me hard in the feelings.

I’d thought I might live there. I had imagined the village as a home I couldn’t visualize but that my body would recall. Some smells-fish-heavy trash, reused cooking oil, the damp remains of a typhoon—were like buried memories. I luxuriated in the humidity, the temperature breeze. But the allergies. The language. The sidelong glances. It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.”

The first part of the passage hits at something I wrote about in my last post about the trip, 结束 (or zai jian, goodbye in Chinese.) I wrote about the “tantalizing possibilities of a different life that is lost.” I daydreamed about living in Gubeikou with Song and Jim and learning Chinese and living a simple life in a rural little village. And yet it’s not a real version of the life I actually live.

I wrote in the 结束 blog post about reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates which has been one of the most defining books for me. I wrote about how race has been so significant in my life because I felt like most of my life has been trying to understand my world and why it seems so different from most of my family’s world. That core motive carried me through Ethnic Studies and friend groups and ultimately to China. The book was a medicine I needed at the end of the trip with Coates’ part about The Mecca, resistance, and being true to yourself.

Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers [oppressors, those who created The American Dream, white folks], to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live- and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home.”

I talked about how so many of the emotions on this trip stemmed from me being tired of splitting myself. Tired of the questions, tired of the lack of empathy most people had, tired of the racism and the slurs and racial remarks, tired of the stares and feeling like I don’t belong.

I wrote this part in 结束:

This sort of divided feeling about America and China, being not fully able to feel truly whole in either, is maybe just a testament to my being as a Chinese American adoptee.”

That second part of the passage from Unpassing resonated with me. “The language. The sidelong glances. It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.” It hit at the idea of being taken away from a place where I did belong and brought to a place where I didn’t belong and how I yearn for belonging and a place but it’s so hard for me to find peace in any. I felt that extremely strongly back at the end of my trip to China and I still sometimes get those feelings now. I think in general; a lot of my blog posts back then were about trying to find a home. Maybe really just wanting to belong.

Which leads me to the year 2021.

I went through a personal racial reckoning as you might call it. It was during the time after the Atlanta spa shooting where Asian women were killed and during the George Floyd/Breonna Taylor protests. All these things from the trip were lingering in me and I hadn’t really done anything with them to heal the part of my soul that needed it. When a COVID-related Chinese hate comment was said to me from a stranger on the street in Austin, it brought back all these feelings.

When I realized a lot of my support network were my white family who couldn’t relate and be there for me related to race and adoption issues, it broke something in me. I knew I had to heal something because I was in the worst depression and suicidal point in my life. I immediately sought help from YWCA who really helped me identify the deep pain and isolation I was feeling. They affirmed the trauma that my adoption and my existence in the US have been, is, and will continue to be. They empowered me to live the life that would make me feel more whole, even if it was something my family wouldn’t be happy with.

I found an adoption specific therapist who was a white adoptee mother who also helped empower me to live out what to me was a more whole identity and lean into my Chinese American side. I got a lot of tattoos with deep meaning to Jiujiang or my origin story or my journey so far. Things that would make me feel more embodied as me even though tattoos were not something historically talked highly about in my family. I changed my last name as you all who are reading this know. That was met with some acceptance that I am grateful for and some backlash. I needed time alone and away to build the self-assurance that whatever happened, I felt confident enough to continue the life path that would keep me alive.

That leads me to more recent times.

I found this nonprofit called the Nanchang Project. They have volunteers who help adoptees with resources and guides to find biological relatives in China. They have their own DNA database and people on the ground in China who test biological families, promote on Chinese social media, and have connections to traditional Chinese media.

I volunteered with them illustrating the first two chapters of one of their blog series. It was a nice little thing to do. I didn’t really think my involvement would extend much beyond that. We did a virtual meetup with the illustrators, the author, and one of the lead Nanchang volunteers. All of us adoptees. And that lead to a conversation about our experiences and how some of them were in that process of reunion with their birth families because of the Nanchang Project.

Being with those adoptees helped me see that reunion is possible if very rare and that support networks do exist. It sparked me to think about it more and the possibility of it. I’m not opposed nor have I ever been. I just always thought it would be extremely hard, expensive, and lonely journey.

But by coincidence, the Nanchang Project is going to Jiangxi on a search trip in March 2027. That is the province I am from, and I applied to be considered for one of their ambassadors. If I get chosen, they will do a professional search in my birth city to look for my biological parents. It’s a scary but exciting idea but chances are slim for me being picked as an ambassador and for the search to yield any results. Nevertheless, it something I am now considering and have on my mind.

Austin

My blog posts ended when I was in Austin and going through the troubled COVID times and feeling lonely. Before COVID I had been going to lots of events, playing volleyball, reading books, riding my bike. Basic Laura stuff. I was asking myself when does a place start feeling like home?

Is it home?

The fact that I don’t have a social safety net means I feel in flux. I still feel like Austin is this transition place. A place that isn’t home and that I don’t feel comfortable in. I have my routine and I’m getting to know the streets but what makes a city home is who is there and how comfortable you feel.

I’ve been asking myself if I see Austin becoming my home?”

Has that changed?

Well in my time here, there’s a lot that has happened to me. I met some friends and running people that became closer friends. That was certainly a good way to form a social safety net. I entered and exited some bad and good relationships where I learned things and went through core elements of the human experience. I went through a lot of personal health problems that were incredibly challenging to go through. Two hip surgeries, some intensive therapy, eating disorder recovery, terrible mix of anti-depressants that landed me in the ER with Serotonin syndrome, bad reactions to a changed birth control, and now (what is very micro in comparison to all those) a dislocated and fractured finger. I am extremely grateful I had health insurance and good support to get me the resources and time that I needed to recover.

I have done a lot of volunteering. I was volunteering with Refugee Services of Texas back when the blog was still running along with Austin Justice Coalition. I got accepted to be a volunteer with CASA after a long long application and interview process but that was when I was going through the peak of my health problems and I knew I had to focus on my health. I picked up some more short-term volunteering during that time. I did lobbying during the Texas Legislative session with Texas Gun Sense and Moms Demand Action after the Uvalde shooting. I made phone calls and handed out flyers for BASTA informing low-income communities about their housing rights and wrote letters and sent books to incarcerated Texans for Inside Books Project. I’ve volunteered with events like the Texas Book Festival, The MAHJ, and Kidical Mass. Essentially, I’ve just been giving my time and ability to make sure events and spaces where community can form are able to.

There’s a quote going around that is quite popular about how everyone is talking about missing third spaces and needing *community* but people aren’t willing to do the work and sacrifices to make that *community* possible.

Every wants a village but no one wants to be a villager.”

I don’t think my motive for doing volunteer stuff is necessarily that. I do think it’s obviously important to volunteer and it’s how these orgs/events are even able to operate and exist. I do think the world would probably be a lot better if more people volunteered instead of scrolled on social media or watched TV. Even if it was just 1 hour a week or a few hours a month. But mostly I’ve done this because I care. I really feel like I learn and grow from everything I volunteer with, and going back to my last blog post, it is work that fulfills me.

I have since become a board member with the League of Women Voters of the Austin Area. I help run their social media along with their programming and vision/direction. It’s been fun! It feels worthy and important in this time when our elections are under attack and they are one of the last pillars of our crumbling democracy that we have left. I was nominated as one of Austin’s Net Zero Heroes for 2025. It was entirely because some of my friends got together and sent emails to recommend me, so I guess I’m a bit of a nepobaby. It was nice to talk about Plant Powered Athletes and the League with that though! From that, I was asked to be on a panel for ATX Climate Week. That was cool! I was definitely feeling imposter syndrome going in because it was being advertised as a panel of climate experts. I am FAR from a climate expert and all the people on the panel had their full-time job and life’s work in climate. I did a lot of prep beforehand, and it turned out well. I had a lot of people coming up to me after saying they liked what I talked about which was cool!

This is all a lot of rambling and not a lot of answering the question: is Austin home to me?

I don’t know.

I have much deeper ties here now. I have tried to leave twice now and got reeled back in! There are obviously things I like and care about here. There’s a LOT of things I dislike about Texas and Austin. I miss Colorado so much and I always look forward to the trip that I take back to Colorado every year. And I know this: I don’t want to die in Texas. If there is a god, I pray they don’t let me die in Texas.

So, while I’m financially much more stable and secure, have deeper ties in Austin, and have commitments, there’s still something that doesn’t feel like home.

What’s the same?

I’ll end it on a happier note… Some thoughts on death.

Reading through that blog post, my thoughts haven’t changed too much. I think going on the China trip helped me face death. By that, it made peace with death feel attainable. I can look back on my life and know I went back to the homeland and fell in love.

I just finished this book called On Death and Dying by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I loved these excerpts:

It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have ambitiously controlled their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.

…

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. To be a therapist to a dying person makes us aware of the uniqueness of each individual in this vast sea of humanity. It makes us aware of finiteness, our limited lifespan. Few of us live beyond our three score and ten years and yet in that brief time most of us create and live a unique biography and weave ourselves into the fabric of human history.”

I’m at a point where I certainly feel that satisfaction with life. I’m not saying my life is going to end tomorrow or anytime soon by the way! I read this book and felt I could go in peace. I think my 20’s were a period of growth and new experiences but largely my core has always been the same. I went through low lows and high highs. I stepped into the identity and self that made me feel more whole and true. I made it here and I’m good right now.

Well, except that I would prefer not to die in Texas but that’s more because I’d rather die in Colorado in the mountains haha. It’d be nice to die somewhere beautiful…

Anyway I’m overall good and that makes me feel content. Satisfaction with life may be my version of a successful life as I head into my 30’s.