I showed my daughter a video of her gnawing on a chicken claw, back when we lived in China. “Eww,” she says, annoyed that I’m asking her to look away from Roblox.
“Do you remember this?” I ask. She shakes her head. Another memory lost.
My daughter doesn’t remember much about the years we lived abroad. She was just 3 when my husband and I decided to leave Los Angeles for China, then Cambodia. Now she’s almost 10. We’ve been back in Los Angeles since she was 5, when the pandemic changed our plans.
She has been forgetting the things she loved
When we first got back, she hated her car seat. “I want a tuk-tuk!” she’d yell from the backseat.
But now I’m not sure she’d be able to tell me what a tuk-tuk is, let alone remember riding in one. She’s forgotten the temples, the ruins, and the bat caves. There’s more pressing stuff filling her mind: a friend’s birthday party, getting to the next level in gymnastics, and acing her next math quiz.
She doesn’t think about our life abroad, even though my husband and I can’t stop thinking about it.
We hadn’t planned on moving to China, but it was the first job offer that came in after my husband, a music teacher, sent résumés to schools around the world. We were so eager to leave that we didn’t care where we landed, just that it was far away.
Moving abroad was nothing new for us. We’d met at a jungly yoga class in Bali and spent our first years together living out of cheap hotel rooms across Asia. Living this way felt like we’d found a cheat code on life. While everyone back home dealt with mortgages and credit card debt, we zipped around on motorbikes, got cheap massages, and outran boredom.
My daughter went to a preschool in China
But then I got pregnant.
So, we moved back to Los Angeles and bought a house. For a while, things were pleasant: holidays with relatives, nice neighbors, and a life that made sense on paper.
But late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch YouTube videos of families living abroad. When our daughter was asleep, my husband and I would open a bottle of wine and reminisce about the old life, toying with the idea of what it would look like to pick up and go, this time with a kid.
Over time, talking led to applying, and when that first school extended its offer, we said yes. Since our daughter hadn’t started school yet, it seemed like the perfect time to do it.
The teaching job was in Xiamen, a coastal city in southeast China. It’s not as touristy as better-known destinations like Shanghai and Beijing, which meant there were fewer English speakers.
We enrolled our daughter in a local pre-school, where she was the only foreign kid in her class. Though I loved watching her practice Mandarin and learn to use chopsticks, I started to notice she was more frustrated than excited about the adventure. After all, it wasn’t so long ago she’d learned to form sentences in English and use a fork.
We then moved to Cambodia
The pandemic was part of the reason we left China for Cambodia, where my husband secured another teaching job.
Our daughter also went to school with other expat kids this time. She swapped Mandarin for Khmer lessons, but spent the rest of her day speaking English.
Life was easier, but we never intended to stay in Cambodia. We saw it as a pit-stop until something better came along. When I met some of the older expat kids who were in their fourth or fifth new country, I started to worry about what all that moving might mean for our daughter.
What if we never felt settled anywhere? How many new languages would we expect our daughter to learn? How many new friends would she eventually have to leave behind? Was it worth it?
When the pandemic finally hit Cambodia, we decided to leave and return to Los Angeles to wait it out.
My husband and I are restless and want to move again
Though she missed the tuk-tuks, I remember the glee on our daughter’s face when she noticed everyone at the local park spoke English. We eventually enrolled her in school and moved to an area we liked, telling ourselves we were done with that life. We’d still travel, of course, but we’d do it like so many other families — spring break, summer, Christmas.
Five years later — the longest we’ve ever spent in one place — my husband and I are restless again. We’ve tried to settle, signing leases, browsing homes, and investing in expensive furniture that we know we can’t take with us, but it doesn’t feel like us.
Lately, we’ve been talking about moving to Europe and floating the idea to our daughter, who quickly changes the subject.
While my husband and I talk about the past and dream about some future far away — and probably always will — our daughter is deeply rooted in her life here and now, and she’s happy. The older she gets, the stronger her friendships, and the scarier it is for us to imagine pulling her away from a life she loves for the allure of elsewhere.
For me, Los Angeles feels boring because I know it so well. As a kid, I’d watch foreign movies with my mom, dreaming about all the places I’d see one day. Anywhere felt more exciting than home.
Maybe it’s the opposite for our daughter. Maybe her idea of adventure is knowing a place intimately, belonging somewhere. I’m not sure if we’ll ever get there, if my husband and I will ever look out the window and think this is it, we belong here.
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