Like in the song, “Born to Be Wild”, I was looking for adventure as a teenager on Chicago’s North Shore. So in 1988, when my high school announced a trip to China, I was the first to sign up. I loved drawing crowds when I bought ice cream from a hawker or rode in a pedi-cab through the streets of Suzhou like Elizabeth Taylor at the Rose Bowl parade. But living in China long-term wasn’t in my plans. Instead, I looked south—to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
I planned my college career around my Mandarin class schedule and a Hong Kong junior year abroad. In Hong Kong, I volunteered at a Vietnamese refugee camp and roamed the crowded Kowloon streets in search of funky stationery shops and noodle stands. I spent the summer detained at the Saigon airport for arriving without a visa, and riding on the back of a motorcycle to the Killing Fields in rural Cambodia. Leaving Asia on the Trans-Siberian Express, I holed up in a Moscow flat, battling fever a month before the Soviet Union fell.
When I returned to the US via Prague, I started thinking of ways to get back to Hong Kong. So I did what I knew best—I went back to study there. Returning to the university where I spent my junior year, I enrolled in a graduate program in political science, three short years before the Handover. Friends also joked that I studied “international relations” as I met a music student from China and married him six quick months later.
Five years of marriage and one baby later, I moved in with my parents as a single mother at the age of 29. Once my son started pre-school, I temped at advertising agencies in Chicago and started writing about health, nutrition, China, and tea. At my last temp job, I met my new husband. For our first date, we wandered Chicago’s German Fest (my idea), followed by the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge (his). The moral of the story: Life can be just as exciting at home as it is halfway around the world. I currently live in a quiet Chicago suburb with my husband and three kids.